St. Peter Claver Regional School
September 9, 2003
READINGS: #438 in the Lectionary
Dear Friends in Christ,
It is always a good thing to hear stories from the life of our Lord. There is no word in the Gospel from which we cannot take comfort, and find guidance for our own lives. The story of today's Gospel is no different even though on the surface it seems to be the telling of only one event - the calling of the Twelve Apostles.
But the Word of God is never simple - and by that I mean that there is never just one meaning to what God says, or to how He tells the story of salvation, whether we are reading the Old Testament or the New, the Gospels or the letters of Paul and the other Apostles.
Tonight's Gospel has three parts, and each one is not only an incident in our Lord's life, and the lives of those around Him - they are parts of our own lives, parts of the story that God is telling as He unfolds the individual lives of every person who is here tonight.
The first thing to note, is that Jesus departs to the mountain to pray, to spend, in fact, an entire night in prayer. I wonder how many of us have spent an entire night in prayer - probably not many if any at all. But that doesn't mean that we don't need to pray hard, and to pray often. If our lord was able to pray an entire night, it is probably because it was not hard for Him to pray - prayer for Him was conversation with His Father - not His pretend Father, but His real Father. And we know that nothing in the Lord's mind could ever have been different from what is in the mind of God the Father. But the point here is not whether it is easy or hard to pray - it is that our Lord, as a man, understood and felt the need to pray - the need to pray - especially before He did something important. And so it is with us. We may not be able to stay on our knees very long - we may not be able to keep our minds on the words we are trying to say to God when we pray. But God reads our needs, He reads our sincerity, and He appreciates and accepts every sincere gesture we make to Him, and He listens - He listens - and then He answers. And then comes our test - for the answers of God are not always to our liking, particularly if we had our hearts set on having something that He doesn't want us to have. That is why, when we pray, when we ask God for anything, it is best to begin by remembering words of our Lord when He prayed, and when He taught us to pray - "Thy will be done" - Thy will be done, O Father in Heaven - not my will, but thy will.
The second part of the Gospel tells the story of how our Lord picked from His disciples the twelve men He wanted to lead His people, to lead His Church. But it tells much more, for when God makes a decision about the world, it is a decision made for the entirety of Creation, a decision for all time and space. In this case, it was to appoint leaders for His Church, the first bishops of His Church, and over the past two thousand years, as the Church has come to life and grown, and never ceased looking to understand the will of God, the Holy Spirit has always kept the leadership of the Church in the protection of her bishops. It is true that one of those men picked by Christ in the end betrayed Him - and it is true that no matter how many good bishops here are in the Church, or how many good people there are in the Church, there will always be those whose own desires become more important that the will of God - there will always be those who betray the Church, who betray us, who betray once again, the Lord Jesus Christ. But the Holy Spirit protects us, and when one champion of the Truth falls by the wayside, God will always raise up another to take their place. This is something it is extremely important or us to know about our Catholic Church - that she is under the protection of the Holy Spirit, and that no matter what, what Christ decided to do when He called the leaders of His Church, the bishops, what Christ decided will always win in the end.
The last part of today's Gospel tells what happened after our Lord had prayed, and after He had made the decision about which Twelve would be the leaders of His Church. He came down from the mountain, He came down with the Twelve, and then began teaching and healing the people - filling their minds and hearts with His truth and wisdom, and filling their bodies and souls with the power of His grace, the power of His love to heal and to make whole. And the Gospel says:
Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.
St. Peter Claver, a very smart and able young man from Spain, and the patron of this regional Catholic School, left his family, left an easy future, left all that made him secure to go to Cartagena in Colombia, in the early 1600's, and work there with the most miserable people of all - the African slaves. No slave ship came into that harbor, that Peter Claver wasn't there immediately, to bring whatever comfort, whatever refreshment he could, to those sad and suffering souls, after their hellish journey across the Atlantic . Many people asked Peter Claver why he went among these terrible conditions, why he worked to comfort the bodies of these people, rather than preaching to them from a distance, in order to save their souls. His answer was this: "We must speak to them with our hands, before we try to speak to them with our lips."
Peter Claver understood love, understood charity, understood what Christ had done when He came down from the mountain to bring people healing - Peter Claver understood and did the same. And we must too. It is not enough just to pray and to listen for God to speak His will - it is not enough just to trust that the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the leadership of the bishops, will do what needs to be done. We must accept and act on the third step as well - we must bring the truth, the healing, the comfort of Christ to as many as we can reach. And it must be from the work of our hands, as much as from the sentiments that come forth from our mouths. For good words without good works, amounts to lip-service -- lip-service to the Gospel, to our Lord, and to the Father in Heaven.
None of us wants to be guilty, at the end of our lives, of having given just lip-service to the will of God, to the love of Christ, to the work of the Church. And so, we do whatever we can to bring these three into human life. They will happen, by the Holy Spirit, whether we act to make them happen or not - but our salvation will happen, only if we make them a part of our own lives.
And what are these three, that we desire to make a part of our lives, our beings, if not the very Being of God Himself? For the will of God is God the Father, and the love of God is Jesus Christ our Lord, and the work of the Church is the Holy Spirit - and in all Three, who are One, we find our one and only fulfillment, our one and only happiness.
Dear friends, may the work we do here in Sts. Peter and Paul Parish, and here at St. Peter Claver Regional Catholic School, help us to bring God into our lives, and into our souls - into the neighborhoods where we live, and into the world which He has given us to dwell in. And may our lives be ever more filled with the simple truths taught to us by the Gospel: prayer to God - obedience to His Church - and the sharing of His love, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Amen.
In those days Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.
When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured.
Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.
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