Your Mission, Should You Accept It

Programming Note: This weekend up until Ash Wednesday is of course a time leading up to what we in the US call, ironically in French, Mardi Gras. In Brazil this time is called Carnaval. Like Mardi Gras, Carnaval can be quite secular. However, New Song (Canção Nova) celebrates Carnaval in a way that is more Catholic and in devotion to Our Lord. You can view it (in Portuguese) by clicking here.

Your mission should you accept it.What is the mission of the Church today? It is the same mission she always had, the salvation of souls. However, if we decide that we are the Church, which is Church teaching, then the salvation of souls is our prime mission as it is of the Church. If we lose sight of this reality, then we turn the Church into a social service organization and nothing more. We make it the perpetrator of social justice and make it a form of labor union. Those things can be part of the mission of the Church as long as the prime mission is in place: The salvation of souls. However, if we are not first concerned about the salvation of souls, we fail in every aspect of our prime mission.

If we look at today’s second reading from Paul’s First letter to the Christians in Corinth, we see that his life revolved around this mission, He says it directly: “That they may be saved.” Well to understand what salvation is, we need to understand what we are being saved from. The general consensus is that God sends people, who offend him, to a place of eternal punishment.
I am not sure that is what Hell is. My favorite illustration of what Hell may be is from a horror movie that is based on St. Augustine’s description of evil. Evil is like darkness. Just as darkness is the lack of light, evil is the lack of that which is ultimately good, which is God. If you can imagine a place where all that is good is missing, just as a dark hall is completely void of light, you have a glimpse of Hell. Unfortunately, you can only imagine it.

There is a movie that tried to depict it and the director had to remove the images from the movie in order to bring it down to an R rating for wide distribution it was so horrifying, which is good for a horror movie. The extremely violent scenes of Hell have never been seen since their filming and they are lost forever. The movie is Event Horizon. Never forget, Jesus went through the horror of the crucifixion because the horror of Hell was so great, that he wanted to do all he could to ensure we would not experience it. This is our mission too: the salvation of souls making sure all whom we meet never see that horror.

Who goes to Hell? The answer is in John, those who prefer darkness to the light. How can they know the light, if they have never seen it. You and I have been called by Christ Himself to point to the light. You find that in Matthew.

We have a mission to lead people to the eternal life with Christ by leading them to understand Christ’s mission and ours. This is what Paul writes to us and focuses his whole life on doing this. I have to admit, I have come to understand that this mission of the Catholic church is a mission that appears to have been lost and been replaced by some crazy idea that we are all going to Heaven if we are just nice to one another. This is not what St. Paul says. He says that he has dedicated every aspect of his life so that all can be saved. This is our mission as well. When we conform our life to the will of God, we glorify God by becoming all He created us to be and we reflect the light. All of which is our mission.

Notice what he says: We are to imitate him as he imitates Christ. This syllogism means for us to be imitators of Christ. Jesus Himself tells us to do the same thing even to the point of carrying our cross to our own crucifixion that others may be saved. What did Jesus do to complete His mission. He prayed daily to determine the Father’s will and then did it.

Every aspect of our life is about leading people to salvation. Everything we do needs to be focused on imitating Christ. It us not just our work, but how we work. Working in a way that our reliability and demeanor reflect our mission of saving souls. If we do not know Christ, we do not study Paul along with the rest of the Bible and Church teahing and we do not pray, we cannot fulfill our mission. We can be part of an amorphous effort to be nice to others or better yet, “To be excellent to one another.” To try to act like every day is Christmas and treat others with the same attitude, there is nothing wrong with it, except to ask the reason why? What is the point of being excellent to each other if there is no final meaning to our lives?

Every waking moment of our life has a call to be fertile in the mission of the salvation of souls, our own and others and if we are not realizing this, we are missing the point of being here in the Church in the first place.

We do that by witnessing to Christ with a supernatural form of ideology that teaches us to act in ways that those without faith cannot understand.

I truly believe that one of the failures of the Church in the United States today is that it has long ago lost this message. Notice further, that Paul gives us a specific example. Be like Christ. How does one do good? Be like Christ! It is not to do the right thing. It is not to be excellent to one another. It is not to be charitable or to be courteous. It is to be like Christ which is more than all of that. What would Christ do? All He could for the salvation of souls. That is our mission as a community and personally.

Everything we do from taking care of the Church to putting its actual teachings into practice are what we do so that people may be saved. The long, lost footage of the depiction of Hell from the movie Event Horizon is hidden for ever. It is just as well, for it was so horrible, it could not be seen. It should tell us how important is our mission.

Fr. Carr is an alliance member of the New Song Community (Canção Nova). He is the pastor of Holy Trinity Quincy, MA and is the editor of this blog. He is the author of several books, blogs and hundreds of videos all of which you may find on Youtube. He also has a regular radio program on WebRadio Canção Nova. Which he podcasts on Mixcloud and here on Catholicismanew.
You can follow him on twitter as @frbobcarr and on Google Plus as +Fr. Robert Thoughts, comments on the homily? Let us know at Facebook