Today, the Church celebrates World Mission Sunday, and Pope Benedict XVI has described this day as “an opportunity to renew our commitment to proclaim the Gospel and to give pastoral activities greater missionary perspective.”
We might add, that promoting just such a “missionary perspective” is also the goal of our soon to be Cardinal-Archbishop, who has asked all of us to focus our attention and activity here in this archdiocese, on a New Evangelization.
Men and women around the world, and here in our own local community – our neighbors, friends and coworkers – are desperately searching for the life and meaning that is to be found only in Jesus Christ. All of our pastoral efforts, and all of our service, must therefore, as the Holy Father says, have a true “missionary perspective.” What does he mean?
When we think of the missions, I think it’s fair to say that our thoughts most readily turn to people scattered in the remotest parts of the world – and over the past forty years, we tend to think especially of people’s temporal needs: the victims of war and refugees who cry out for peace; or the victims of disease and natural disaster who cry out for emergency relief and medical care; or the chronically poor around the world who struggle to ward off starvation.
But we often fail to recognize the mission fields that are much closer to home: the urban poor, and the underemployed who ask for assistance in providing daily sustenance for their families; the undereducated, those without adequate medical care, or unwed mothers who seek help in protecting their health and future, and that of their children.
And what is more, when we think of the missions we often forget to think of human needs that are more than physical – emotional and spiritual needs: the many young people who search for meaning in their lives; or the coworker or neighbor whose marriage and family life is in threat of collapse.
Throughout its history the Church has strived to fulfill its mission, responding to the cry of the poor and providing manifest relief to such needs all around the world. The Catholic Church, not the UN, or the Red Cross, or the Gates Foundation, is the largest charitable and social relief provider in the world.
And yet we must also be clear that no social service alone is able to answer the deepest needs and longings of humanity. No amount of humanitarian relief, or new schools and hospitals, or homeless shelters and drug prevention programs will ever save any human being. Jesus Christ alone is our salvation.
So all of our pastoral activities, all of our forms of service, need the context of what Pope Benedict calls a “missionary perspective” – they need to be rooted in bringing others not only the physical and material relief that they must have, and indeed are owed by right, but they must be rooted in bringing others Jesus Christ, and the truth of His Gospel.
Pope Benedict wrote this week that those we serve in missionary activity “must perceive that Christians bring Christ's Word because He is the Truth, and because we have found in Him the meaning and the truth of our own lives.”
How can this be accomplished? How can we come to appreciate and fulfill our own call to be a part of the Church’s missionary activity and bring Christ to others? Well, we’re not likely to start by packing our things and moving to some remote corner of the world. So where do we start?
Again, from Pope Benedict. He says: “an adult faith, capable of entrusting itself totally to God . . . fostered by prayer, meditation on the Word of God, and study of the truth of the faith – this is the prerequisite” for developing a “missionary perspective.”
Brothers and sisters, we need to start by becoming ever more convinced of God’s profound love in our own lives, doing this through prayer, meditation, and study of the faith – and rest assured, once we come to have that relationship with the Lord, we will not be able to keep ourselves from inviting others to share in that love. And that is of course the very essence of the “missionary perspective.”
We have numerous guides to follow along this missionary path. The tax collector in today’s Gospel is just starting out on such a path. His prayer is simply, “be merciful to me a sinner.” And yet it is precisely this attitude that allows us to “entrust ourselves totally to God,” as Pope Benedict said.
“The tax collector’s experience of his own limitations and failures led him not to despair but to depend.” That kind of total trust and reliance upon God is the first stage of preparing to pour ourselves out in service, and having the courage to proclaim the Gospel even in difficult situations or to uninterested listeners.
Then in our second reading, we see St. Paul who is coming to the end of his missionary path. He too started out in an awareness of his own sinfulness, and in trusting reliance upon God. Now, sure enough, near the end of his journey he is able to look back at his missionary efforts and say: “beloved I am already being poured out like a libation . . . but the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the proclamation might be completed.”
We also have the example of any number of missionaries and missionary saints in the life of the Church. My own community is essentially a missionary community. Our founder, Blessed Basil Moreau, first founded our community to serve as home missionaries within his native France, rebuilding a Church devastated by the French Revolution.
Then, within the first few years of our founding, he also sent religious from France, to Algeria, to Bangladesh, and here to the United States. And we tell all sorts of amazing stories about the hardships our members faced, and the amazing work they did – and in some cases we tell the story of their ultimate sacrifice: their martyrdom.
But, you know, none of these missionaries is my community’s first saint. Our first saint, just canonized a week ago, never traveled more than a few hundred miles from his home. He spent forty years doing the same simple work as a doorkeeper at our college in Montreal.
And yet when Pope John Paul II declared Andre Bessette to be Blessed, he noted that: “daily a crowd of the sick, the afflicted, the poor of all kinds came to Andre at the college. They found in his presence a welcome ear, comfort, and faith in God. Very often, they also found relief of mind and body.” And then John Paul asked, “Do not the poor of today have as much need of such love, of such hope, of such education in prayer?”
Brothers and sisters, that’s the “missionary perspective” which sees everything, even suffering, and even simple work like answering the door, as an opportunity to preach the good news, and to invite people into the love of Jesus Christ. This proclamation of the Gospel must now be completed in us. We too must pour out our lives to respond to the deepest longings of our brothers and sisters. Let us all think of the ways that we can answer that longing by bringing them Christ, and then let us pour ourselves out to do it.
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