We Are All Missionary Disciples Reflection by Fr. Dohrman Byers Together in Christ: Saying Yes to Missionary Discipleship Sept 9, 2017 We ve gathered today under the banner: Together in Christ: Saying Yes to Missionary Discipleship. That title is both a statement of fact and a promise to be kept. In fact, we are together in Christ. Every time we open our ears and our hearts to hear the Word of God, every time we open our hands and our mouths to receive the Body of Christ, we are together in Christ - no matter where we are. And we are here today because we have already said yes to missionary discipleship. If you are involved in pro-life activities, social justice formation and organization, outreach to the needy in your community or anywhere in the world; If you are active in environmental issues, seeking justice, welcome and help for immigrants, or citizens returning from prison; If you celebrate the special graces of rural life and try to address its special challenges; If you are already doing these things, you have already said yes to missionary discipleship. Missionary discipleship, at its simplest, is following Christ wherever the Gospel of life and liberty, justice and freedom, human dignity and care for creation needs to be proclaimed. But we all know we ve only begun. St. Paul has given us the challenging image of the Church as the Body of Christ a body composed of many specialized organs all working together in a healthy way for the life of the body and the world. 1
2 We ve got the specialized organs down! Some of us focus on pro-life issues, some on rural life, some on the environment, some on meeting basic needs, some on changing unjust systems, some on combatting racism. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, calling each of us to fulfill our baptismal destiny in a unique way. The problem is that we often find ourselves in competition rather than cooperating competing for time on the parish calendar and for parishioners to participate in our programs. We re competing for our pastor s attention and support, especially in his homilies. We re competing for limited parish and diocesan funds, and we re competing for passion, enthusiasm and missionary spirit. This is not quite the complementary working together envisioned by St. Paul. Our hope in gathering today is that, coming together, we may strengthen our awareness of working together in Christ and renew and deepen our yes to the missionary discipleship to which we have been called. We are responding to the challenge Pope Francis posed in his exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel. There is much challenge in that exhortation, but one of the paragraphs that challenges me most is Number 120: In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples. All the baptized, whatever, their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelization, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelization to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients. The new evangelization calls for personal involvement on the part of each of the baptized. Every Christian is challenged here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelization, indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love. Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are disciples and missionaries, but rather that we are always missionary disciples.
3 These words are not to be taken lightly. So often we say all and every but don t really mean it. We settle for some or any. We Americans have a talent one might almost call it a charism for organizing to get something done. We also have an obsession with seeing results. Together these two traits can serve us well, but they can also mislead us. When the Holy Spirit awakens our hearts to some need, some mission, some situation into which we are called to bring the Gospel, we may rush ahead to organize and promote the cause. We develop presentations to raise awareness which some people attend. We create programs through which people can get involved and a few (mostly busy) people do. We get discouraged, because the response does not match the measure of the need or the passion in our hearts; but we press on. In hope, we try to do what we can with what little we think God has given us. But I wonder At this point in time, in these circumstances, I wonder whether we aren t neglecting a substantial part of our calling. We are, in a sense, the first responders. But are we neglecting our mission to awaken the sleeping giant which is the whole body of the baptized to stir up the missionary spirit of the rest of our fellow disciples? One reason we don t put more effort into widening the hearing of the call is that the indifference seems enormous. How can we stir that up? It s often usually easier to do something ourselves or to make do with a few already awakened and energized people than to overcome the lethargy of so many. Of course, that s because we want results. But God s timetable is much longer than ours, and he is working slowly. If we want to keep pace with him, we may need to slow down. What would it take, after all, to rouse all the baptized even to discipleship much less missionary zeal? Certainly doing something now may attract attention to the field in which we hear the call to labor; but it won t be enough to arouse enough laborers for the harvest. How does one mobilize such a vast entity as the sleeping body of all the faithful?
4 When I reflect on my own experience, I find I m pretty susceptible to information. Give me good information and new insight into a situation, and I ll remember, notice, pay attention. But I also notice that awareness doesn t become missionary zeal until I ve met face to face with someone deeply involved or affected. I thought anti-semitism was wrong, but it didn t become a neuralgic sensitivity for me until, as director of the Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations, I found myself in dialogue with Jews I loved, talking about their personal experiences. I wasn t even aware of the struggle of people returning from prison and trying to build new lives (since the old one had been destroyed) until I became pastor of Old St. Mary in Over-the-Rhine. There I dealt on a daily basis with people especially black men struggling, drowning in a so-called justice system that would not let them breath and a society that really didn t want them back. I was always a city boy and didn t know anything about the special graces and challenges of rural and small town life until I was assigned to Brown County and became part of the daily life and faith of its farmers and little communities, each one distinct, for well or ill. I wasn t aware of the hidden (or once hidden) racism still permeating our society until I was asked to celebrate a Mass for the 25 th anniversary of an African-American couple in our overwhelmingly white suburban parish. I thought they were fully at home in our parish, until at the special Mass I was the only white person in the room. And like every priest, in every assignment I ve had, I ve come face to face with the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, with victims trying to trust their Father God after being abused by their father. I ve walked to the edge of suicide with some, and seen them slip away.
5 I ve tried to accompany gay, lesbian, and transgender Catholics who love their church and the Lord, but struggle to feel at home in this house. And family life: hearing in confession after confession the desperation of people struggling in their marriages or with their children the guilt, the anxiety, the loneliness, the confusion, the repeated failures. Even abortion only became a deep wound in my heart when in one day I heard the confession of a woman wracked by guilt over an abortion and walked with another, with a very dangerous pregnancy, to her decision to bear the child even at the risk of her own life. It has always been in these face-to-face, personal encounters that my awareness has been moved toward zeal. I ve become convinced that this is the way. Much slower, more tedious than I would want, but one personal encounter at a time seems the only way, the Lord s way, to slowly arouse the sluggish mass of the faithful. When I re-read Pope Francis call to missionary discipleship, one thing I notice is that he doesn t start with the need for organization or publicity. He starts with the need for spirituality the spirituality of missionary discipleship. He talks about unfashionable, un-liturgical popular piety as a place where the poor and marginal can be met in God. I get the sense that his sense of spirituality is wider than ours, or at least mine. When we think of spirituality, we tend to think of prayer and devotion, of retreats and spiritual reading. But, when Pope Francis talks about spirituality, he includes, not only our talking to God and asking him to send the Spirit, but our talking to one another in the Spirit. One-on-one, face-to-face encounters are profoundly spiritual events, even when no prayer is uttered. Here we meet the Holy One in the sacred dignity and impenetrable wonder of another person. Today we have prayed, but now we will turn to speak with each other. Those already deeply involved in missionary discipleship the Life and
6 Justice leaders among us, and those of us seeking to energize ourselves and our parishes, to convert ourselves and our parishes into committed missionary disciples. Our take-away may be a new commitment to creatively, tirelessly bring this sort of conversion by personal encounter into our own ministerial contexts. The daunting task for which the Lord is preparing us is to awaken no less than all the baptized one at a time! What patience, what hope, what trust that will require! None of us will live long enough to see many results. But what a vocation! At the beginning of The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis quotes words of Pope Benedict XVI, which he says he never tires of repeating, because they take us to the very heart of the Gospel: Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Of course, the person to whom he refers is Jesus Christ. But the encounter with Christ most often takes place in the encounter with another. More and more I am becoming convinced that in all our efforts at evangelization, we must more and more focus on facilitating personal encounters, whether in the RCIA, marriage ministry, or social action. Such an approach is utterly low-tech and glacially slow barely endurable in our high-speed, high-tech culture of instant mass communication and results. But the Lord was remarkably low-tech in his approach. He gave us himself nothing even so high-tech as a book. And he gave us a small band of disciples, whom he said he would: Wash when they wash one another, Anoint when they anoint one another, Feed when they feed one another, Forgive when they forgive one another, Embrace when they embrace one another, Awaken when they awaken one another.
7 Meeting another face-to-face is a meeting with Christ, and it perhaps it alone can give our life a new horizon and a decisive direction. More important than strategizing today is the simple openness of our encounter with one another. It perhaps it alone will turn us and any and every Christian into true missionary disciples.