Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time: Our Very Being

In this Sunday’s readings we hear of the fullness of the spiri-tual blessings given to us (you and me) by God in the person of Jesus Christ: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.” (Eph. 1:3-14) In fact the reading goes on to lay out clearly for us the reason for our creation and the reason for our continued existence in this life: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.” Therefore: we were created out of the love of God for each one of us— the individual—and the purpose of our existence is to recognize and understand that love which God holds us in, and then to profess and proclaim that love in our lives—by praising the person and the actions of Christ Jesus—through imitation.

While this is hard to live out in our contemporary society, it should not be difficult to understand. God loves you. Period. You have been formed and created in His love, are sustained in this life by the power of His Love (the Holy Spirit), and so are called into your own unique life to image that Divine Love to others, in very human ways. We are called to seek the truth (established by God and given to us in Christ)—what Saint Thomas Aquinas called the “search for excellence”—in sacred scripture, in the 2,000-plus years of apostolic teachings of the Church, and in the showing of Christ’s mission as revealed in the mission of His Church. Today, Pope Benedict XVI refers to this as the New Evangelization. This New Evangelization is not intended to be the sole purview of priests or religious sisters or of deacons or even of the lay apostolates, but rather of each and every baptized member of the Church (what the Church refers to as the “Common priesthood”).

How do we go about being “preachers” for God? In our daily activities of life we are called to image Christ, thus God, to our family members (especially to those who do not see Christ in this world or who do not believe or who have serious doubts about faith), we are called to be His light in the workplace, in the school yard and in our many, many forms of entertainment. For example, in town we should image God to those who do not have enough food or who go without the other basics of life—working at Pantry Partners or in demanding that our local government reach out to those in need with adequate supplies in the food pantry and through fair taxation and services. We are called in the workplace or the school yard to uphold God by seeking moral choices in the bottom lines of the quarterly statements at work and in the treatment of classmates or colleagues. We preach God in the community when local sports teams are less about winning for winning’s sake and are more about teaching sportsmanship, teamwork, and dignity. We preach the Lord to others by the choices we make in our daily lives, in the way we respect our neighbors, welcome the new member or simply include others in the blessings this good and kind God has bestowed on us. And we praise the Lord when we include not just our “wants” in daily prayer but the needs of all.

Baptized in Christ we are! Equipped with His knowledge and truth, we are gifted through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Teachings. Fortified with the sufficient grace of God, we are all called—and expected—to preach the Good News of Christ to others. After all, the reason for our being is not simply to save our own souls, but also the souls of those we love and come into contact with in this life…so that we can all share in His divine life forever,