We watch many of our Church organizations and initiatives decline. I believe that one reason this is true is that groups have a natural tendency to turn in on themselves. When this happens we lose our sense of mission. Our gatherings become “feel good” events in which we see people we know and talk about our same petty agenda week after week. When something quits growing, it begins to die.
God did not send his Son to die for us and gift us with the Holy Spirit so we can have “feel good” gatherings. We could have figured out how to do this all by ourselves. Pope Francis has led the charge in challenging all Christians to keep “reaching out”—to realize that each of us is called to evangelize.
Today we listen to the prophet Isaiah talk about his call and his mission (Isaiah 49:1-6).
“Hear me, O islands, listen O distant peoples. The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb he gave me my name. He made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm…”
Notice the tone of outreach in Isaiah’s voice. He was shouting out, not just to his little community of friends, but to people of distant islands—those who lived apart from society’s mainstream. He saw himself not as an “apple” of God’s eye or a beautiful “rose” in God’s garden. Rather, he was God’s sword. A sword is a weapon that penetrates and destroys. It is not something that just hangs on one’s hip as a decoration. God’s sword pierces the walls put up by the enemy.
“Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the Lord…”
Isaiah was not always on a spiritual “high.” There were times when he felt he had wasted his efforts. Maybe he saw little fruit from his work or doubted that his word had the power to make a difference in distant islands. Undergirding any feelings of doubt, however, was his relationship with the Lord. It was God’s work he was doing and God would see that his word reached those for whom it was intended.
He was to be a sword that would penetrate Israel’s darkness and stir them to repentance and renewal. Beyond this, however, Isaiah’s reach was to extend far beyond the confines of his own people.
“It is too little…for you to raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel; I make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
It was a glorious mission to bring Israel back to life and restore them as a people. That would have been enough for any prophet. God, however, is much more ambitious. He would make Isaiah a light to nations because he wanted to extend his saving love beyond Israel to the “ends of the earth.”
The words of Isaiah convict us. Our thinking is so narrow. Maybe we’ve lost our sense of mission and think just in terms of ourselves. Maybe we’ve given up trying to spur our Church groups to reach out to others—even to the ends of the earth. Today we ask the Holy Spirit to expand our vision and kindle in us the fire of mission so we can be the outreached hand of God in ways we have never dreamed of.
“On you I depend from birth; from my mother’s womb you are my strength” (Ps 71:6).
