“…whoever
wishes to be great among you will be your servant…”
Today the church celebrates World
Mission Sunday. Every year on this Sunday, I’m reminded of my experience
of missions in Mexico when I was a teenager. I remember specifically the
first day we arrived in our village. We
were going to spend two and a half weeks out there in the mountains of
southern Mexico serving the poor, and when we got there we were assigned chores.
I have never forgotten that when we sat down to divvy up the daily chores,
one of our young college missionaries named Jimmy was the first one to raise
his hand to volunteer to clean the toilets every morning. I was 15 at the time and thought this kid was
crazy. Why would he want to do such a disgusting
chore every single day? Little did I
know at the time that he was teaching me a great gospel message that we hear in
today’s gospel. Greatness lies in total
service to others without thinking of one’s self. Jimmy was hard on me that first of three
summers that we spent together on missions.
I never realized how self-centered I was as a teenager until one night
that Jimmy basically spelled it out for me.
No one except my father had ever been that harsh with me but at the same
time, he did it with great love. Here I
was thinking I was going to Mexico ready to set the world on fire by preaching
God’s word but it was in the little things that God really made himself
present: in taking care of children so
their parents could go to Mass, in doing my own laundry by hand in a bucket, in
drawing water from a deep well for the other missionaries, in walking miles
just to bring the presence of Christ to someone who may have felt forgotten by
their Church. It was in the selfless
examples of my fellow missionaries, it was in the great faith of the poor
people we were called to serve, and in my long and sometimes difficult talks
with Jimmy and seeing his dedication to our mission that this young teenager
slowly started to discover his priestly vocation.
Next summer it will be 20 years since I
went on missions to that place that I once called an “oasis of Christianity”
because you see the gospel come to life in the love and the faith of the poor. They rely solely on God and not on anything
of this world. It is there that I met
some of the poorest people I have ever known, but at the same time some of the
greatest and most powerful. Christ
reminds us that to be the first, to be truly powerful, we have to be the slave
of all. Being able to experience this
first hand at such a young age set the tone for the rest of my life. These people who we were coming to serve
delighted in serving us! They would
constantly be giving us food that more often than not meant that they were
depriving themselves and their families of food so that the missionaries would could
eat from their harvest. The priest that
accompanied us always said that the bread that these poor people gave us was as
sacred as the bread that we broke on the altar.
It was such a joy to be a missionary, and I carry that spirit now as a
priest. World Mission Sunday is supposed
to remind us that not only are we called to remember those who are preaching
the gospel and helping the poor around the world, but also that we don’t
necessarily need to travel to foreign lands to be a missionary: we are called to be missionaries right here
in our homes, our work, and our schools.
We are called to serve and be a slave to all even if it means doing
something as menial as cleaning toilets so that somebody else doesn’t have
to. For it is in the small tasks
preformed with great love that we truly achieve greatness.
