Read carefully Jesus' words in today's gospel. His speaks to his closest associates about the role of an apostle. His words are driven by the same kind of care for a child of God recorded in the first reading from the Book of Hosea.Very few can simply drop daily obligations to become apostle-like missionaries. But to be a genuine 21st century apostle requires personal spiritual formation ... a challenge not beyond us. To be a successful messenger of God, we need to be first men and women of prayer. The first apostles had a virtual Gospel in the truest sense present with them when they were with Jesus. We come to know God's message through our prayer, through reading both the scriptures and other spiritual reading and through sharing our faith with others and through the Eucharist.
The mission that falls upon us today is to reach out to the lost sheep of our Church as mentioned in yesterday's blog. There are so many Catholics who have left the Church. Perhaps there is hardly a family that does not have a member separated from our Church. Perhaps we can designate this group as the "faithful departed." Their situations, each of them unique to the individual, usually come about through painful moments or, unfortunately, from weak formation in the faith.
The question for us today is this: Do I stand by and accept the loss of so many Catholics who have found a reason to depart from the Church for one reason or another? To answer this question in the negative means that we, like the apostles, have to know Jesus and what he taught and what his Church has taught us through the almost two centuries since the first Pentecost Sunday. We have to know where the Church is today and what is meaningful. It means that we have to be models of faith following ourselves. We have to share with others why the Eucharist is so significant in our lives. We have to be able to share with others what a sacramental life can be. We have to share with them the joy that our faith brings to us.
When you hear friends of other faiths speaking with excitement about their churches, their faith communities, how does it make you feel about your own? What does it ask of you? This is what being an apostle means today: being alive with the Holy Spirit; being excited about the goodness that exists within our faith.
