Homily for the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

World Mission Sunday

October 19, 2025
St. Martin de Porres Catholic Church
Prosper, Texas

Exodus 17:8-13
Psalm 121:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8
2 Timothy 3:14-4:2
Luke 18:1-8

In 1926 Pope Pius XI decreed that each year on the penultimate Sunday of October, the Church would keep a day dedicated to World Missions to remind all Catholics of our shared responsibility to promote the spread of the authentic Gospel in every conceivable way. We can and should support missionary work with our financial gifts, but even more we must seek to live as faithful disciples and loving friends of the Lord Jesus and so bear witness to everyone we meet that Jesus Christ is Lord.

One of the distinguishing marks of Saint Luke’s Gospel is his emphasis that the spread of the Gospel is not just the responsibility of the Apostles and their successors, the bishops; rather, Jesus commissions all of His disciples, all of the members of His Church, to share the Good news among those who have yet to hear the Gospel and also those who are in need of being reminded of the Gospel that they have already received.

For all of us to accept this mission we must recognize and believe that Christianity, like Judaism, is a revealed religion. We must believe even more as faithful Catholics that Jesus Christ is truly the Son of God and has risen from the dead to save us from our sins. The Gospel that imbues the Catholic Church, which requires our conversion, and which we share as missionaries is not the result of human wisdom based on our discoveries and experiences. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Islam, and the pantheons of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Native American and Norse mythology are all examples of noble human efforts to explain the mystery of existence and give meaning to our suffering and hope to our mortality.

But Judaism and Christianity are different and are fused together in Jesus Christ. They are not man’s search for God; they are God’s search for man, that man might know his true origin and eternal destiny and that God knows and cares enough for man to establish an eternal covenant with him. Christ shares His mission with us to go throughout the world even at great cost to ourselves to share this news with those who do not know Him, just as He was sent from the Father to save all people. This demands a grateful response on our part because of God’s graciousness.

Let me put the matter most directly: if Christianity is not a revealed religion by God, then it is a false religion. If Christianity is a revealed religion by God, then any effort to disregard what is revealed or, worse, attempt to change or to misrepresent what is revealed to be more palatable to our current cultural sensibilities is infidelity to the Word of God. More than that, such infidelity is treachery of the worst kind first exhibited in the Church by Judas Iscariot, and it leads to spiritual death by false doctrine exalting the passions, excusing grave sin, denying that some sins are sins, and even claiming that some sins are even laudable and life-giving.

This is the reason that Saint Paul taught Saint Timothy with the words we have just heard: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”

As Saint Paul anticipated, we currently live in a time when many people do not endure sound teaching but instead seek teachers to suit themselves and, having rejected the truth of the Word of God, they will wander off into myths. That sort of infidelity is bad enough when anyone among the baptized falls into such unrighteousness, but even worse is that some of those Catholics who have wandered off into myths also hold teaching offices in the Church and continue to teach in the name of the Church even while they subvert the Gospel and make a pretense of religion but deny its power to change lives by grace and through faith. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

For us to fulfill the mission entrusted to us at our Baptism requires constant and persistent prayer. The prayer required is not only a private prayer, but liturgical prayer offered in communion with the Catholic Church. In today’s first reading from Exodus, Moses directs Joshua to fight Amalek who has declared war on the Israelites, while he will pray for Joshua’s success. Moses’ prayer involves more than words. His prayer requires action. Moses was required to keep his hands raised for the Israelites to triumph. The battle was waged from morning to sunset until Joshua was victorious. Moses’ intervention was not only lengthy but also arduous work since it involved a physical posture that became very painful after much time. His perseverance in prayer required the assistance of Aaron and Hur to hold his arms up that he might not collapse out of exhaustion and fail the mission entrusted by God for His Chosen People of the Old Covenant.

The parable of Jesus in the Gospel is about the necessity of praying always and not losing hope. The widow described in the parable appears to have an even more strenuous mission than Moses, since although Moses gets tired, the woman has been beleaguered with the discouragement and hopelessness of injustice. The last things the widow needs are the procedures of a gnat-straining bureaucrat. The widow is owed the concrete work of true charity that always accompanies authentic justice; so is every human being throughout the world —especially the poor.

Like the assistance of Aaron and Hur who hold up Moses’ hands and also like the perseverance of the widow in the Gospel, our ongoing prayers and charitable assistance carry out our missionary vocation and sustain the missionaries of the Gospel in so many lands in which it is truly dangerous to be a Christian and the temptation to abandon the faith is great. Our ongoing prayers and our support for the missions strengthen our faith and understanding of the Faith of the Church as revealed by God with an urgent demand to share the Gospel. Without such prayer we can abandon the faith and become lost. As the Venerable Servant of God, Fulton J. Sheen once said, “If you do not behave as you believe, you will end up believing as you behave.”

It is up to us, together in communion with Christ and His Church, to ensure that when He comes again, He will indeed find faith on the earth. Out of gratitude for the gift of Jesus Christ and the salvation He offers us, please be generous to the missions today.