FOCUS SLS18 Inspire & Equip
January 3, 2018
Bishop James Conley
The story of my parents’ conversion (podcast of the story here) was an incredible grace in my life. It’s an extraordinary thing to share the communion of Christ—the fullness of the faith—with those whom we love the most, our families. But evangelizing your family isn’t easy.
Remember how much difficulty Jesus had even in his own hometown. St. Luke tells the story of Jesus proclaiming the Kingdom in Nazareth. He’d already begun to proclaim the Kingdom he had come to usher in, and crowds had followed him, repenting, and seeking to do his will. He’d been baptized by John, and the Holy Spirit had proclaimed that he was the Lord’s son. He’d begun the work for which he had become incarnate. He’d faced temptation in the desert, and rebuked Satan. Jesus had begun the “spiritual multiplication” in which we continue to participate today.
But when he went to Nazareth, and taught in the synagogue, no one took him seriously. Nazareth was the town where he’d grown up. It was a small town, and everyone knew each other. The people in the synagogue knew his parents. They knew his cousins. They thought they already knew who he was. And then he stood up in the synagogue and told them he was the Messiah.
St. Luke says they were “filled with fury.” They became a mob. They “drove him out of town,” and took him to a cliff. They were going to kill him. They couldn’t believe that Jesus, who they knew, who they’d grown up with, would dare to tell them that he was the Messiah—to rebuke them, and tell them to change their ways. They couldn’t believe that he would dare.
So they tried to throw him off a cliff. Jesus “passed through the midst of them, and went away.”
He moved on to another place.
Here’s the point: if it wasn’t easy for Jesus to proclaim the Gospel—the Gospel of his own incarnation—among people who knew him well, it will not be easy for any of us. But all of us want to share the Gospel with our parents and our siblings, and our hometown friends—with the people we know the best, and the people we’ve loved the longest.
I’d like to offer three points to consider in the call to evangelize your own families.
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis says that “the family is experiencing a profound cultural crisis, as are all communities and social bonds. In the case of the family, the weakening of these bonds is particularly serious because the family is the fundamental cell of society, where we learn to live with others despite our differences and to belong to one another; it is also the place where parents pass on the faith to their children.”
Many of you know that the family is experiencing a profound cultural crisis because you have experienced this crisis in your own families. You have experienced the crisis of divorce, or division, of families split apart. Or you have experienced the crisis of loneliness—caused by the ubiquity of individualizing technology, by the tendency of our culture to segregate the family, to divide by a frenzy of activity and the consumption of media.
The first step to overcoming that crisis is friendship. Evangelization in any context depends on the credibility of our witness. And this is especially important for the evangelization of our families.
In the face of a crisis for families, the power and witness of friendship cannot be underestimated, especially in your families. Knowing another person—loving them as they are, investing in them, caring for them—is a deeply countercultural witness in our time. Friendship is so rare that it is a witness to the power of Jesus Christ.
The basis for the evangelization of your families should be cultivating deeper relationships with your parents and siblings. Those relationships will result in the witness of your faith, in the day-to-day dynamics of your family. The Lord is calling you to give witness to your family to the faith, hope, and charity of Christian discipleship, in the witness of your love, your charity, and your friendship.
Loving your families in friendship is a step in the path of evangelization, but it is also important because loving our families in the way the Lord calls us to forms us to become saints.
My spiritual mentor and patron, Blessed John Henry Newman, taught that “the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us.”
In your families, this begins with the Lord’s command to honor your parents, and to love your own siblings as you love yourselves. Newman put it this way: “To honour our parents is the first step towards honouring God; to love our brethren according to the flesh, the first step towards considering all men our brethren.”
Loving our families is very difficult. It often seems far more difficult than loving strangers, or college students, or those in our bible studies. But loving our families prepares us to love the world. Loving our families can be the foundation of virtue—of the love for the world to which the Lord calls us. And, loving your families as the Lord calls you is the best way to witness the truth of the Lord’s mercy to them.
Your family knows you well enough to know that you are a sinner. And because of that, there is probably no more powerful witness to see the ways in which the Lord is transforming you in holiness. Not inauthentically, not falsely, but to see you truly struggle against sin, and entrust to the Lord, and grow in virtue. To see you choose to honor your parents when it’s difficult, or choose to love your siblings generously, conveys the power of the Lord’s mercy, and the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Friendship is love, properly expressed. Love expressed for your parents by honoring and respecting them. Love for your siblings by giving yourself generously to them. Love for every family member by developing the human bonds of connection that are a reminder of the bonds of the Lord’s love for us, and the love of the Trinity. If you want to witness to the Gospel in your family, the first step is taking the step of love.
--
My second point is the importance of trust in the Lord’s Providence. Pope St. John Paul II called Providence “the divine logic of the Lord.” Providence is the way in which the Holy Spirit acts, often in surprising and confounding ways, to build on our efforts, to multiply them, to coordinate them, so that, in the Lord’s time, his holy will is manifested.
Providence is sometimes maddening, because we do not know in advance how the Lord will use our efforts for his glory. This is especially true in the work of evangelization. We rarely know how God is using us, even when our efforts seem fruitless, to sow seeds or bear fruit.
A prayer often attributed to Blessed Oscar Romero says that “we are a prophets of a future not our own.” We work faithfully, but we don’t know how the Lord will use our work. We don’t know what seeds we’re sowing. And we don’t know how our faithfulness, our charity, and our witness will bear fruit in the work of evangelization.
But it helps us to place our trust in God’s Providence. To work faithfully, and trust that the Lord is at work, even when we do not see the results. Trusting the Lord’s Providence helps us not to force his will to be accomplished—not to sow division or distrust by pushing, or insisting, or getting discouraged, when we do not yet see how the Lord is working.
Providence often surprises us. Because only in hindsight can we see that something we thought was small or insignificant began an interior process of conversion for a person in our life. Trusting in the Lord’s Providence is trusting that, in this life or the next, he will surprise us with the beauty and goodness of his plan.
Newman says that even when he could not see the fruit of his efforts, the Lord “knows what He is about. Therefore I will trust Him.”
As we work to witness to our families, the Lord calls us to trust him, and trust his timing, and his will. The Lord wants your family members to become saints. He wants to know them eternally. Our task is to be faithful and charitable witnesses, and trust that he is using our witness for their holiness, and for his glory.
--
My third point is the importance of prayer. Prayer is the foundation for any work of evangelization. Especially prayer in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and prayer in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote that the Church’s great saints “constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbor from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord.” This must become true for each one of you.
The Eucharist, which is the “source and summit” of our faith, has the power to transform us—to deepen our intimate friendship with Jesus Christ, to remake our hearts like his, and to fill us with the power of his love. And today, because God is calling us to renew our commitment to become missionaries of the Gospel, he is calling us to deepen our devotion to the Eucharist, and to be transformed by the power of Christ’s Eucharistic presence.
“The Eucharist not only gathers the Church,” wrote Bishop Dominque Rey, “but sends us out, renewed, to gather the whole world.”
To be missionaries of the Gospel, we must be holy. And at the heart of holiness is the Eucharist.
The truth is that evangelizing your family is principally the work of loving them in the name of Jesus. And you cannot love without being loved by the Lord. You cannot love, as a Christian witness is called to, without being nourished and strengthened by Jesus Christ.
Pope St. John Paul II wrote that through adoration of the Eucharist, “we can say not only that each of us receives Christ, but also that Christ receives each of us. He enters into friendship with us: ‘You are my friends.’”
In friendship, in the dialogue of Eucharistic adoration, God transforms us, so that, in love, we can make gifts of our ourselves to the world, just as Christ has made a gift of himself in the Eucharist.
Pope Benedict XVI said that adoration of the Blessed Sacrament should always prepare us to love as the Lord loves us.
In adoration of the Eucharist, he taught, “we ourselves will be transformed… His dynamic enters into us and then seeks to spread outwards to others until it fills the world, so that his love can truly become the dominant measure of the world.”
Evangelizing your families means making love their dominant measure. And so, dear brothers and sisters, there is nothing more important you can do to evangelize your families, or to evangelize the world, than to pray, in the presence of the Eucharist.
In fact, that is my charge to each one of you. If you want to evangelize your families, begin with daily prayer for them, in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Pray, love in the generosity of friendship, and trust in the Providence of God. The Lord is calling your families to become saints. Through your witness, your prayer, and the Providence of God, may all of our families be transformed in the mercy and love of Jesus Christ.
+++
