Father Rick Bolte's Homily

B:15th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Paul, in today’s reading from Ephesians, tells us and them that we were first chosen to be children of God.  We were chosen before the world began, before we were conceived, before we ever had a thought about our worthiness.  We were chosen “to be holy and without blemish before him.”  This is due, not to anything we would do but according to God’s lavishing his grace upon us including his forgiveness.

Certainly one of the biggest challenges of faith is for us to believe this.  We live in a world trying to prove they’re good enough and worthy of love.  Success in our world is not something we let happen naturally but something we feel compelled to achieve.  We pass this compulsion on to our children (something of original sin here).  I saw a commercial for Wal-Mart where a worried mother is sending her young boy off to school.  The announcer says, “Mommy can’t do little Johnny’s history report for him but she can give him everything he needs to succeed.”  The commercial goes on to show happy children with their own laptops.  We feel pressure and we pass on this pressure to succeed in the eyes of the world.  We don’t ask “why?”  Everyone around us is feeling the same pressure and everyone’s trying to do the same thing.  We fit in.

Lost in this pressure to succeed are the real needs of the heart.  Instead of realizing that we are already loved, we try to earn it.  Instead of accepting the gracious forgiveness of God, we live with a sense of unworthiness.  We are driven to succeed.  We feel compelled to accumulate things, titles, awards, trophies, accolades, etc. trying to prove to others (and really ourselves) that we are worthy of love.  We are already loved more deeply than we can imagine.  The purpose of marriage, friendships, family, etc. is to help us, though our love is always flawed by selfishness, to know the true love of God.  People of faith and members of God’s family thus can know the love of God.

Paul goes on to say that we, who first hoped in Christ, are chosen and destined for the praise of God’s glory.  To praise the glory of God is to live in the awareness of God’s adoption of us as his children.  Like the first time we were chosen, before the foundation of the world, this being chosen happens without our volition.  In our first reading from Amos we hear Amos explain that he was a shepherd and dresser of sycamore trees and was prophesying only because God called him to.  At our baptism we also celebrate we have been chosen.  A baby (or an adult) is anointed with the Oil of Chrism with a prayer calling them to be priest, prophet, and king like Jesus was.  We are chosen to be prophets of God’s good news in our world.

If we have faith in God, if we believe in his love and forgiveness, our lives will be a prophetic witness to the world.  Jesus sends off his disciples and tells them to carry nothing more than the barest essentials.  They are to not only speak of God’s good news but also to demonstrate their confidence in God.  By their poverty they speak to the world that the compulsion to succeed is not necessary.  They show they know they are loved despite their failings but refusing to cling to things, reputation, and their accomplishments.

We are chosen to be prophets of God’s good news.  We don’t do this by being nice and fitting in like everyone else.  People with little or no faith do as much.  We are called to demonstrate our faith by the way we live.  Let us ask God for an increase in faith that we may accept that we are his chosen people.  And by this acceptance demonstrate as witnesses to the world that all are chosen and all can be free of the compulsion to earn the gift of love that is actually already ours.