Evangelical Joy

+JMJ+

“The LORD took me and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’”

It is my absolute honor to be back here at St. Gabriel to be your new parochial vicar. I’m so glad and excited that I’m here to be able to serve you and to love you and to be present to you. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t expect to be here. Back in January/February, my classmates and I started a little wager to see where we’d all be assigned. The loser would pay for the first get-together between our Charlotte seminarians in Cincinnati. Good way to foster fraternity among our younger brothers in seminary while also getting some good, Christian rivalry among my classmates. Anyways, long story short, I totally called getting assigned here.

But here’s the thing you need to know about my vocation story, my spiritual journey: I didn’t have some grand reversion moment. I’m not St. Augustine or St. Paul; I didn’t live some crazy lifestyle in college, only to realize one day through divine revelation that I needed to turn my life around and go back to church. No, I always went to holy Mass; in college, I even made my class schedule around being able to go to weekday Mass at least once a week.

But the thing is that when I was a boy, I wanted to be a dad—a good, Catholic dad. I wanted to marry some Catholic girl I’d go to Mass with, hold her hand during the Our Father. I wanted, like, I don’t know, 4 kids, and I’d teach them how to pray, how to love the Lord, take them to holy Mass with me. I figured my son would be a priest…not me, though. Priesthood is a good, holy vocation….for someone else.

That’s where the Lord found Amos in our first reading today. This was during the time of the Divided Kingdom, where the chosen people of God are split: there’s the 10 tribes that made up the northern Kingdom of Israel, and then there’s the other 2 that made up the southern Kingdom of Judah. And the northern kingdom…they’re not doing so good, morally speaking. They keep building up these altars and temples to false gods, until the God who saved them from Egypt was pushed totally to the background. And in forgetting their identity as a people freed from slavery by God, they have forgotten how to treat the poor and the marginalized the way God treated them.

So, when Amos comes on the scene, they’re not too happy with him telling them what to do, especially because Amos comes from the southern kingdom of Judah. He’s a foreigner telling them what to do. That’s the first line in today’s reading from Amaziah, the priest at Bethel: “Get out of here, you visionary! Go home to Judah! Go prophesy somewhere else!” This priest wants nothing to do with this prophet and what he has to say.

But Amos retorts back at this priest. Amos says, “Look, I’m not a prophet by trade. I don’t belong to some prophets’ guild”—which did exist back then. “No,” Amos continues, “I was a shepherd, just a lowly shepherd, a nobody, when the Lord called me to prophesy to Israel.”

I sympathize with that. Like I said, priesthood was a really cool and holy vocation…for someone else. Not me; who am I to be priest? I’m a nobody from Independence High School, not Charlotte Catholic. I come from St. John Neumann; we’re not a seminarian factory like St. Mark or Sacred Heart. I’m just me.

But I’m here to share, brothers and sisters, that that attitude changes radically when we—slowly, of course—when we come to truly believe in the words from St. Paul in our 2nd reading. Do we really believe that God the Father chose us before the foundation of the world? Can you believe that before God ever said, “Let there be light,” He chose you individually and personally? “In love,” St. Paul says, “in love He destined us for Himself!” And because He loved us, He chose to reveal to us the mystery of His plan.

What is His plan? St. Paul says that the Father’s plan is to “sum up all things in Christ.” What does it mean to be “summed up?” Are we some summer reading project God has to write up? No, the word for “summing up” in Latin and Greek is “recapitulate.” “Recapitulate.” “Caput” meaning “head,” “re” meaning “again.” “Recapitulate,” meaning “to give a new head.” Because for generations, the human race had been a chicken running without a head. Adam was our head, but when he fell, we lost it, and we just ran around like a chicken without a head ever since. But when Jesus Christ died, and blood and water poured from his side, he became our new head. And our whole lives as a human race was given new direction, new meaning, new life.

Brothers and sisters, when we truly believe that we’ve been given new direction, new meaning, and new life in Jesus Christ, we start to think and to act like we’ve just gotten a new head screwed on. Everything changes after that. That’s what Christians are: we are people of Christ. And when we become people of Christ, we become infused with what I call “evangelical joy,” the joy of the Gospel. And people notice that joy.

That’s exactly what happened to me. When I was in high school, I went on a retreat hosted by NET Ministries, which is a group of college-aged missionaries who take a summer or a year from school to go around parishes leading retreats for teens. So, I’m in high school at this retreat, and one of the missionaries, Joe, was applying for seminary that year. He had this twinkle in his eye whenever he talked about seminary that made me think, “I don’t know what it is he has, but whatever it is, I want that.”

Years later, I don’t know if he ever became a priest. But I do know what that twinkle was: it was evangelical joy. No longer was the priesthood something that was cool and holy for someone else; now there was something there for me. Now, God could have just appeared to me personally and told me my vocation. But that’s not how He ordinarily works. Ordinarily, He works in, with, and through someone like Joe to help a knucklehead like me open my heart to whatever it is God was calling me to.

And that’s our Gospel, isn’t it? The Lord Jesus could have chosen to himself appear to people and cure them and preach the Gospel. But instead, the Lord Jesus chose the Twelve to send them out to preach, not with their extravagance of an extra walking stick or an extra tunic. He sent them to preach using their evangelical joy.

So it is with me. I have been sent to you by our Bishop Michael to preach to you using evangelical joy. Why? So that you too can preach to wherever it is you’re going tomorrow, and to preach with evangelical joy. Whether it’s in the office, in that diner you like to go to for lunch, when you pick up flowers for the spouse on your way home, wherever it is: We’re called to preach the Gospel with the joy of being a Christian. Preaching isn’t a job for someone else. We’ve been baptized as priests and as prophets, so we’re all called to preach the Gospel.

But growing in evangelical joy starts with being open to listening to God’s voice like Amos. It starts with asking for the grace of real faith that God does love us, and that He is calling us to be sons and daughters in Christ. And from there, changing our lives bit by bit so that we really do have a new head: Jesus Christ.

If you haven’t been to Confession in a while, this week at some point is a great time to recommit ourselves to having Christ as our head. But for now, let’s make this reception of Holy Communion be a renewed first step towards that new meaning, new direction, new life in Christ Jesus.