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Hopefully you heard this announced in your parish, but maybe you didn’t. This is Vocation Awareness Week. Every year the Church celebrates this week as Ordinary Time begins with the Baptism of Jesus.
As Jesus was called at his baptism, so are we called at ours. If we were infants at the time, we surely don’t remember it. Probably there was only ordinary family drama – no preacher clothed in animal skins and no dove hovering overhead. Nonetheless, the Holy Spirit was with us then in fullness – and stays with us now.
Because we recall this call of Jesus at this time of his life, it is appropriate for us to reflect upon our call. Just what is God calling us to?
An author and minister, Frederick Buechner, may have said it best. “Our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world’s deepest hunger meet.”
In today’s Gospel reading (Mark 1:14-20) Jesus started calling his disciples. Jesus appointed twelve ordinary, stumbling, bumbling fellows who ended up following faithfully in spite of their doubts, confusion, lack of understanding, temper tantrums, cowardice, envy, jealousy, and bickering. What’s so ordinary about that? Really, it is most extraordinary.
And you and I? While it may seem that we are really the most ordinary people, we are also called to be something special. We are called to be ecclesia – a Greek word meaning, “the community called out,” or Church. And, like the twelve, we are the community sent out. But what is it that we are called and sent for?
We are called to be good stewards of our earth. We are called to be with God in a relationship union so intimate and fantastic, that we cannot even begin to imagine it. We are called to be of service to our brothers and our sisters. We are called to work for peace and justice. God calls us to see the sacred in the secular, to see the holy in the homely, and to see God in each other. There is no such thing as an ordinary Christian. My baptism calls me, in Christ, to be like God, and to see God in all the ordinary people and events around me.
The writer of Ecclesiastes rightly says, To everything there is a season…” In ordinary time we live out our faith. In ordinary time we do extraordinary things. In ordinary time we experience epiphanies, and continue to find Emmanuel – God WITH us.
When we meet someone today, may we remember, “This is no ordinary person you’re dealing with.” This is the face of God.
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