2nd Sunday

2nd Sunday

They are truly invisible.

Is. 49.3, 5-6; 1 Cor. 1.1-3; Jn. 1.29-34

At first sight these three readings are not all that impressive. They seam to be bits and pieces, little fragments of various books. And it is certainly not clear why they would be put together for Mass. But I think that if we spend a little more time, something really does emerge which is common to all these three readings. Isaiah is talking about his awareness of himself as having been sent by God, to act for God. In the Psalm, as we said the response; "Here I am Lord, I come to do your will" we get the same kind of sense; before God I am activated, I have a job now. And of course, Paul constantly refers to himself as being sent by God from Christ. John the Baptist is sent and he talks about Jesus who later on in the same Gospel of John will regularly refer to himself as having been sent. So there is a theme joining these things.

The Latin word for sent is missus from which we get the word "mission". That is what I want to talk about: this business of being sent, of mission. When I was a little kid going through separate school, we had a special little chart on the bulletin board with pagan babies on it, and you could ransom the pagan babies and you would bring in all kinds of money and have a big contest to see how many pagan babies they could save from Africa, or New Guinea or some other remote and unheard of place in the world. This was missionary activity, a kind of extra thing that you did. But if you read the whole Bible, mission is not some something that these religious people did but is something that they were. This is a whole different thing that I hope to try to make sense of.

We read the Call of Moses, the Call of Abraham, the Call of all the Prophets. They all understood themselves as called by God to go do something. In other words, their religion ended outside themselves. "I am being sent to this one or this one or all of these." That opens up some very useful things to think about, because we live in an age called the "Me Generation" or the "Ego Era". What does that mean? We are all extraordinarily conscious of ourselves as selves, as little kinds of enclosed units. How do I look? Do I have the proper high regard for myself? Do I project the right image? Do I love myself as I am supposed to love myself? The self is absolutely central. It is so central to our thinking that we cannot imagine any other way of operating in the world, - apart from that kind of consciousness. Are people looking at me? How do I come across? We’ve got a whole industry called public relations – advertising. the purpose of which is to create a self. Yet, we are all our own little PR people, I think. And all this carries over to religion because religion basically becomes a matter of how I am before God. Am I being a nice person? Am I doing good things? Am I thinking the right thoughts? Am I being obedient or am I virtuous enough? We have, in a very real way, a kind of self centered religion. And the roots of this are deep. We can see them, for example, in the life of Martin Luther. Reading any of Luther’s stuff, you find that Luther was totally consumed, worrying about himself before God. And so you get this religion that seems totally self enclosed. Am I all right, God? Am I all right? Am I all right? And if you contrast that with Isaiah, Paul, the Psalms, John the Baptist, Jesus, they do not seam to have that as a centre of their consciousness but rather they understand themselves as simply sent by God to these people or all people. It is a radically different way of putting your life together. To see God as wanting me to grow up, to be the best self I can be. Or to see myself before God as actually being sent to people. On a mission, so that being a missionary is not some thing that the Church can do as some extra thing but that the Church is essentially mission. And that is indeed what it is – beginning, middle and end. Of course, we don’t operate that way.

Let me put it another way. The Church is supposed to be the only institution on the face of the earth that does not exist for its own sake. The University of Western Ontario exists for its own sake. The Better Business Bureau exists for its own sake. The Bank of Montreal exists for its own sake. Everything exists for its own sake. The Church, however, essentially is to exist for the sake of others, because the Church is essentially sent by God. But this notion on the other hand can make us nervous, because everybody has run across the people who think they have a mission. My mission is to be the best Amway sales person in the whole world. My mission is to get the highest LSAT grades in the whole world. My mission is to be fill in the blanks. We are all made slightly nervous by people like that. Because having a mission usually means that I have all this stuff in my head that I want to dump on everybody else’s head, so that they think just as I do, they will want the same stuff as I do. They buy what I am selling whether it is ideas or snake oil, or automobiles or shoes. And this of course scares us. And there are, in fact, all kind of religious maniacs running around telling us exactly what God wants us to do. Follow these clear and distinct ideas about how we are supposed to run our lives.

And we resist that, understandably. We should resist that, because that is not the Biblical sense of mission at all. If you look at the career of Jesus, He saw himself as sent by God to do what? To listen to people. To hear people as they really are. That doesn’t sound like much does it? But how many places in our lives do we experience instances wherein we feel that this other person really wants to hear us, really wants us to be present to them. I don’t do that very well and I do not find anybody else doing it particularly well either. But that is what the mission is for. The mission is for the other. And therefore the mission first of all means that we have to hear the other. Let the other come into our consciousness. And here too, the Church does not have a very good record. But if we go back to the example of Jesus, what did Jesus do? Jesus precisely listened to all those people that nobody else listened to. The people that nobody else thought even existed. They were invisible, as well as inaudible. There was nothing to hear, because they were not really there. But the genius of Jesus was precisely to let people be, by listening to them. Above all, to hear the poor. These are the people that nobody listens to. They are truly invisible. They do not exist for us. We do not hear, partly among other reasons, because we are so filled with this notion that we must build this great self before God. This notion of the self is a real decline from the sense of mission that we find throughout the Bible.

One of the great things that is going on is a suggestion made by the Pope several years ago. (But none of the Bishops or Cardinals, were at all interested in doing it.) The Pope has said that what we must do to initiate the third millennium is to make a great act of repentance. What is the Church to be sorrowful about? How many millions of Indians in Latin America or the Caribbean have been destroyed by those good Catholics from Spain and Portugal? How many black human beings were transported by those good Christians, Dutch Danish, English slavers, who translated at least 20million people as so much baggage. Where only about half of them survived the trip. Good Christian people. And of course slavery was justified because black were not real people. Rather they are animals, savages. How many people’s lives were destroyed by the Inquisition? Because they do not think like us, something is wrong with them and they need to be destroyed. The Crusades were likely one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of Christianity. How many Christians were killed, murdered, slaughtered by these good French, German and English knights because they had darker skin or spoke a different language? And the Pope says, in my context, all these people were invisible, and what we must repent for is the fact that we did not listen. We did not hear their own reality. And that, as I said, is what the Church is supposed to be. It was sent by God to listen, to attend to the world. And finally, let me repeat, does that sound like such a big deal? People take courses in creative listening. "I think I hear you saying" has become so much of a stock phrase in this highly psychologised world. We have the illusion of listening all over. But to what effect? For what purpose? To really let the other person emerge, or to persuade them that I am really swell, that I am really good. How many times in the course of your life have you really believed that someone has really listened to you - really listened to you. And yet as I have said, this is what the Scripture says we are to be all about. We are sent to do that. The Church is sent to do that. Not just to preserve ourselves, not just to create all these boundaries so we can tell who is in and who is out, who is good and who is bad, who is worth considering and who is not worth considering. To persuade everybody, that the God who made us all listened to all of us. And we as people of God, the Church of God have that as our primary responsibility. The mission is not something extra. And all those pagan babies - I do not know what happened to those pagan babies, But I do know that it was a great substitute for the real effort.

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