January 23, 2022

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle C

Nehemiah 8:2-4, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-30; Luke 1:1-4, 4:14-21

As many of you know, I was in the United States Navy. I was fortunate enough to get an ROTC scholarship, and as part of the scholarship requirements I attended a four to five week orientation every summer as I attended college. During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, we spent a week with each of the major services within the Navy Department, that is to say the surface navy, the submarine service, the aviation wing, and finally a week at Camp Pendleton with the US Marine Corps. This was to decide which of these areas I would enter once I graduated and paid back my scholarship with five years of active duty service. I chose the submarine service. As an engineer, I was attracted to the confluence of technologies required to make a warship that could go underwater for week and even several months at a time without surfacing. These were the days when Tom Clancy's book The Hunt For Red October has just come out, making this also sound like an exciting branch that had real value to our country to protect and defend it – in other words, a vital mission.

However, a major crisis happened when I was in the Navy from 1987 to 1992. The mission of the submarine force disappeared overnight. Poof. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved into the states now existing, of which of course Russia is the biggest and still the strongest. But due to their economic woes, almost all of their navies and especially their submarines were now too expensive to operate and were parked in ports, and only a few ever came out, and then infrequently. Now some of the US allies have submarines, mostly the English, French, and Germans, but few others have them, and therefore I was serving in an arm of the Navy that had lost almost all of its reason for being. And after that time the major issue that has faced our country has been the War on Terror, to which the submarine force has little use. Since this time, therefore, the submarines service has looked for a role which will make it vital again. The sub service lost its mission, and has been trying to regain it.

Now this is a long wind-up to bring out this point: today, we hear Jesus' mission statement. We have the first public appearance of Jesus as an adult other than his baptism. And he tells the people in the synagogue why he came to earth and what he wants to do. He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” [Luke 4:18-19 NAB] In other words, he came to bring spiritual and physical salvation of the world. He quoted Isaiah, who declared that God willed it so, and Christ tells us that he is the fulfillment of that promise.

And unlike the mission of my submarine force, or the mission of various companies or groups that have existed throughout the history of the world, this mission has always stayed relevant and important in all ages. The Gospel today ends at verse 21. In its very next passage, Jesus is rejected by the people of Nazareth, who almost throw him off a cliff. This is not because they do not understand the need for this mission, but because they doubted his ability to fulfill it. Sure, the poor have a wretched lot, and all of us toil in a world that seems to cause pain and turmoil at every turn, but what is this carpenter's son going to do about it? We here today know how it will turn out, with the Resurrection and therefore the promise of salvation, and the Nazarene people didn't know this yet. But even then, we have people today who have attended Christian churches and should know how it turns out, and yet they still don't believe in Christ's ability to fulfill his mission, that there is joy to be had in this life if one follows the teaching of that carpenter's son. They continue to toil away in a dead-end rat race to get the most stuff before one dies, the mission statement for all unhappy people. This becomes even clearer when you read the passage in Luke's Gospel immediately before the one we just read: it is the temptation in the desert. Christ is offered that same dead-end deal: the devil promises him power and glory, and all the world, if he will just make the same mistake that Adam did in the garden – forsake God. But he doesn't fall for the trap, and neither should we.

This week we will celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. Paul started life not understanding the mission of Christ, and fighting against it. He found true joy when he was converted on the way to Damascus, and spends the rest of his life spreading the mission of Christ, the Good News. To this end, he adopted the mission statement that we have here at Saint James, the mission given to all of us at the end of Christ's earthly ministry: go and make disciples. In his letter we read today to the Corinthians, he talks about all of us coming together to fulfill the mission of Christ, each playing a different part which come together to form the whole. And that is the answer to achieving true joy in life: for it is through bringing joy to other people that we in the end truly achieve joy ourselves.

As we continue with our service, we will receive our Lord and Savior. Let us ask him for the strength to carry out our part in the mission that he gave us. Let us use our abilities, whatever they are, to bring the Good News to others, and in that way bring it to ourselves. Let us adopt a life mission that will last and won't be gone tomorrow when the winds of fortune blow another way.