Moses looked; there was the bush blazing, but it was not being burnt up…and God called to him..”Here I am” he answered. Exodus 3:1-8
Though formerly diocesan mission officer I struggle daily with the idea of mission. If ever there was an area in the life of the Church full of variety, confusion and oversimplification it is this area.
‘The Church exists by mission as fire by burning’ they say.
Yet is ‘mission’ really the fire that keeps the Church burning with zeal?
‘Mission’ - or ‘Mystery’?
I would say that the Church exists for ‘Mystery’, the worship of Almighty God before it exists for ‘Mission’.
Look at Moses in our first reading this morning. We see his vocation to mission born as he encounters the mystery of God in the burning bush. Awestruck he could not refuse the Lord’s invitation to carry out the greatest mission in the Old Testament – the Exodus.
Look at Isaiah whose vision of God’s holiness is enshrined forever in our Eucharistic prayers. He first heard the angelic hymn we repeat again and again: Holy, holy, holy… the mystery brought him like Moses to ‘take off his shoes’ and fall down before the divine majesty.
Again and again in scripture we see the calling to mission flowing from an encounter with God cloaked in awe and mystery.
Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Gideon, Samuel, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Our Lady, SS. Peter & Paul...all find their vocation in encounters with God that are both personal and mysterious, moving the recipients to worship.
This morning in this eucharistic gathering the Lord Jesus is wonderfully in our midst, the Holy One. How much do we sense that holiness? How much do we sense our own unworthiness to attend this altar?
The fellowship, mission, and service of Christians flows from their encounter with mystery, their sharing, as we are now sharing, in the worship of the Trinity.
In my own humbler faith pilgrimage I can trace the missionary zeal that flows in me to a mysterious challenge at a particular stage in my life.
It was the ‘something about’ a priest that made all the difference. As an Oxford undergraduate I fell under the influence of a man who was charismatic in the old sense. The sense of presence and conviction about Fr. John Hooper so intrigued me it won me to his Oxford tea table and then to his Confessional, bowled over by a sense of the immediacy of God about the man. His was a Church where sermons were long but full of the glorification of God. Little logic in those sermons, looking back, but plenty of presence and conviction in the preacher.
His services were also long. High Mass with ceremonial imbued with a spirit of adoration.
Looking back, ‘evangelisation’ at St. Mary Magdalene’s was one depth sounding across to another, deep chords rung in the heart. There was no newsletter, no home groups, no mission action plan but godliness, awe and wonder.
The burning bush that kindled my vocation was the sure, unselfconscious majesty of Sunday worship in the great tradition of the church, evoking awe before the mystery of God in a way that no self-conscious construct can achieve.
There was force of conviction about the mystery of the Faith and this bowled me over.
‘Mission’ in my case is about ‘Mystery’. I yearn to see the church rid of so much anaemic, diluted Christianity.
It was the mystery of divine revelation that kindled the missionary call of Moses and God has not changed.
Encountering the mystery of Christ is at the heart of what the church is all about or it is about nothing at all!
Whether we are ‘high church’ or ‘low church’ or ‘broad church’ we need to be deep church if people are to be reached by the Lord through us.
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