“All You Have to Do is Text This Prayer”
by Brian Flanagan, Fiat Ventures
Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
This morning on the way to work, I was driving behind a bus with advertisements for various things all over it, and one ad in particular caught my eye. It said:
All you have to do is text this prayer: “Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner…” to 79248.
I mean I appreciate the effort on the part of whoever bought that advertising space on the bus and is trying to lead people to Christ while they’re stuck in traffic, but I’m not sure that texting a prayer is the way to eternal salvation.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s a great prayer to pray. “Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.” We’re all sinners and we all need God’s mercy. But some Christian faith traditions place a very specific focus on saying that prayer as the basic requirement for getting into heaven. And once you say it, apparently you’re good to go. You’re saved. You’ve got your golden ticket and when you die and get to the pearly gates, you might even get to skip ahead in line!
In the Catholic faith, we go a bit deeper than that in our understanding of what it means to be “saved”. The Second Reading from Mass this week really capture’s this: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?”
As Catholics, we absolutely need to have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior”. We need to invite Jesus into our lives – but this is no one-time deal. We need to do this every day! Every morning when we wake up, we need to choose to live out our faith. When we haven’t been doing a great job of that, we have the awesome Sacrament of Reconciliation so we can start over and give our lives to God again.
And if anybody ever asks you to pick the “moment” you were saved, for most of us it had nothing to do with praying our own personal prayer at all. It was the moment of our Baptism. In the First Letter of St. Peter, it says “Baptism now saves you”. Pope Benedict XVI was once asked what the most important day of his life was, and he didn’t respond with the day he became a priest or became pope, but rather the day of his own Baptism!
In the Catholic Church, we have the Sacraments to help us along the way of salvation. They help us live out our faith day in and day out. Through the Sacraments, we’re going straighter to God than we ever could at home praying in our rooms. It doesn’t get any more personal-relationship than that.
So go ahead and text that prayer, but do it every day! Standard text messaging rates may apply…
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