Send Me

February 10, 2013

Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time 2013 C

By Rev. Joe McCloskey, SJ 

He touched my mouth with it, and said, “See, now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.”  Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”  “Here I am,” I said; “Send me!”  Isaiah 6:7-8 

For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.  But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective.  Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me.  Therefore, whether it be I or they, so we preach and so you believed.   1 Corinthians 15:9-11 

Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”  When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.  Luke 5:10b-11 

Piety 

Piety sits us with the Lord.  The Lord teaches through the events happening around us.  Unworthy as we may be, the Lord sends his angel to purify our lips so that we may announce his good news.  Piety is how deep we go with the Lord.  There is the point when we have to put our nets into the deep of the ocean of God’s love that surrounds us.  We can work for years without seeming to accomplish anything.   In one dropping of the nets of our efforts at the bidding of the Lord, a catch that almost sinks the boat of our comfortableness overwhelms our boat to the point that we seem to be sinking.  We have to call our friends to help us with a catch too big if we had to handle it by ourselves.

Study

We look deeply at the call we have received from the Lord.  There are two main tasks.  We know the Lord better and better by our prayer over the Scriptures.  We put on the mind and the heart of the Lord by prayer and study of what is happening to us in our walk with the Lord.  Some things we are already doing.  The Lord has put on our hearts the desire to do good and avoid evil.  We search out how the Lord faces the demands of life and discover we are already doing much of what the Lord did in his time by our being today men and women for others.  Selflessness is meeting the needs of the people around us.  We discover in the seeing of the possibilities how we can be more like the Lord by changing something we are doing.  It is our desire to be more like the Lord that energizes our action.

Action

Seeing the Lord in action motivates us to take the next step in offering our lives to the Lord.  We accept the Lord’s help in the good people he sends into our lives.  The Lord is inviting us to be catching people for his kingdom.  As we get older and wiser we come to realize that our “Yes” to the life of the Lord is made possible by all the things to which we say our “no.”  The quality of our “yes” requires us to make choices.  We cannot do everything.  What we say “no" to makes possible our "yes."  We have to make choices and discernment is fed by our prayers and the good people who give us the example of how the Lord would face the problems of life we deal with and try to remedy.   Action is how we are sent by the Lord.  By our actions our faith reveals itself to our world.  We are called to be men and women of great faith, hope and charity.  It is the love of our lives that makes our world go round.  What we give away in the name of the Lord is our claim on heaven through the resurrection.  We work harder when we give the resurrection a chance to motivate us in our journey to heaven.