This Sunday, we are asked to place in the special pink envelope the amount of dollars that our heart inspires us to donate to the work of the foreign missions. However, having said that, I feel compelled to talk to you about the more serious and more demanding contributions that all Catholics ought to give, around the clock, 24/7 to fulfill their missionary obligations.
Whenever one in our family is seriously ill, or we find ourselves in a bind, financially, emotionally, mentally, we send toward heaven a steady stream of prayers and entreaties that come straight from our hearts. World Mission Sunday is designed to make us realize that the actual boundaries of our family are much, much wider. They are so wide that they encompass the whole world!
Just in the Catholic family, we have about a billion brothers and sisters worldwide. To them we ought to add all those who are living in darkness and, oftentimes, without hope because they have yet to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. Therefore, our first substantial contribution to World Mission Sunday must be a solemn promise to send to heaven a steady and much larger stream of prayers for all the immediate, very real, pressing needs of our countless and mostly unknown brothers/sisters the world over.
And we are to do so routinely, daily, with feelings of urgency and inner anguish. At Masses around the world, many parishes include prayers for missionaries and those whom they serve in distant mission lands. So, prayer comes first.
I already mentioned to you about our obligation to contribute also financially. I left for last the most important and most effective obligation. Every single one of us must be a genuine missionary in this country, anywhere we happen to be and operate. Let us face it: our country, too, is again a mission land. God is pushed more and more to the edge of the picture. Anything goes; relativism is rampant and unbridled; episodes of senseless violence are mounting, and many people have lost any sense of propriety, decency and cannot find any more meaning and purpose in life.
In such a context our task as preachers of God’s good news is urgent and crucial. Therefore, we must accept not only the fact that it is our solemn duty as Christians to preach (mostly with our life) but also that, given the dire present situation, we ought to do the preaching with all our resources, energies, inner conviction, while being willing to pay a high personal price.
On World Mission Sunday, Jesus pinpoints exactly the extent of what he expects of us as missionaries preaching with our life (Mark 10:35-45). With marked oriental flavor, he mentions drinking from the same cup from which he will be drinking himself and to be plunged into the baptism in which he was to be baptized.
The cup is a cup like the one which Jesus begged the Father to let him pass up without drinking it in the garden of Gethsemane hours before his horrific passion and death. Jesus overcame quickly his understandable moment of weakness and drank it fully in total obedience to the Father (cf. Matthew 26:39).
If we are not living through a very painful situation, it might take some time for us to determine what would constitute the cup from which the Lord wants us to drink. If our cup is not yet obvious, we shall ask the Holy Spirit to show it to us. We might have pushed it aside and forgot about it… Eventually, what ought to be very clear is that our cup must be drunk with courage, resolve, endurance and enormous trust in the love of our Father—as Jesus did. Our missionary impact will be evident to people around us by the amount of serenity we manage to display amid our trials.
The second scary image used by Jesus is a baptism, a full immersion into an inner disposition that our wounded human nature resists with all its might. Our human nature, wounded by original sin, is all wired to make us haughty and self-centered. If overlooked, we feel terribly hurt. If slighted, we become bitter. If wronged, we look for revenge. If humiliated, we burn inside. If our mistakes are exposed, we lie and cover up.
The baptism into which we must plunge our ego is so naturally repulsive, yet it is a very effective way of preaching the Gospel with our life. St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta preached to millions of Indians by serving the human rejects dying on the sidewalks of that enormous metropolis and by giving them the dignity of which they had been deprived.
To be effective missionaries we must decide to place ourselves joyfully at the service of all those people the Lord has placed in our life. Thus, when we see the presiding priest drink from the cup, we shall pause, lest we might give Jesus a hasty “we can” which would prove meaningless. Then, we shall ask the Lord to give us the courage to drink from the cup from which he wants us to drink with resolve and full trust in his love. Finally, inspired by the lowliness of the consecrated wafer before our eyes, let us ask Lord to help us conquer our hubris and, in the power of the Eucharistic Bread, to place ourselves wholeheartedly at the joyful service of each other.
This attitude will make us very effective missionaries in our own right not only today but for years to come.
