Today’s Gospel is very intriguing, as we hear Jesus sending out his disciples
with so little as they go out of their journey. Having traveled as a missionary a lot myself, and having hiked several times on
long pilgrimages, this Gospel is not just a story, but it is reality to me. When you head off on a long journey with everything
carried on your back or when you travel a long distance and have certain
limitations, you really pay attention to what you pack. Back
in 1990, I was leaving to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa. I had
gotten a list of recommended items for us to bring. I was going to be serving in a very remote
area without any running water and no electricity, so there were certain things
I needed to bring with me. However, they told us there was a weight requirement on the luggage – I think
that our two pieces of luggage could not weigh more than 50 lbs in total. My
mom was really good at packing things, so I remember she and my two sisters had
my small backpack and small duffle bag on a bathroom scale and were helping me
weigh everything. They had it down to a
science. I decided to not take a lot of
things that were just too heavy. I got
my things into those two small bags, but there was a lot I left behind. When
all 50 of us Peace Corps volunteers were together at O’Hare airport getting our
luggage checked in, I was amazed at how huge those other duffle bags were
compared to mine. My two bags looked
like they were miniature compare to everyone else’s. Someone asked: Whose tiny little bags are those? When I confessed that they were mine,
everyone was laughing and amazed that I thought they were going to be strict
about the weight requirements. Oh well –
at least I knew that I wasn’t weighed down with what I had.
I
don’t think Jesus was trying to be mean or a control freak in telling his
disciples to pack lightly on their journey.
In his own way, he was showing them what needed to be important in their
lives on their journey of discipleship. So
often, we can get bogged down in trying to carry too many superfluous things
along with us. In
the last few weeks in the Gospel, we talked about the importance of having a
disposition that allows for God’s grace to have an affect in our lives. Living a life of Gospel simplicity is also essential for us to allow God’s
grace to enter our lives, in order for us to be able to travel through life as
a person of faith. But
what do we mean by Gospel simplicity? The
Gospel passage we hear today about packing lightly for our journey and the
concept of Gospel simplicity are linked closely together. As we
move out of childhood and into our teenage and adult years, we have a lot of
priorities pulling at our lives. We can
agonize about the big decisions we need to make in life. We can become anxious about the future. We can try to serve to God in our lives, but
we can become distracted by other priorities and other influences and other
messages crying out to us in the world. At
its core, Gospel simplicity is the gift of having an undivided heart. The
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that we should have purity of heart –
to be able to will only one thing in our lives. The
Bible warns us against idolatry, of making something more important than God in
our lives. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church says this: Idolatry not only refers to false
pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation for us on our journey of faith.
In our idol worship, we honor and revere a creature in place of God, whether
this be gods or demons, power, pleasure, ancestors, the state, money or
material possessions. No
matter who we are, we are to will one thing in our lives, to simplify our lives
down to what Jesus would have us to do and to be - nothing more or nothing less
- because nothing else is needed!
One
of the greatest lessons I had in life was when I served as a missionary in
Canada. I
served as a missionary at a soup kitchen and a food back for full-time for two
years. I
received $350 a month from those agencies to pay all of my living
expenses. Even
though this 20 years ago, that still was not a lot of money back then. I
lived with four other missionaries in the core area of the inner city of
Winnipeg in a big old house that used to be a boarding house. We
kept our money in common and paid all of our expenses out of it. And believe or not, at the end of each year,
we always had some money left over. I
felt that my entire life was devoted to serving God in my work there in
Winnipeg – in living very simply and earnestly in my vocation as a lay
missionary. And I felt a lot of
blessings in those two years, even though that experience was not always
easy. As a
priest, I constantly think about how I want to live out a Gospel simplicity in
my life, about how that is a part of my vocation, about the things I need to
get rid of in order to be able live out the Gospel message.
Sometimes, we hear God calling us to a place in our lives that is unexpected
and uncomfortable. When
Jesus gathered his disciples together, sending them to unknown parts to be
missionaries out into the world, sending them with barely any provisions, I am
sure some of them were anxious and afraid. Yet,
they went out with grateful hearts. They
tried not to carry those things with them that would bog them down on their
journey. Where
is God calling out to us today? What do we need to take out of our backpack
in order to better prepared to respond to that call.
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