Matthew’s passages on the disciples in the storm remind us that faith remains a relationship between God and us, his people. In spite of trouble, God will always be present. Together, we need only realize that fact and act upon it.

This insight raises three points. First, faith is a relationship between God and his people, the Church. While the faith choice has always been and always will be a personal act of the individual, the content and context of faith is mediated through people. The individual receives it from others, and has the responsibility to pass it on to others. As individuals, we cannot be evangelized and evangelize others outside the influence of God’s people. The social context of this post-Christian era in America should drive that point home. No one can believe or evangelize outside what the Church teaches. Imagine the difficulty you would encounter evangelizing when culture remains ignorant of and indifferent to Christian faith.

Second, God is always present to his people. Faith gives us the means to say “YES!” to his presence. While creeds (i.e., the Apostle and Nicene) give us the content of faith, they do not replace faith. As paragraph 170 states: “We do not believe in formulas, but in the realities they express, which faith allows us to touch.” Church doctrine is the means that helps facilitate the faith relationship, not the end of faith. However, since God always guides the Church and her teaching, those means are sure.

Faith comes in and through the Church. And the Church, under God’s direction, provides a sure means to the divine. In light of the two previous points, our final one is clear: we only need to realize God’s presence (in the Church) and act upon it.

Jesus was sent by the Father to sow the seeds of the kingdom in his ministry on earth. Surely, the sowing did not involve only his verbal teaching. His life, his every act, particularly his dying and rising, became a proclamation of Good News for the whole world. In him was the kingdom of God inaugurated. It began to be realized in his being born into this world. Then, he sent his disciples (and all who would come after them) to continue the sowing of that seed by which the kingdom would come about for the whole universe. The Church, you and me, are now responsible for the sowing and for the harvesting. What that means is that our families and our parishes are responsible for that work.

The work of evangelization has been assigned to the community of believers who come after Christ. None of us can claim to be exempt from that charge. It is a task laid upon each of us: to make known the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior of the universe.

Our Holy Father, Pope Francis, travels all over the world in the work of evangelizing. He does not cease ever to proclaim the truth that is in Jesus Christ. He says that he comes as a pilgrim pope or father. He comes to confirm the local churches in their ministry of evangelizing. To all the churches has been entrusted the task of sowing the seed of the word of God in all hearts. The pope wants to re- sow that seed in our hearts and in the hearts of all persons of good will. No soil is unworthy of his zeal and of his energy.

Professional missionaries, clergy, religious, and laity go out to the whole world to announce that Jesus Christ loves all people. Professionals and volunteers in the parishes have all kinds of ways of announcing the Good News. Homilies, catechism classes, all faith-formation efforts, youth ministry, outreach to the poor and to the needy, ministries of presence and of compassion: Jesus is made present in the sacred works that come from our witness. The local parish, the faith-sharing group to which you belong, the family within which you live, all are agents of evangelization, of seed-sowing and of harvesting. Every Christian community needs to be an apostolic community, one that bears the Word to others in some way.

We are never limited by our personal or corporate inadequacies. The word of God will accomplish the purposes for which it was sent. Ours is only to spread it far and wide and to leave the rest to the Lord. There will surely be obstacles to the growth. Pray that we ourselves do not become those obstacles.