Sometimes the callings we get in life
can be pretty surprising. As most of you
know, I did not become Catholic until I was an adult at the age of 29. 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 gathered
here today for mass grew up in the Catholic Church. Many of you in fact may have been baptized as
infants right here in this very church building, when your parents and god
parents made the promise on your behalf to bring you up in the faith and to
teach you about God. However, at one
time or another, when we are teenagers or adults, all of us have to make the
conscious decision about following in the footsteps of our faith or not. It is often so easy to go down another road
in life, to shut ourselves off from God, to choose another path that follows
the callings that we hear from our secular world that are so different from the
ways of our faith. We have the freedom
to follow our faith or not, and whether we consciously make that decision or
not, we all make that choice some way or another.
In our Gospel today, we hear about two
brothers, Simon and Andrew, who are making their livelihood fishing, who are
actually in the midst of 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
this moment. Some Scripture scholars speculate
that these two brothers may have been friends of John the Baptist or members of
his group of disciples. But, the point
is, Simon and Andrew were able to leave everything behind to follow Jesus. What a radical change this was for them in
their lives. 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,
telling them to repent and to change their ways. The people of Nineveh believed in God’s
message that Jonah brought to them, responding in a sign of repentance, symbolized
by the sackcloth and ashes that they put on.
God saw how sorry the people were, and he did not carry out his promise
to destroy their city.
Today, we also are called to repentance
in a special way. Today, January 22, is
the 39th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision that
legalized abortion in our country. Today
has been declared a day of prayer, penance, and mourning, as we mourn the
existence of this law that so contradicts the Gospel of life that is an
essential and foundational belief of our Catholic faith. Our faith teaches us
about the value of every human person, recognizing that we are all made in
God’s image and that we are all redeemed by our Savior, Jesus Christ. We are all precious & unique as human
beings. Our value is rooted in who we
are as human beings, not by what we do.
All of our Church’s social teaching begins with and builds upon the
foundation of human dignity.
As part of this holistic view 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, & the death penalty.
As Catholics, we cannot pick & choose what we believe in regard to
the dignity of human life. The Catholic
Church teaches that which was echoed in the message of the prophets of the
ancient Israel: that the measure of our society, the measure of any society, is
whether it threatens or enhances the life & dignity of the human person,
particularly the poor & the most vulnerable in society, including unborn human
life.
We mourn today, we give penance today, but we also have hope
in Jesus, we have hope in the future. We
heed his call to discipleship, 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 what is popular
& acceptable in our secular society. Yes, we mourn today, but we also have
hope in the Gospel of Life that our faith in Jesus proclaims.
No comments:
Post a Comment