Mass Readings Audio
https://bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/2021-07-11-usccb-daily-mass-readings
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – July 11, 2021
Welcome to the one hundred and seventy-second episode of By Your Life. I’m Lisa Huetteman and I know that you have a hundred different things you could be doing right now, so I thank you for choosing By Your Life.
My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.
In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for the Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. (Year B) A friend of mine recently shared a meme on Facebook that said, “Do not ask the Lord to guide your footsteps if you are not willing to move your feet.” I think that sums up our readings from this Sunday.
In the first reading from the Prophet Amos, Amos tells us that he was content being “a shepherd and a dresser of sycamore trees” (Amos 7:14) when he was called to be a prophet. In the second reading, Paul tells the Ephesians, and us, that God “chose us” (Eph 1:4) and blessed us “according to the intention of his will.” (Eph 1:5) In the Gospel, Mark writes that “[Jesus] summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over unclean spirits. (Mk 6:7)
As baptized Christians, like the prophet Amos and the Twelve disciples, we are all called and sent. In his Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate “Rejoice and Be Glad”, the Holy Father Pope Francis writes, “The Lord asks everything of us, and in return he offers us true life, the happiness for which we were created. He wants us to be saints and not to settle for a bland and mediocre existence.” (GE 1)
Quoting from our second reading for this Sunday, the Holy Father said that his purpose in writing this exhortation was to “repropose the call to holiness in a practical way for our own time, with all its risks, challenges and opportunities. For the Lord has chosen each one of us “to be holy and blameless before him in love.” (Eph 1:4)
Tough Act to Follow
In our Gospel, the Twelve responded to the call and “drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” (Mk 6:13) This is a tough act to follow, but the good news is that we’re not supposed to do what they did. This was the call of the Twelve, not us. The Second Vatican Council stated that “All the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord – each in his or her own way – to that perfect holiness by which the Father himself is perfect” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 11)
Pope Francis writes, “Each in his or her own way”, which means “We should not grow discouraged before examples of holiness that appear unattainable.”… “We are not meant to copy, for that could even lead us astray from the one specific path that the Lord has in mind for us. The important thing is that each believer discern his or her own path, that they bring out the very best of themselves, the most personal gifts that God has placed in their hearts.”(GE 11)
Forging New Ground
Ours is a unique story written by the Creator. In their book, Unrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person, authors Luke Burgis and Joshua Miller point to St. John Paul II’s first encyclical Redemptor Hominis on the Redemption of Man writing, “The ways we have to travel are broader, longer, higher, and deeper than we can imagine. According to St. John Paul II, there are 7,484, 325, 476 of them—that’s the total number of people in the world (at the time of this writing.)”
Unrepeatable provides a guide to assist you to gain a profound insight into the unique design, creative drive, and potential destiny for yourself and others. Although it offers much more, I found two important messages in this book that relate to our Gospel from this week: 1) the need to seek your uniqueness in a culture of conformity, and 2) recognizing that your unique calling is not about you, it’s about others. Let’s start with the second point first.
It’s Not About You
St John Paul wrote that “Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies. In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good. Christ teaches us that the best use of freedom is charity, which takes concrete form in self-giving and in service.” (RH 21)
When Jesus sent the Twelve out, it was not for their own sake, but for the sake of the sick and the possessed. He sent them to those who had rejected the God of their fathers to preach repentance. Their being sent was a mission for the salvation of the world, one person at a time.
When he sent them, the Lord said, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there.” (Mk 6:10) Why did he say this? Could the Lord have been instructing them to be present, be in the moment, be with the people, while they were with them? In other words, don’t go into these towns and villages with your own agenda to seek out demons and sick people, or worrying about how you will heal them. Rather, go and be with the people. Listen to them, and then I, the Lord, will work through you and provide them what they need.
Being Present with Others
So much is written about “present moment awareness” or “living in the moment” as a better way to live. I read a lot about it over the years, and I’ve struggled to implement the strategies. In business, we are trained to plan. We are goal setters. Then, we measure our success based on how well we meet or exceed our plans. This is what I did for most of my career when I had a “real” job. I was a planner. But we have to let go of our plans if we want to live in the present. And we need to be present if we are to hear the Lord speaking to us.
I’m not suggesting that you should just float from day to day, minute by minute and do whatever comes to you at the moment. That would not be practical if you ever want to get anything done, let alone have a team get anything done. However, the only place anyone can get anything done is in the present. It resides in between learning from the past and visioning the future. The key is being able to find the balance between pursuing a vision and being completely in the moment every day and everywhere.
Being present doesn’t mean you abandon your vision for the future. It is a good thing to have a plan of action that you develop through prayer and contemplation, that is, with God’s help. Although it is focused on the future, even planning happens in the now and a good plan is based on an accurate assessment of the current situation. You can’t figure out how to get where you want to go without knowing where you are starting from.
But being present has a much more human element because all plans, in one way or another, are by people for people to serve people. When I interviewed Mark Carr, CEO of Christian Brothers Automotive, one of the things he said really stuck with me. Their success model was built on Christ’s principle of loving one another. He said, “I made a list of 20 things people hate about getting their car fixed and I determined how I could solve every one of those problems. We looked at service from the customer’s perspective and treated them the way we would want to be treated.” You can’t understand the customer’s perspective if you aren’t present with the customer.
Being Present in Christ
In Redemptor Hominis, St. John Paul II reminds us that “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” (RH 10) He continues, “The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life. (RH 13)
To live your unique calling, you must find Christ and walk with him and allow him to be present in you, and when you are living this calling, you are helping others to do the same. You don’t have to change careers, just bring Christ to work with you.
Culture of Conformity
Seeking and living our unique calling is a challenge in a culture of conformity. Don’t get me wrong, conformity has a place of service in society. When we think about it in terms of compliance with standards, rules, or laws, it has its benefits. Our morning commute would be a tad bit more complicated if we couldn’t rely on others keeping to the right, stopping at red lights, and yielding to pedestrians, (at least in most parts of the world.) But when conformity to social norms leads to a lack of creativity, a world governed by politically correct phrases or opinions, and degradation of the uniqueness of each human person, it is stifling.
Burgis and Miller write about how our education system funnels students into conformity if they want to come out the other end. Our agricultural system defines how fruits and vegetables must conform to specific standards of acceptable traits. Technology has shaped how people acquire knowledge, shop, and communicate, without much thought on their part. And the conformity of language shapes the way we see the world. Look no further than the redefinition of health care to include the destruction of human life.
This is the culture in which we are immersed, and this is the culture to which we are called to share the Good News. Which one will influence the other?
Shake the Dust Off Your Feet
When Jesus sent the Twelve, he also told them “Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” (Mk 6:11) This instruction seems to be contrary to the mission of seeking the lost. Could Jesus have really wanted them to give up so easily? I don’t think so.
When I imagine the disciples shaking the dust off their feet, I see a person who comes in from working in the yard and in taking a shower, removes all the dirt that covers them before sitting down to a meal with their family. I see a surgeon who scrubs before going into surgery. I see a priest, who prays before Mass. In other words, I see them removing the harmful effects of the environment they have come from so they can safely carry out their mission in the next.
Shaking the dust off our feet is a conscious effort against conforming to a culture that has lost its way and refuses to repent. It is more a process of protecting ourselves than rejecting others.
St. John Paul II offers this advice for determining which force influences our lives. He wrote, “The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly—and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being—he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self…” (RH 10) If we want to assure that we are not sucked into the immediate and superficial standards of our culture, we must enter into Christ instead.
The world is constantly clamoring for our attention. So is Christ. We have to make the choice of which one we will listen to, and which message we will share. We have to make the choice on a daily basis to shake the dust of the culture off our feet and at the same time, to enter into the culture that so desperately needs to know that a man’s worth and dignity is in the Gospel.
It is Our Duty
One final thought… In the book, THE HERO CODE: Lessons Learned from Lives Well Lived, Admiral William McRaven (U.S. Navy Retired) shared an old proverb in his chapter on duty. He wrote:
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the knight was lost. For want of the knight, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. The kingdom was lost for want of a nail.”
For the admiral, the interpretation of this proverb was the importance of doing your duty. If the clerk doesn’t do his paperwork, or the sergeant doesn’t’ deliver the chow, or the nurse, the pilot, or the Marines don’t do their duty, the kingdom is always at risk. He goes on to say,
“The idea of duty is a simple one. We all have a job to do in life. Whether the job is serving customers in a restaurant, taking care of our family, teaching our children, policing our cities, caring for the ill and infirmed, protecting our gate, following the military Code of Conduct, or leading the country, we must do our job to the best of our ability. We must do our job well, not because it serves our interest, but because it serves the interest of others. Duty is a recognition that you have a responsibility to your fellow man and woman. It is an unselfish act, whether great or small, that contributes to the welfare of humanity.”
We all have a job to do in life. We must do our job well, no matter what others are doing. Never let it be said, for want of my duty, the Kingdom was lost.
Let’s ask God to help us.
Father, we know that you have a unique plan for us. Show us your way and then help us to act. Grant us the wisdom and insight, courage and strength to know and follow your holy will, so that in all that we do, we will glorify you by our lives.
May God abundantly bless you this week and may you glorify the Lord by your life.
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