Our Mission as Citizens of Heaven and as U.S. Citizens, 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), July 4, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA
Fourteenth Sunday in OT, C
July 4, 2010
Is 66:10-14; Gal 6:14-18; Lk 10:1-12,17-20

The following text guided today’s homily: 

1) Over the past few weeks, there has been a trilogy among the Gospel passages. Two weeks ago we focused on Christ’s identity as the Messiah and Son of God and of our call to follow him along the way of self-giving love until death. Last week, the Gospel featured the various types of excuses — personal security and well-being, business and family concerns — by which people refuse to follow Christ right now. Today we encounter the crowning of what it means to be a disciple of Christ: to follow him all the way so that his priorities become our priorities, his message our message, his mission our mission, his zeal for the salvation of others our own.

2) Jesus appointed seventy-two of his disciples and sent them out in pairs to proclaim the Gospel he himself had been proclaiming to them. A short time earlier (cf. Lk 9:1-6), Jesus had sent out the twelve apostles, those who would become his first priests.  But to preach the Gospel was not meant to be the task of priests alone. So he appointed 72 — 60 of whom we would call today lay people — and sent them out with the twelve to the neighboring towns and villages. “The harvest is plentiful,” he said, “but the laborers are few.” Jesus not only instructed them to pray to God the Father to send more laborers, but was showing them one way the Father responds to that prayer, by sending THEM out as laborers for his harvest of souls.  I’ve always thought that the 72 was more than a symbolic number, but probably implies that the Lord basically sent out EVERYONE who was a willing, consistent follower.

3) He sent them out first with a message, which had two elements to it: “Peace” and “The kingdom of God is at hand!” The two are allied. The “peace” they were to announce was precisely the peace that Jesus had been preaching — peace with God through the forgiveness of the sins by which human beings offend God. The way to enter into that peace is to enter into God’s kingdom, to allow the Lord to be the king of one’s thoughts and actions. We’ll return to this message shortly and apply it to our mission in our land as we celebrate 234th anniversary of our country’s independence.

4) Jesus sent them out with a certain “packaging” for that message as well. They were sent out as “lambs in the midst of wolves,” not wolves in the midst of lambs. They were sent to PROPOSE the Gospel in a compelling way to others’ freedom, not to IMPOSE anything (cf. John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, 39). They were to proclaim the Gospel with confidence, but with meekness. They were not called to proclaim it with force of weapons or the power of threats, but with the persuasive force of their faith, goodness, and holiness. That was why Jesus instructed them to go out with no purse, no bag, no sandals. How could they possibly proclaim effectively that the kingdom of GOD is at hand if they were trying to increase the size of their purse and build an earthly kingdom of their own — or if others even suspected them of doing so? They were to proclaim the Gospel as Jesus did, who himself had carried no purse, bag and sandals. If they were welcomed by a household, they were to stay there, lest they ever start to look for a “better deal.” The joy that comes from God and his love was meant to be the most powerful proclamation of the Good News. They were sent out two-by-two in order to show precisely that they did love and forgive each other and invite others to enter into that communion of love. Even the way Jesus prepared them to handle rejection — by wiping the dust off their feet as a witness of their rejection — so that they wouldn’t carry the pain of their rejection with them to another town — shows that they were to carry only Jesus’ message rather than one of resentment.

5) Even though they were sent out to preach the message as lambs of God, their message was startling. We have heard the words, “The kingdom of God is among you!” so many times that perhaps they no longer startle us. We need to think back to the context. The seventy-two were sent to proclaim this kingdom at one of the times of greatest strength in the Roman empire, an empire that didn’t take well any challenges to its authority. In the midst of Roman dominion, the seventy-two ordinary disciples of Christ were ambassadors of a different kingdom, a different type of allegiance — the kingdom of God. The two kingdoms did not necessarily conflict, as Jesus himself pointed to when he said, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and give to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21). But he also said that when there was a conflict, we were to “seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness” (Mt 6:33). This is the truth to which St. Peter pointed when — after he had been arrested by the Sanhedrin and flogged for proclaiming the Gospel when they had told him not to do so — he resolutely proclaimed, “We must obey God rather than any human authority!” (Acts 5:29).

6) Jesus wants to send each of us out to our neighboring villages and towns with the same message, the same packaging, the same priority for the kingdom of God.  All of us are called to be missionaries, a few of us to far away lands which have never heard the Gospel, all of us to our own locales, where, although they have heard of Jesus and most have been baptized, they really haven’t lived in or for that kingdom and for that King. Jesus needs us all to live up to this vocation and mission because there is such a harvest waiting and so few who are harvesting. The fields, he said elsewhere, are ripe, which means that unless we go out now to reap the harvest much of the produce will perish. The reality is that many come to comfortable churches on Sunday morning, but few who leave to go hunt down Christ’s wandering sheep, the sheep for whom the Lord we love gave his life. Christ once gave the parable of God’s love, saying he would leave the 99 sheep behind to go after the one lost sheep and bring that person back to the fold. One great modern preacher says that today we need to leave the one sheep behind and go out after the other 99. The point is that there are so many lost sheep out there, so many lives not being harvested for God, and the Lord calls us to pray for laborers and to become those laborers.

7) On this Fourth of July, as we remember and thank God for the blessings we have as a nation, as well as for the enormous sacrifices made over the past 234 years to obtain and maintain our freedom, we also need to reflect on the service Christ is calling us to render to our nation, which is, in a special way, the field he has called and commissioned us to harvest. The greatest service we can give to our country is to announce and live the Gospel that, we’ve been freed from the clutches of King George so that we may live in the Kingdom of God which is among us.  As we can see clearly in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, we have a citizenship far greater than even our U.S. citizenship. If by birth on U.S. soil we become U.S. Citizens, by our rebirth in the waters of baptism, we become citizens of heaven, fellow citizens of the saints and members of God’s household.  The founding fathers of our country recognized very clearly that for our nation to endure, U.S. citizens needed to live as citizens of heaven and call others to do the same. The experiment in ordered liberty which is the United States of America would only succeed, they said, if the citizens were moral and religious, if they used their freedom well, if they obeyed God on their own and did the right thing even if they could get away with doing the wrong thing. Our fellow Massachusetts native, John Adams, stated this very clearly. “It is religion and morality alone,” Adams wrote, “which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. Religion and virtue are the only foundations … of republicanism and of all free governments.” On another occasion, President Adams noted, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. … Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

8) It is crucial for those of us who love our country to keep these admonitions from our second president in mind, because so many of our fellow citizens, particularly elites in the secular media, universities and legal professions, have not only forgotten them but think the exact opposite. In total disagreement with our founding fathers, they think that our faith in God, that our announcing Christ’s kingdom, that our living as citizens of heaven in order to be even better U.S. citizens, threatens our republican form of government. As we are all away, many are trying to bring about a declaration of independence from God in our land, as if God and faith in him is the new King George, rather than the foundation of all our freedoms. They will tolerate our going together to Church on Sundays, provided that we never take our faith into the public square. They claim that by our voting our faith-filled consciences and trying to have our civil laws respect God’s laws, it is tantamount to “forcing our morality” on them. At the same time, however, by their lawsuits to take God out of schools, out of the pledge of allegiance, and off our currency, to remove prayers from our graduations, to remove all of historical precedent and the need for both a man and a woman in marriage, they are forcing their own practical-atheism on us and on future generations. By doing so they are threatening the very survival of this nation we love, which cannot survive, as John Adams said, without the principles of “religion and morality” which “alone… can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.”

9) What does President Adams mean? Without religion and religious morality, our freedom is insecure, because it is no longer grounded in the truth, in something stable and unchangeable outside ourselves, but instead devolves simply into the ability to do whatever I want. Once we begin to think that freedom is the capacity to do whatever we please, the common good begins to be rent asunder, torn apart, because this type of freedom is fundamentally selfish. It thinks only about its rights and not its responsibilities. The classic case is the so-called freedom to choose to abort our babies, whereby some of our citizens believe that they should have the right to kill their own children if their children are unwanted, regardless of whatever responsibilities they have to children they’ve brought into existence through their sexual activity. We see it also in the push for the right to commit suicide, regardless of the consequences to family members and loved ones. We see it in no fault divorce laws, which say that people should have the freedom and the right to end their marriages for any reason whatsoever, regardless of the promises made for life and the responsibilities one owes to spouses and children. We’ve seen it historically several times with regard to the draft, as some say they should be free not to serve, regardless of the responsibilities they have as citizens. We could multiply the examples, but the point should be clear: a notion of freedom severed from religion and morality, rather than being a great good that strengthens our nation, can become a weapon that tears it apart. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” as John Adams said. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

10) To this society, Jesus is sending US, all “72” of us, to proclaim that God’s kingdom has come, that Jesus welcomes us and calls us to conversion. Like Isaiah, who heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, who will go for us?” and stood up saying, “Here I am; send me!” (Is 6:8), so each of us needs to stand up in the face of the deepest needs of our nation and say, “Here I am, God; send me!” The Lord trusted the 72 so much that he sent them out with the message God the Father gave him and gave them God’s own power to cure the sick. That same Christ trusts us that much to give us this mission today. As we began this century, his vicar on earth called us to live up to our founding and step up to the plate. To the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast in 2000, Pope John Paul II said in a message read by the Vatican Nuncio: “As one who is personally grateful for what America did for the world in the darkest days of the 20th century, allow me to ask: Will America continue to inspire people to build a truly better world, a world in which freedom is ordered to truth and goodness? Or will America offer the example of a pseudo-freedom which, detached from the moral norms that give life direction and fruitfulness, turns in practice into a narrow and ultimately inhuman self-enslavement, one which smothers people’s spirits and dissolves the foundations of social life? … For religious believers who bear political responsibility, our times offer a daunting yet exhilarating challenge. I would go so far as to say that their task is to save democracy from self-destruction.” Jesus came to save us from self-destruction, and we are sent forth to our country to continue that mission of incredibly high stakes. We need to emulate the incredible witness of our founding fathers, who put their lives on the line — because treason against the British government was a capital offense — when they signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia 234 years ago today. We need to be willing to imitate the heroism of so many soldiers who fought under George Washington, who fought in the war of 1812, who fought to keep our nation together and free the slaves in the Civil War, who defended freedom from tyranny in World War I and II, who battled atheistic communism in Korea and Vietnam, and who are seeking to free the world of Islamic terrorism today in Afghanistan and Iraq. They have fought for our country, for their families, for future generations. We need to do all that — and fight for God as well.

11) To proclaim the Gospel has never been easy. Jesus suffered for it and died for it, but in it he found his glory (cf. Jn 17:1). The apostles suffered for it but counted themselves worthy to suffer “on account of the name” of Jesus (Acts 5:41). St. Paul, in the second reading today, who was stoned, imprisoned and ultimately decapitated for the Gospel, said he found his glory and his sole boast “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” by which the world was crucified to him and him to the world.” And so it will be for us. If we respond to Christ’s call to us this morning to proclaim his Gospel to our family members, to our friends, to our colleagues and neighbors, to our president and governor, legislators and judges and those invested with the common good, we will suffer. Some will reject us like Jesus promised the 72 they would be rejected. But if we suffer out of love for Christ and for those he loves, then we will receive a reward far greater than any medal of honor Congress could bestow. As Jesus promises at the end of the Gospel, our names will be INSCRIBED IN HEAVEN, where the kingdom he sends us to announce will reach its fulfillment.

The readings for today’s Mass were: