Useful Service
St. Josephine Bakhita was born in Sudan and, as a young girl, was kidnapped by Arab traders and sold into slavery. She would spend the next 12 years of her life as a slave, often treated cruelly and harshly, until she was able to find freedom in a convent, where she was baptized and made her profession of faith as a Canossian Sister.
St. Josephine wrote no great theological treatises. She has few, if any, inspirational quotes attributed to her. She founded no great religious orders, nor was she known for any awe-inspiring miracles during her lifetime. During her time with the Canossian sisters, she cooked, did housekeeping and had one specific role, as doorkeeper. In that role, she greeted all who entered the convent, especially the young children who received an education there.
And all who entered the doors of the convent would be met by Mother Josephine with a great, big smile, a joyous greeting and a warm hug. She was the welcoming face of Christ to all.
Today’s second reading relates the story of another slave – Onesimus, who escaped from his master, Philemon, and became like a son to St. Paul, comforting him in his old age while he was imprisoned.
In his letter, Paul gently begs and cajoles Philemon to treat Onesimus as a brother and an equal. In other words, to set him free. Paul doesn’t make some larger political statement about the evils of slavery. He merely suggests to Philemon that if we are all members of the same body in Christ, we are no longer slave or free. Rather, we are all one in the Lord.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel may seem harsh, calling on us to hate mother, father, brother, and sister, but Jesus is using exaggerated terms to, like Paul, call us to a radical new way of relationship; a way of loving that goes beyond simply caring about those closest to us. Calling us, to expand our hearts, make them large enough to encompass the entire world and, like St. Josephine, to be a voice of welcome to the stranger among us, to offer the embrace of Christ’s love to all who enter the doors of our church.
Christ and Paul call us to a higher love. A love that goes beyond boundaries of class, or a particular neighborhood, education level, or nationality. Allegiance to a flag or a political party no longer takes precedence over our need to be people of compassion. Our vision must go beyond just those who love us back and extend to even those whose names we might never know.
It is a love that doesn’t lead us further away from those we care about, but instead circles around to draw us ever closer to each person we encounter. Not so that we love those closest to us less, but instead that we love those we might not care to know more.
The fact is that real, human bondage still exists in this world in the 21st century. There are 27 million victims of human trafficking in the world today – woman and girls, men and boys subject to forced prostitution and forced, unpaid labor. Many of them are undocumented aliens living in our country. Despite the 13th Amendment, slavery hasn’t disappeared, it’s just gone underground.
And there are other forms of quasi-slavery: 46 million Americans live below the poverty line and are slaves to their impoverished circumstances. 870 million people worldwide go hungry any given day and are slaves to their desperate search for food or clean water.
150 years ago, this country fought a Civil War in an effort to set free our black brothers and sisters.
In this century, we fight a new battle: against the bondage of poverty, the heavy chains of discrimination, against the cruel tyrants of bigotry, bullying and indifference. We are called to free those made captive by the violence that permeates our neighborhoods, cities, even entire countries. It is a call that extends even to our very planet, as Pope Francis reminds us in his encyclical on the environment, encouraging us to work together to release a world suffering under the oppressive hand of pollution, waste, and a throw away culture of consumerism.
In the end though, despite all the harrowing, sobering statistics, the number that matters most is the number “one.” Because just like Paul focuses on one slave, Onesimus, rather than on the entire problem of slavery in the ancient world, you and I in our daily journey of carrying our cross need to focus on the fact that people are more than a number, a statistic. That each one is a child of God, a face to look upon and love and hold.
You know, the name Onesimus means “useful” – a strange name for a person, but an appropriate one for a piece of property, which is what a slave was: either useful and to be retained, or useless and to be discarded.
And unfortunately, in our society we too often divide people up into categories of useful or useless, those who have value and those who can be discarded, based on whether they are a “viable” fetus or “terminally-ill” patient; whether they have a job or a college degree or meet some other arbitrary criteria that denotes value to the greater society.
The Jesuit priest, Fr. Greg Boyle, who works to get kids out of gangs in Los Angeles, writes in his book Tattoos on the Heart, that we must envision a world encompassed by a “circle of compassion. Then we can [begin to] imagine no one standing outside that circle, [instead] moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless…. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
Discipleship is about ever expanding that circle of compassion and love, until no one is left outside of it. Each of us is called to find a way that we can be useful servants of Christ. So that we, like St. Josephine, can open wide the doors of faith and welcome the lost, the broken, the hurting and the lonely into the Body of Christ.
That is our calling. That is our cross to carry for Christ. To be the love of God that will truly set all people free.
Wisdom 9:13-18b; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33
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