Some
Thoughts on the Liturgy
THE
VISION OF SERVICE
+ One of the more famous quotations about sight is from
a woman born blind and also deaf, the famous Helen Keller:
“The most pathetic person in the world”
she said “is someone who has sight, but has no
vision.”
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her story is an interesting one
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it begins not with her, but with another nearly blind
person—that person had lost the majority of her sight at
the age of 5 and by teenage years was practically blind
and homeless
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with the help of some friends, and a couple primitive
operations on her eyes, she regained enough sight to be
able to read for short periods of time
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but she couldn’t get a job due to her poor eyesight
- and was close to despair when she got a job offer to
help Helen Keller
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- as a result, Anne Sullivan, the nearly blind teacher
enabled Helen Keller, the completely blind and totally
deaf person, to become one of the most inspirational
people this country has ever seen
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both Anne and Helen had vision even though their sight was
non-existent
+
That idea of “vision”, I believe, is one of the best
definitions of faith that we have
- a vision is an overall goal that guides everything
one does
-
in the readings today:
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God, tells Habakkuk – write down the vision
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and the vision will direct you
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Paul tells Timothy that the spirit—a paraphrase of the
word “vision”—is no cowardly spirit
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and faith is the topic of Jesus in the Gospel
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if you possess this vision, this faith, you will be able
to do anything
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we Christians call that vision the vision of Jesus Christ
+
The vision of Jesus Christ—faith—has many specific
characteristics
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this Gospel adds one for us to learn from—the person
imbued with the vision of Jesus Christ—another way of
saying “the person who has faith in Jesus”—will act
as a servant
to
others
+
Not only is faith the placing of trust in what Jesus said
and did which we hear throughout the Scriptures
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but faith has a characteristic of service to others as
part of it—we must be servants for God
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the context of the Gospel is that the apostles were
probably a little bit proud of the fact that they were
with Jesus and had the faith that they were supposed to
have
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Jesus reminds them that if they are going to be people of
faith in him, they must understand what it means to be a
servant
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they are not something special—they are servants for
God, period
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he reminds them that they as people of faith must say:
We
are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were
obliged to do.
+
Interestingly enough, the title “Servant of God” is
the first stage for a person who is under consideration
for sainthood in the Roman Catholic tradition
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but it is a title that Jesus says should be the
description of our faith—to be a servant of or for God
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what does it mean?
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obviously, we will serve our God—worshipping God in
here, and worshipping God in prayer in the privacy of our
own lives as well
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but, it will also mean—and this is the difficult
part—that not too many Christian people buy into, I
believe
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it means that we must become servants to others
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at home, as
a servant means
that we will do the things that no one else wants to do,
that we do the things that are necessary for a happy
family
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at work, where we are paid, it means that we decide to
work in an atmosphere in which the ones that we work with
are more important than we are
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we approach life with the attitude that others are more
important than we are, and therefore we will do certain
things on their behalf
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actually it is the attitude of people like Helen Keller
and Anne Sulliva
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When faith is looked at as the vision of Jesus Christ with
the characteristic of being a servant
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faith takes on a whole new dimension
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not only is it a way of life that will guide us for our
salvation
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but it will mean that we will try to help others for their
salvation.
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