The Solemnity of the Ascension that we
celebrate today is also the day in which we begin the great preparation for the
coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Yet part of that preparation is to use the
gifts that God has equipped us with for the proclamation and spreading of the
Gospel. For
the Lord has commissioned some of us as apostles, others as prophets, others as
evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, all to equip and assist each other
for the work and within the work of ministry.
The
question arises, however: Are we afraid to go out into the world? In some ways,
yes; in other ways, no. There are moments where we will answer with haste the
call to go out to all the world and tell the Good News. And there are moments
where we will be dumbfounded, and continue to stare into the clouds, waiting
for something miraculous to happen in our lives.
Whether
we are afraid or not is not the question. Ultimately, the question becomes: Are
we faithful to the call, to the vocation (in all aspects of the word), that the
Lord has given to us? Remember the adage: God doesn’t call the equipped; He
equips the called. For we have been urged to live in a
manner worthy of the call that we have received; that with all humility and
gentleness, with patience, we are to bear with one another through love, always
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace: one
body and one Spirit, as we have been also called to the one hope of THE call; one
Lord, one faith, one baptism...
Our
Lord ascends today to be seated at the right hand of the Father, raising our
humanity to an unparalleled state. It is our hope and calling to one day join
all the saints and angels around the throne of God. However, for us to be
present in that august body of creatures, we are to be faithful to the mission
and ministry we have been called to. We are to trust that the Lord will equip
us for the mission at hand.
We
are to faithfully enter fully into that vocation to go into the whole world and
proclaim the Gospel to every creature.
1 comment:
Reasons to believe Jesus is alive in a new life with God can be found in quotes from two prominent atheists and a biology textbook. There is nothing wrong with the Sartre quote, and it proves that the Nagel quote is dishonest. The Nagel quote proves that the textbook quote is ignorant, unintelligent, and irrational:
Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, New York: Washington Square Press, p. 784)
Among the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some from of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. (Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, location 69 of 1831)
And certain properties of the human brain distinguish our species from all other animals. The human brain is, after all, the only known collection of matter that tries to understand itself. To most biologists, the brain and the mind are one and the same; understand how the brain is organized and how it works, and we’ll understand such mindful functions as abstract thought and feelings. Some philosophers are less comfortable with this mechanistic view of mind, finding Descartes’ concept of a mind-body duality more attractive. (Neil Campbell, Biology, 4th edition, p. 776 )
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