Be the Messanger

October 15, 2023 Gospel Reflection

So I was reading through some statistics this week that really just shocked me: So Catholicism is the largest single denomination of any religion in the United States. So in essence, yes the majority of Christians in the U.S. are protestant, because there are so many branches of protestantism, not one of them has the same number of members as Catholicism. So don’t let people tell you that Protestantism has more members, since there isn’t just one “Protestantism,” there are thousands. If you look below at the chart, you will see that every branch of Christianity has many, many subdivisions, so even though evangelical protestantism has 25.4% of Christians, that is then broken down into hundreds of followers, and the same goes for all of the different protestant religions. Hence why Catholicism is considered the largest single religion. As pew research puts it, “The Catholic Church is larger than any other single religious institution in the U.S.''

Taken from Pew Research. You can see that Catholicism is the largest of any single denomination/religion.

Although the number of Catholics is encouraging, the statistics that come from that aren’t all that good. There are 61.9 million Catholics in the United States, but of those 61.9 million, only 17% of them go to mass weekly or more, according to the Catholic News Agency. Despite that staggeringly low statistic, also according to the Catholic News Agency, more than three-quarters of U.S. Catholics consider themselves to be a “religious person.” So in essence, despite the low number of people going to mass, many people consider themselves to be a religious person. So what does it mean to be a religious person? Well, let's think about the current society we live in. Drugs, drinking, sex, and promiscuity run rampant. Lies are spread around the world about faith, Christ, and sin. Sin is almost encouraged, right? Just take a trip on any social media site and you will see plenty of posts about the things I just mentioned – just people living for the wrong stuff: drinking until they can’t breathe, getting high every Friday night, making sure to score the most girls or guys. So it makes since, to me at least, that people would consider themselves religious, that people who don’t prioritize Christ, who don’t prioritize the mass, would consider themselves inline with the teachings of the Church and Christ. It makes sense because the world we live in is completely backwards. Nothing makes sense.

Isn’t that kind of what Jesus is talking about in the gospel today? He gives us this parable and this king sends out his servants to invite the guests. But they didn’t come. They flat out refused. They denied a very generous offer. I mean if I was invited to a banquet, I would probably go. But they didn’t. So the king sends them again and once again the people deny, but this time turn to violence, similar to last week's parable. They killed the messengers, the servants of the king. So the King disinvited those guys and killed them. Then he invited everyone. He invited everyone, but evidently not everyone was ready and that is when Jesus hits us with this quote: Many are invited, but few are chosen. And that is really at the core of these statistics. The Church is open to everyone and it is great that so many consider themselves Catholic. But if you aren’t doing the most important thing Christ gave us, the best way to know Christ, that is the mass, then are you really Catholic? Are you really on the path of being chosen? Because guess what. It isn’t easy to be chosen, and denying the invitation to the mass is just like showing up to the wedding without the right garment – you aren’t prepared, you really aren’t ready for God.

There is a famous allegory from Plato that I am sure many of you are familiar with called the Allegory of the Cave. It is probably his most well known dialogue because it introduces something called his Theory of Forms. Without getting into the deep philosophical inclusions, basically there are these people chained in a cave and that look at this wall all day. There is a fire behind them and people walk behind them with cutouts of shapes. So these people only see shadows (up against the wall) and they think the “real things” are the shadows. So people would walk behind them with a cutout of a bird and they would think that the shadow is the real thing, rather than the actual bird. Then one day one person escapes and after adjusting his eyes realizes that everything they had seen was mere shadows and not the real things. So he goes back down to the cave to tell people that they had been wrong. And they reacted just like people always have. They said he was wrong, they denied him, and then Plato infers that they would kill him. So essentially, they rejected and killed this escape man because he said something no one else was saying. He proposed a different view point. Is that not what happened to Jesus Christ and is that not what is happening today. Jesus Christ was killed for speaking the truth, a trust that changed the way people thought and affected people’s power. And the same struggle is going on today with the Church and the people who live for this world.

The Church teaches that living for drugs and alcohol leads to a meaningless existence, but the world encourages it. The Church teaches that sex is for marriage and the world says that it should occur whenever people want to. And the Church is painted as an ancient and evil organization. God is mocked. Christ is mocked. The same thing Plato was talking about thousands of years ago, the same thing that Christ died for, is happening now. And it makes sense why people stray away from the Church. They get scared. The world’s threats are real and people just say “why don’t I just shut up,” “let me just keep my faith to myself and limit it as much as I can.” And maybe sometimes we all wish it was that easy to keep our faith in Jesus. But as we heard today and as we hear often, faith in Christ isn’t easy. It is hard. Heaven isn’t something we have earned, something that we have a right to. It is a gift, and it is hard to get gifts sometimes. God wants us to spend eternity with him. He desires that so much. But when we live in such an awful way, we have made the choice for ourselves.

To be a practicing catholic you must fulfill these things:

1. Observe the Ten Commandments

2. Assent to the Teachings of the Church

3. Follow the Five Precepts of the Church (Mass on Sundays & Holy Days, Confession once a year, Receive Holy Communion at least once a year, Observe fasting & abstinence, Provide for Material Needs of the Church).

It isn’t easy to be a practicing Catholic, but isn’t meant to be easy. Why? Because the point of the Church is to bring people closer to the almighty Father, and doing that isn’t easy. It isn’t easy because if it was, everyone would do it. And everyone that was invited would be chosen. But we know that isn’t true. We know that many aren’t chosen. That many choose against eternity with the father.

We live in a world where Catholics and non-Catholics participate in ignoring and killing the messengers, the servants. No matter what you call yourself, if you don’t go to mass on Sunday and follow its teachings, you aren’t really a practicing Catholic. Now that doesn’t mean if you miss mass once you aren’t a practicing Catholic, but if your life doesn’t include making an effort, then you aren’t one. By not going to mass and participating in the sacraments that Christ gave us, we ignore. We ignore the Church. We ignore the King’s messengers. We out-right deny that invitation to the heavenly banquet. Even if we think we are Catholic but don’t participate in the Church, we aren’t prepared, we aren’t wearing the right garments for the heavenly banquet we are invited to. And the society we live in is the worst of all. They kill the messengers. They defile Christ and his message for us. By living for sex, money, drugs, alcohol, and more, society is trying to kill Jesus, trying to kill the messenger, the Church. By participating and encouraging it we definitely participate in killing the Church, but by not doing anything about it, by staying silent, we also participate in it. The sin of omission can be the worst.

So it now comes the time to decipher who we are as people, each one of us. Are we those that think we are religious, but don’t really care, and ignore the messengers sent to us? Are we those that encourage the awfulness of society? Are we those that do nothing about the disgust occuring in society? Are we those that ignore and kill the messengers, that is the message of Jesus? Or are we something else? Are we the people that fight for change, that fight to end what is going on in our society? Are we the messengers that know the risk of our message but still proclaim it because we know it's true?

Because if we aren’t the messengers ourselves, we aren’t really ready for the Father. We may think we have accepted the invite, but if we haven’t come prepared, then our fake “yes” to the invitation should have just been a “no.”

So how do we make sure we have the right garments, that we are prepared. It's not that hard to figure out. It is as simple as saying NO to society. It is as simple as this: Be the Messenger.