Words spoken in praise

One may have thought that we planned the homilies over the past week to coincide with major events such as the Canadian secular Thanksgiving weekend and the Church's annual observance of World Mission Sunday (which takes place this weekend), but the truth is that these things are more gifts from the living God than they are planned occurrences by those who are but servants.

In today's offering, the sixth in the series, I offer a meditation on the words we speak while the Eucharistic banquet is being offered, prepared and received.  These are words of faith and commitment on our part.  They are also words of praise offered to God who is ever present to us, and they are words that look forward to a time when the great peace of union with the Father will be fulfilled.

Read on or listen in.  It's up to you.

Witnesses of the Lamb

Each year, on the second last Sunday of October, the Church throughout the world pays particular attention to the work that is being done to continue the Mission entrusted to us by Jesus himself.  Because we ourselves have first been loved, we must never stop evangelizing, bearing witness by the love and care we show others, especially those who are most in need.  Believe it or not, there are still some who have not experienced the love of Christ, and there are some who struggle to live their faith in various parts of our world, but thankfully there is still hope.  Every year, new dioceses are formed in various parts of the world, new seminaries are opened to accommodate the growing number of young men who respond to God’s call to follow him as priests, areas devastated by war and natural disaster are rebuilt, and some regions long suppressed are increasingly coming to hear the message of Christ. 

The mission of the Church has not changed since the time that Jesus first boiled down the commandments to their bare essentials and explained to his disciples that the most important of all the rules was that we strive always to love the Lord … and to love your neighbour as yourself.  Love is the weapon of choice by which Christ wins the hearts of all people, one at a time.  Love is as it always has been: a radical and surprising choice for the first disciples, and for disciples of our time.  If we truly want to love our God with every part of ourselves, we must begin in prayer, but we must also be willing to go beyond the prayer of our lips, and the prayer of our hearts.  This prayer must bear fruit through the work of our hands.

Christ’s hands have tended to the needs of the oppressed in our world for centuries, thanks to the commitment and generosity of saints and sinners who have walked the roads of this earth.  Christ’s hands still respond to the same call each time we listen to a cry for help and answer with compassion and understanding.  With human hands, we continue today to bear witness to Christ’s word which is received with joy, inspired by the Holy Spirit each time we respond in faith.  This word has been spoken in our hearts since the day of our baptism.  This word continues to challenge us each day to be missionaries of healing, of forgiveness and of love in a world that too often is blind to the true power of love and deaf to the call for help so often to be found on the lips of the marginalized, the neglected and the powerless.

At the beginning of this century, His Holiness John Paul II challenged all Catholics to renew our commitment to take to all people the proclamation of the Gospel with "the same enthusiasm of the Christians of the early times" (Novo Millennio Ineunte, No. 58).  With the fervor of the apostles, we must seek to share this good news today especially with those who need to hear it, to be comforted by it, or to hope in its promise.

For many years, I for one understood the work of the Church’s mission of evangelization as particularly taking place in remote parts of our world.  Images of missionaries spreading the gospel in the Amazon rain forests, the isolated regions of Northern Canada and even the outback of Australia were part of my first understandings of the Church’s mission, but what of the streets of this city?  What about the financial districts of Bay Street in Toronto, or of lower Manhattan in New York?  Often it is most difficult to speak of love when we are surrounded by concrete jungles, where a fast-paced life leaves little or no room for the heart to listen.

When our lives too become too fast paced for us to listen, perhaps we should be all the more attentive to our duty to proclaim Christ’s death by our words and by our actions.  Through lives of loving service to our neighbours, we profess Christ’s resurrection and through our belief in the power of Christ’s love, a power which can overcome all obstacles, we affirm our hope that Christ will indeed come again at the end of time to be our judge and our saviour.

While we wait for that day, let us continue the mission Christ entrusted to us.  The Church must never be afraid to spread the good news of the gospel to all corners of the world.  Strengthened by the special food we receive at this banquet called the Eucharist, we go forth into the world as living witnesses of Christ who we proclaim to be the Lamb of God, the one who takes away the sins of the world, the one of whom we ask mercy and the one who will grant us everlasting peace.