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Feast of Pentecost, Cycle B
May 24, 2015
Saint Francis de Sales, Abingdon
The New Evangelization
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato
Evangelization
When I
was a child, I remember seeing preachers on street corners in New York City
when my mother would take us into the city to shop.
These
preachers were trying to convert people to Jesus and be saved. They would shout and threaten damnation if
people didn’t convert.
That is
my earliest recollection of what is called evangelization. This word – evangelization – is used in our
Catholic Church a lot today.
My
guess is that many of you have heard it.
Pope Francis is calling us to evangelize.
The
word – evangelization – comes directly from the Latin word that means Gospel or
good news. So evangelization means that
we bring the Gospel or good news to the world around us.
Understanding This
Recently
I came across what I think is an insightful way to understand evangelization
here in the twenty-first century.
One of
our Catholic theologians says that evangelization is about naming grace –
naming grace. It is not really about
bringing God to people, as though God were not already there.
Evangelizers
do not so much make God present, but rather they name or identify or point out
how God is already present. Thus, our
human experiences, if given a chance, can speak to us of God.
The
calling to evangelize requires us to be poets or interpreters of everyday human
experience. We are to help others to see
their life as touched by God.
We do
this by looking at life in the light of faith.
Evangelization involves looking more deeply into the ordinary to see the
Extraordinary—spelled with a capital E.
It is
looking deeply at the human and everyday and seeing the divine right
there. I think this insight is excellent
and is at least the first step of fruitful evangelization for our time, in our
country and its culture.
Evangelization: Naming Grace
So, for
example, a child is born.
And we
stand in awe of this new life from God.
We
forgive someone, even though we feel that we ourselves gain nothing from this. And we know that this power has to come from
God.
We
sacrifice for another, for a daughter to go off to college in September or for
a person in need whom we never even meet.
And we are aware of a spirit within us that moves us to do this.
We are
enraptured by the magnificence of a sunset.
And we wonder about the something, or Someone – spelled with a capital S
– in whose life we are basking.
We find
ourselves deeply loving someone. And we
sense that there is mystery to this that just transcends human senses or an
explanation.
Evangelization: The Way of Jesus
So, we
need to name the grace of God in ways like this.
That
must be the beginning of evangelization, I believe, in this new century and in
our culture. We need to name the
Extraordinary in the ordinary and therefore find the “good news” in the human.
We
point out and identify God’s presence, already present and in our
midst. And that, my friends, is the Holy
Spirit, who the Holy Spirit is, and what the Holy Spirit is brings about.
And
then, with this naming done, we can proceed – again positively – to the next
step. We can proceed to lifting up the
wonderful way of life that is Jesus and inviting others to that.
So we
name grace and make that a conscious experience. And then we name Jesus and make his way a
conscious invitation.
And, in
both steps, we are positive. We are not
like the street preachers I remember as a child, as sincere and good persons as
they were.
We are
not negatively condemning or labeling someone as in mortal sin. We are not threatening with damnation and
manipulating with fear.
We are
naming grace and naming the way of Jesus.
And in doing this, we are living his way of love and respect for others
no matter who they are or what they do.
Conclusion
This, I believe, is the way to celebrate and
grow the presence of the Holy Spirit.
This is what Pentecost is about for our
culture and century. This is how to
evangelize today.
