Week III Sunday, Evening Prayer I

This is a reflection I prepared for Evening Prayer on Saturday of the annual retreat for deacons of the Diocese of Salt Lake City. The reading is the one for Sunday, Evening Prayer I, Week III of the four-week Psalter. However, we used a Gospel reading instead to commemorate our dearly departed brothers and sisters (wives of deacons). I prepared a reflection for that reading too. Since I wrote this, I did not want to "waste" it. As always, for what it's worth.

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Reading: Hebrews 13:20-21

What is pleasing to God that he wishes to carry out in you?

Reflecting on Scripture prompts these kinds of questions. What is significant about this question is that it can’t be answered, at least not with any specificity, by anyone other than God. Another beautiful thing about this question is that God isn’t going to tell anyone but you the answer.

On a general level, we are a community of Christians committed to the service of others in Jesus’s name for the sake of God’s kingdom. This kind of service is best described as diakonia. Because of this we know we are called to serve. How best to serve each day?

By virtue of her baptism, every Christian is called to engage in diakonia. Just as there is a priesthood of all the baptized, there is a diaconate of the all the baptized. Hence, diakonia is an inherent part of any spirituality that flies under the banner of Christ.

In an Angelus address during the first year of his pontificate, Pope Francis insisted: “A prayer that does not lead you to practical action for your brother [or sister] — the poor, the sick, those in need of help, [someone] in difficulty — is a sterile and incomplete prayer...”¹

My dear sisters and brothers, I urge each one of you to ask God through Christ in the power of their Spirit daily what specific service he is pleased to have you carry out. Your diaconate requires no less of you. Your faithfulness to this daily summons to service is what makes you a deacon, a servant.

Jesus is among us as “the one who serves.”² He calls on us, by grace given in ordination, to act in his very person. To act in persona Christi servi - in the person of Christ the servant.³

For the seven men chosen to serve tables in the earliest Christian community in Jerusalem, the Church established two-fold criteria: be “filled with the Spirit and wisdom.”⁴ Wisdom is to ask the Lord daily what service he wishes to carry out in you. It is the Spirit who enables us to carry out what Christ asks us to do.

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1 Pope Francis, Sunday General Audience, 21 July 2013.^↩
2 Luke 22:27.^↩
3 For in persona Christi servi- see Archbishop Jose Gomez’s Foreword to James Keating’s The Heart of the Diaconate: Communion with the Servant Mysteries of Christ, x.^↩
4 Acts 6:3.^↩