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Focused on the Mission:
“The Kingdom of God is at hand for you!”
“We are not simply made by God; we are made ‘of God.’” Gregory J. Boyle, S. J., Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
In this Sunday’s gospel, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan to emphasize the depth of the scriptural admonition to “love your neighbor as yourself.” How often do we, like the “scholar of the law,” tend to view our neighbors as restricted to people like us, or to people of whom we approve. How often do you hear how someone will pass by a beggar on the street because they think that person will use whatever you give them to buy alcohol or drugs? How many organizations have barred their doors to folks like alcoholics or drug addicts seeking help in recovery by refusing to host AA or NA meetings because of the perception of the unsavoriness of those suffering from addictions? Huge sections of Baltimore City are a war zone and how many of us are doing something to alleviate that suffering?
This attitude is not restricted to those to whom we might be charitable. I recently attended a board meeting for a charitable organization’s fund raising arm. The Board passed a resolution prohibiting the acceptance of contributions from anyone who openly and notoriously opposes Catholic teaching. The specific teaching at issue was the teaching that a same sex relationship was sinful, and the catalyst for the resolution was a wealthy gentleman married to another man who was considering a large donation to the organization. They would not accept the charity of someone whose “sin” they judged to be more odious than others.
We tend to restrict our charity to those whose sins are more like ours, and thus more acceptable to us, and we tend to restrict our acceptance of the charity of others to those whose purity is, in our flawed judgment, more like ours.
I am writing this on the feast of St. Francis and he has a letter to the faithful that really struck me. The saint writes: “Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us have charity and humility. Let us give alms because they cleanse our souls from the stains of sin. Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give.” St. Peter tells us, “Above all, let your love for one another be intense, because love covers a multitude of sins.” 1Pet. 4:8
The expressions of our love for others, our charity towards one another and our giving alms, redounds to our eternal benefit. Conversely, by selectively turning our backs on others and refusing to accept their attempts at being charitable we deprive ourselves and them of the graces and the redemptive value of opportunities that God has set before us.
I strongly believe and embrace the belief that sin is never, ever, an impediment to God’s love for us. We, however, can erect our own barriers to the experience and acceptance of that love by our arrogance in thinking that we are somehow imbued with the knowledge and judgment reserved only to God. Whatever our state of grace, we are by the creative act of God the image and likeness of the Holy One, and nothing in the created order can change that. Love has to be given, though, and not coerced, so we have the power to deny our very nature and choose our own consequences.
One message from Jesus to us, I believe, in the parable of the Good Samaritan is that Love is the nature, substance, and source of our very being, because God is love, and in being loving we bring the experience of God more deeply into ourselves and others.
ST. STEPHEN’S MISSION STATEMENT
We, the parish of St. Stephen, will carry out the mission of Jesus Christ as a welcoming, worshipping, Catholic community by sharing, growing, and living the Gospel.
ST. STEPHEN’S MISSION STATEMENT
We, the parish of St. Stephen, will carry out the mission of Jesus Christ as a welcoming, worshipping, Catholic community by sharing, growing, and living the Gospel.