Baptismam Nostram Vivamus

Amici, Americani, Compatriotae,

Because I had to work from home today in order to continue to care for my wife's niece who has third degree burns on her thighs due to a hot water accident a week ago last Saturday, I got the opportunity to attend daily Mass at lunchtime at Our Lady of Grace. Today's Scripture readings include:

• Jesus the Great High Priest in Hebrews 5:1-10
• Assurance of Victory for God's Priest King in Psalm 110:1-4
• The Question about Fasting in Mark 2:18-22

Father Kirby as usual gave an excellent homily. He spoke mainly from the first reading in Hebrews, explaining that we who are in the laity are called to be in a sense priest, prophet and king. Now 1st Peter 2:9 does state:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

So I understood the concept of the priesthood of believers on the part of the laity versus the priesthood in Holy Orders on the part of ordained πρεσβύτερος in Greek or Sacerdos in Latin. But I had not heard of these roles (i.e., priest, prophet and king) being ascribed to the laity in this fashion. So I did some research and discovered that tt the Our Catholic Faith web site there is an excellent explanation of this entitled, Mission Of The Catholic Laity: Priest, Prophet, And King. I encourage the reader to review this short essay.

Then in his homily Father Kirby focused mainly on the ending verses in today's epistle reading, continuing with his Sunday Mass theme of living out our Baptism in our daily lives:

In the days when he was in the Flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

As part of the priesthood of believers, we in the laity have an obligation to imitate Christ before the world. We must pray without ceasing, and persevere even in suffering, living out our Baptism as an example before the world of what Christ did for us. We must offer up to God what happens to us as a thanksgiving of praise to Him and service to our neighbor, hence the old nuns' phrase, "Offer it up!"

But beyond this there is a seriousness with which Catholics - lay person, religious and clerical - engaged in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Now as the reader may already know, I am a believer in Human Rights bestowed by God, not Civil Rights bestowed by Caesar. But that distinction is not the point here. What is the point is this. In the depths of racial strife during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, Catholics joined with their Protestant brethren in marching for racial equality across the land. Father Kirby explained that along with black marchers, Catholic priests, nuns and lay persons would be subjected to tear gas and water hoses and all manner of maltreatment. But they marched onward regardless of the consequences that Caesar could bring to bear because that is what our Baptism requires: defending the defenseless, giving voice to the voiceless and advocating for those without an advocate (e.g., the unborn, the elderly, the terminally ill, those on death row, etc.)

There is one other noteworthy thing of which Father Kirby made mention, and which I discussed in a previous post. The term Reverend prefaced the title and name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is more properly called:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This man was a Christian minister. Society today tries to secularize and "de-Christianitize" him to fit an atheist, humanist agenda. But it is Christianity alone which first recognized (in the face of Rome's libertine paganism and Athens' secularist philosophy) universal human equality in dignity some 2000 years ago when St. Paul wrote in Colossians 3:11:

Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scyth′ian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.

To be Christian is to be like Christ who is God's only begotten Son. He is the very God in whose image and likeness we all - black, white, red, yellow, and brown - are created. Without God having created us as Genesis 1 and 2 describe, without Christianity - perhaps even without us living out our Baptism - there is no equality in dignity, no human rights.