Mission Sunday – Called, Gifted, Sent

It could be a phone call, an email, a text, or a conversation. However it arrives, its content is something like this: “John is in hospice and nearing the end, and the family would like him to be anointed.” Or “Can you talk to the Confirmation class about vocations?” Or “My daughter’s Subaru needs brakes; are you still working on cars?”

This is mission – to be called by the Lord, a call most usually manifested through the people in our lives, and then sent to use the gifts God has entrusted to us to benefit others. All of us have a mission. Or better, all of us have the same mission: to make Jesus Christ known and loved.

Since 1926, the third Sunday in October is observed as World Mission Sunday. Pope Pius XI established this day to enshrine the reality each year that the Church “is by its very nature missionary.” Others have since expressed the core idea in different words such as: “The Church does not have a mission - the Church is a mission” or “The Church does not have a mission; the mission has a Church.”

All of these expressions articulate the task Jesus himself gave the Eleven and every generation of the faithful who followed: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).

We may naturally think of people who have left their homeland and all that is familiar to travel to another part of the world to share the Gospel. They are still called and sent by God in today’s Church, and we need to pray for them and support them with both prayer and contributions from our resources. But that is only one subset of the missionary Church.

Clergy and religious have that mission, of course. But before them, spouses and parents have that mission to one another and to their children. And before that, the mission is grounded first and fundamentally in our Baptism into the one Body of Christ.

Every other mission, no matter how far or how near, how great or how routine, flows from the waters that give us new life.

To be an effective missionary requires that first of all, we come to know Jesus. Not just facts about Jesus, but Jesus as our Friend, Healer, Redeemer, Savior, Lord. There is an old saying in Latin: nemo dat quod non habet – no one can give what they don’t have. To evangelize others (literally, to share the Good News) means we must first be evangelized. What we then shareis our own faith – our own experience of God – that comes from our hearts and depths of our spirits.

People may well not be convinced by argument or logic or quoting Bible verses, but they are often moved by lived testimony that say: I have found something – Someone – that has changed my life so deeply that I want you to find what I found.

This work of evangelization demands “accompaniment,” a word recent Popes have often used. It is not some complicated method, but simply being with people long-term as they grow into personal faith. So it means being there as they experience the whole gamut of emotions – joy, anger at past hurts, boredom, skepticism, doubt, sadness, envy, indifference. Again, parents are the best evangelists in this way: inspired by love and believing in the potential of their children, they are there in thick and thin.

The idea of mission is captured particularly in the dismissal at the end of each Mass which states: “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.” We are sent forth from the Eucharist, carrying the Body of Christ we become to the Body of Christ in the world.

Each of us knows Christian faith because someone else shared the Good News with us. As Jesus says: “The gift you have been freely given, freely give.” We are that mission today.