Sometimes the callings we get in life can be very surprising. As most of you know, I did not become Catholic until I was an adult at the age of 29, back in 1992. I entered the Church through the RCIA program during the Easter Vigil mass, just like most adults who come to the Catholic faith from Protestant backgrounds. Immediately, I felt the calling to be a lay missionary, but finding a program that was the right match for me brought about a lot of different choices. After looking around at many different programs, the place that intrigued me the most a soup kitchen and food bank up in Winnipeg, Canada. A lot of my family and friends thought that I was crazy going up to Canada to work with street people, leaving my career as a CPA, but I knew in my heart that this was where God wanted me to go. Perhaps when I was riding my bike to the soup kitchen in the middle of the Canadian winters when it was 30 or 40 degrees below zero, I wondered about my sanity as well. But, if it wasn’t for that decision to become a missionary in Canada and my response to that calling, I probably wouldn’t be up here as a priest today.
Not all of our responses to God’s call are so dramatic. Many of us here at mass grew up in the Catholic Church. Some of you were baptized as infants here at St Jude. Even if we are baptized into the faith as infants, when we are teenagers or adults, at one time or another, we have to make a conscious decision to continue in the footsteps of our faith or not. It's easy to go down another road in life, to shut ourselves off from God, to choose another path that follows the values of our secular world. We have the freedom to follow our faith or not, and whether we consciously make that decision or not, we all make that choice in some way.
Our Gospel tells us about two brothers who are making their livelihood fishing, who are casting their nets in the sea when they receive their calling from Jesus. We don’t know if Simon and Andrew had previously known Jesus or had heard him preaching before. Some Scripture scholars speculate that these brothers may have been friends of John the Baptist. But, ultimately, Simon and Andrew left everything behind to follow Jesus. It was a radical change, but they realized who Jesus truly was, and this made all the difference in the world.
In our first reading this morning, we hear about another call, the call of Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh, to tell them to repent and to change their ways. The people of Nineveh believed in the message that Jonah brought, responding in a sign of repentance, symbolized by their sackcloth and ashes. God saw their remorse, so he did not carry out his promise to destroy their city.
Today, we also are called to repentance in a special way. This Monday is the 45th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in our country. This day is a day of prayer, penance, and mourning, as we mourn the existence of this law that contradicts the Gospel of life. Our faith teaches us about the value of every human person, as we are all made in God’s image, as we are all redeemed by our Savior, Jesus Christ. Our value is rooted in who we are as precious and unique human beings, not by what we do. All of our Church’s social teaching begins with and builds upon the foundation of human dignity.
In viewing of human dignity, our Church teaches the value of human life as a seamless garment from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. Our human dignity is threatened not only by legalized abortion and euthanasia, but also by such policies that allow cloning, embryonic stem cell research, genocide, torture, racism, the targeting of non-combatants in acts of war & terrorism, and the death penalty. As Catholics, we cannot pick and choose what we believe in regards to the dignity of human life. The Church teaches the same message as the prophets of Israel: that the measure of our society and of any society is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person, particularly the poor and the most vulnerable in society, including unborn human life.
We mourn on this day of penance, but we also have hope in Jesus and in the future. We are called to discipleship, to the same call that Andrew and Simon received. We should not fear the world. We should not fear professing to the world what we truly believe in the Gospel of Life. The Holy Spirit is with us to empower us, to give us the courage to stand up for what we believe, even if it seems so at odds with our secular world. Yes, we are always to have hope in the Gospel of Life that our faith in Jesus proclaims.
No comments:
Post a Comment