MANY ARE CALLED BUT FEW ARE CHOSEN

 A SERMON FOR MISSION SUNDAY

There’s a saying used by our Lord that I’m sure you’re all familiar with.  It popped up again last Sunday in the proper Last Gospel: “Many are called but few are chosen.”  It’s a nice turn of phrase, but have you ever wondered what it actually means?  What does it mean to be “called”?  And what’s the difference between being “called” and being “chosen”?  Then of course there’s the ultimate questions of all, namely “Am I called?”  “Am I chosen?”

“Many are called, but few are chosen.”  A short phrase, but one packed with unanswered questions.  So let’s take a brief look at what our Lord means by this mysterious pronouncement.  The current population of the world is about 7.8 billion.  In other words 7,800 million.  If you filled up the stadium of the Cincinnati Bengals to capacity, you’d still need another 120,000 stadiums the same size to fit in all the people of the world.  How many of those people have been “called”, how many “chosen”?

The first question is, of course, called to what?  To salvation?  All men are called to this.  All men.  The problem has always been getting them to know this good news, the good news of the Gospel.  Like the Gospel of today’s saint, St. Luke, for example.  So many for so long have had little or no idea about creation, the fall of man, the need for redemption, and that the Son of God actually dwelt with the children of men and took away the sins of the world through his Passion and Cross.  Our Lord ordered his apostles to go and teach this good news to all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Ever since, it has been the mission of the Church to do exactly that, and for this reason we have never ceased the constant expansion of the faith through the missions.  Dozens of missionary orders were created over the years, and they brought the faith wherever they went.  One of the first things Christopher Columbus did after he discovered the New World was to introduce missionaries into that world to teach and baptize the locals.  For this, he is now universally despised by the enemies of God, which alone should make us want to celebrate his holiday even more.

The point is, God wants everyone to know the faith.  He calls everyone to it.  Many are called.  With the advances in world exploration, modern technology and digital communications, more and more are called every day.  But alas, few are chosen.

How many of those nations which were brought to know, love and serve God continue to do so today?  So many of them have been disloyal to the Church which is the only path to salvation, outside which there is no salvation.  Schism tore some of them away to form new autonomous churches, so-called “orthodox” churches, whose doctrines are sometimes anything but orthodox.  Others split from the Church through heresy, from the early days of Arianism to the Protestant rebellion, and now to the modernist infiltration of the Church herself.  Today, the institutional “Catholic Church” has nothing to offer that other Protestant sects don’t have, and so people fall away from the Church in droves to join in the apostasy of their non-Catholic neighbors.  So many nations lost to the faith.  So many souls.  Lost.  Lost in a world that offers them no real knowledge of the true God, no love for God’s laws, nothing, in fact, but an empty God-free life of doing nothing but pleasing their own selves.

They were called, but alas it seems that they are not chosen.  The chosen ones, the “elect”, are those who have remained loyal to their calling.  You and I, presumably, are chosen.  But are we?  To be honest, we won’t know the answer to that question until we die, either in the state of grace, or out of it.  The hour of our death is the moment when the answer will be given to us.  We will know then for sure whether we have been true to our calling or not, whether we are in fact among the chosen, the elect.  We already know we have been called, but have we been chosen for salvation or not?  That is something we will find out.

One particularly harmful heresy was invented by John Calvin back in the days of the Protestant Revolt.  He twisted the Church’s teaching about predestination and made it into something truly perverse.  We are, yes, predestined for either heaven or hell.  Predestined in the sense that God has known from all eternity which one we are going to end up in.  The Calvinists took this doctrine of the Church and twisted it to conclude from this that there’s nothing we can do about it.  God already knows if we’re going to heaven or going to hell, so what can we possibly do to change that?  This of course leads to either presumption or despair, depending on how you’re feeling on a particular day.  “It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m going to end up in heaven/hell no matter what I do, whether I act like a saint or a sinner.”  This is rubbish, of course.  The Church reminds us that it is precisely our moral choices, our behavior, that is the basis for God’s knowledge of where we’ll end up.  He knows we’re going to heaven (or hell) because he knows how we’re going to choose to act throughout our lives, and whether we will die in the state of grace or not.  So be very careful with this doctrine of predestination, and make sure you don’t drift into Calvinism, particularly if you’re going through a bad spell in your life and feel as though you’re merely the victim of “Fate.”  On the contrary, you’re a child of God, and our Father in heaven will “give us this day our daily bread,” he will provide us with whatever graces and blessings we need to save our soul.  It’s not haphazard “good fortune” or “luck.”  It’s Divine Providence making sure of our calling, and giving us every opportunity to be “chosen.”

Today is Mission Sunday.  There’s a special collect at Mass for the propagation of the faith, and in light of the fact that “many are called, but few chosen,” it would behoove us today to pray that the Church may not only expand the number of those who are baptized into her, but would even more importantly, remain loyal herself to the faith and morals she is supposed to be teaching, and resume transmitting that faith and those moral precepts to her children.  If only the Church would get back to this most fundamental of her duties, we could expect to find so many more of those who are called ending up among the chosen.

As for ourselves, we many legitimately presume, I hope, that we have remained loyal to God’s truth and God’s laws.  But let’s not extend that presumption to any kind of certainty that just because we’re good traditional Catholics we’re assured of being chosen for eternal life in heaven.  Without God’s grace, we’re not going to make it, and we need to persevere in that grace until our dying breath.  God has called us this far.  The rest is entirely up to us.