When I prepare for my homilies and first look at the readings, I try to look for a common theme. Sometimes the theme is direct and evident. Other times the theme is subtle and challenging to find. At first glance, I would identify one common theme in today’s readings as the importance of being welcoming and hospitable as disciples of Christ.
Even before I converted to the Catholic faith, one of the American Catholics I admired most was Dorothy Day. I had heard about her when I was a college student, since she passed away in the freshman year of college. Dorothy Day was a journalist who very much lived in the secular world, with organized religion playing a very little role in her life before her conversion to Catholicism. She was searching for something in her life for many years, finding the Catholic faith through he friendship with a religious sister who lived near her home in New York. In 1933, with her friend Peter Maurin, she started the Catholic Worker Movement and their houses of hospitality, modeled after the way the monasteries welcomed visitors and strangers in the Middles Ages. The Catholic worker houses welcomed everyone, especially the poor, the downtrodden, and the outcasts. Since this was in the middle of the Great Depression of the 1930s, with many people hungry and out of work, those who needed to be welcomed were vast. Today, many decades after their founding, there are more than 175 Catholic Worker Houses operating. Dorothy Day once said: “Those who do not see the face of Christ in the poor, are atheists” who do not receive the entirety of Christ’s Good News. She also said: "If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."
In our first reading today, a reward is promised to the Shunamite woman who gave hospitality to the prophet Elijah. Her hospitality foreshadows the promise in today’s Gospel, for those who “receives (or welcomes) a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” What a wonderful welcome this Shunamite woman made for Elisha in her humble abode: a small room on the roof of the house, with a bed, a table, a chair, even a lamp. This humble, generous gesture of hospitality, offered simply out of respect for a man of God and with no thought of a reward, grants her, in fact, a wonderful reward: next year, she and her husband, who were childless up to this point, would receive the gift of new life in a child to be born to them. Elisha tells her that next year “you will hold a son in your arms.” So too, today’s Gospel tells us that even a gift as simple as a cup of cold water will not go unnoticed by the Lord.
The idea of a warm welcome is only part of today’s Gospel message. Jesus challenges us as well, warning that “anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me.” In the Early Church, there was great persecutions of Christ’s follwers. In cases where some family members were Christian and some were not, the choice between “preferring” mother or father to their faith in Christ put them in a difficult situation. We only have to look at what is in the newspapers or on the TV to see that this was not simply a challenge for those first Christians. We see a lot of religious persecution throughout the world today and even a backlash against Christianity in our own country. So, at first glance, some of these phrases in today’s Gospel may seem enigmatic, but delving into them, they are indeed relevant to our modern reality.
In new evangelization to which we are called, the term “intentional disciple” is used a lot. So, what exactly is an intentional disciple? An intentional disciple listens and learns from Jesus, our teacher, and then chooses to follow Jesus the teacher and then apply what he teaches. An intentional disciple intends to practice what is taught. Paul’s message to the followers of Jesus in Rome in the second Reading today stresses the radical change we receive in the waters of baptism: a “death” to our old existence, a death to selfishness and sin. As baptized disciples of Christ, we are made new creations who live in the light of Christ’s resurrection. As disciples of Christ, we can truly be intentional disciples, in union with Christ, in union with Christ’s love, embodying the values of his Good News.
I am really excited about us growing together as disciples of Christ and strengthening our efforts at evangelization and reaching out to others in the world. Being welcoming and inviting is a big part of that. Growing in our love and understanding of the Eucharist is a big part of that, Reaching out to others in acts of mercy and love is a big part of that as well. But reaching out to others does not mean just letting the priest do his part, listening to invitations made in the announcements at the end of Mass or in the bulletin. We need to be a part of inviting others, reaching out to those who are not engage in our parish right now, those family, friends, and aquaintences whom we know, giving them a personal invitation or a nudge or a sign of encouragement when they need it to get more involved in their faith. All of us need to be a part of this new evangelization effort.
