[00:00] St. Peter tells us that we were ransomed from our futile conduct, handed on by our ancestors. Not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ as a spotless, unblemished lamb. And then we hear our Lord in the Gospel today, telling His apostles what was going to happen

[00:31] to Him, and also the price that they would have to pay for following Him. That He was going to be spit upon, handed over by the authorities. He was going to, obviously, what we all know as suffer crucifixion, or scourging, crucifixion and death at the hands of those who were in authority at the time, whether it be the Jews or the Romans. And we see the apostles in their fervor, not just them, because the other ones were indignant

[01:05] because in a way they were envious or jealous that James and John had beat them to the punch, asking our Lord to sit at His right and at His left. And our Lord squashed that mentality right away. He told them, "Listen, you know, the Gentiles act in this manner. Those who are in authority lord it over the others, but not you. If you want to be great," and He said it many times, "become like a child.

[01:38] To become the servant of others. The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve." Now we have to understand the level of humility and meekness that our Lord wanted of His apostles. And He assured them after they agreed to the fact that they could drink from the same chalice that our Lord was going to drink from, even though they might not have understood it completely

[02:09] at that point, our Lord said, "Oh yeah, well, you are going to drink from this chalice. You are going to follow My example. You have committed yourselves to being apostles. You know that I am God and that My word is life and My word is truth. So you will, in proclaiming this word, in following My mission, you will also follow My death and witness to that truth that you are handing on from Me."

[02:44] And we know that all the apostles died a martyr's death, except for St. John, who we still celebrate as a martyr, a vicarious martyrdom because he was dropped in boiling oil and would have died if it wasn't for the grace of God. We think of all the different missionaries that came before us, the North American martyrs that basically founded the Church in our countries, North America. We think of the things that they had to go through and we ask ourselves, do we have that

[03:16] same love? Do we have that same desire to be witnesses to the Gospel in whatever capacity our Lord wants of us? The saint we celebrate today, St. Augustine of Canterbury, was one of those saints who followed in the footsteps of the apostles, both in the fact that he was a missionary and also the fact that he was a bishop. Now he died around, they don't give the time of his birth, but he died in 604 and he was

[03:52] sent to establish the Church, the Catholic faith in England as one of the principal missionaries that was heading there. He was basically an abbot, just a monk and St. Gregory who desired to go and preach as a missionary was made Pope, so he had to delegate his desires to other people at this point.

[04:22] At one point, he was walking in the market and he saw slaves for sale because slavery has been since the beginning. Every land, every nation has had slaves, but Gregory had noticed that there were these fair-haired, blue-eyed people that were being kept as slaves and he asked, "Like, who are these people?" And they said, "They're the Angles." And he said, "Well," he said, "they seem to be angels to me."

[04:54] And from that moment on, he desired to send someone to preach the Good News and to found Christianity in that country. So he decided that it would be St. Augustine. So he commissioned him, can you imagine getting that knock on the door when you're an abbot of a Benedictine monastery, getting the knock on the door and guess where you're going? And so he ended up taking 30 of his own men, Benedictines, with him and 10 others who were

[05:31] volunteers to go. And it was so difficult, they had to travel through France and we don't even understand what that would really mean to be going through these remote towns, towns that maybe now are big cities like Marseille, Rheims, the many other places in the south of France, traveling along the Mediterranean in order to make it to the English Channel and then having to

[06:02] cross that channel was obviously a dangerous thing at the time. So at a certain point, St. Augustine was even ordained or installed as bishop at that time by one of the bishops along the journey. And at a certain point, they became disheartened, discouraged by this mission. They hadn't even arrived there yet.

[06:33] And they sent a few of the Benedictine monks, turned them around and sent them back to Rome in order to plead with the Holy Father. "This mission, it's just, we're ill prepared. It's not something, like the journey itself was so difficult. They were monks in a monastery. They weren't trained to be explorers and adventurers." But Pope Gregory refused, sent them back and you can imagine that journey. The journey back then, it wasn't just like you're turning them around in a car, you know.

[07:06] The first thing you would think if you're Pope Gregory is that, "Wow, they just traveled like months back here because it was so difficult. No, go back again and you keep going." So they were obedient to Pope Gregory. Well, he was actually Pope St. Gregory now, but they continued on. And God gave them immediate fruits of their labors. Augustine converted one of the kings of England and, or the parts of England, I guess there

[07:44] might have been multiple clans and stuff where there were different kings. But King Ethelbert, I'm not even sure of the pronunciation, but anyways, he converted him and that was the door in which Christianity was opened into that country. So we see, and we think of, that we were ransomed by Jesus, by His precious blood. But we are also ransomed in a way by all those who came before us. We have St. Augustine of Canterbury, who founded the Church and the cathedral of Canterbury

[08:20] in probably a small little town, or not even town, a village. And then we think of the North American martyrs who came here, they didn't receive the fruits of their labors, but they were killed for the sake of the Gospel and spreading the truth. We think of all the martyrs that went before us and all the missionaries, St. Francis Xavier, St. Ignatius, St. Francis, St. Anthony, they all desired to go among the Saracens or go among those who had never heard of the Gospel.

[08:54] And we ask ourselves, do we understand at the price at which we are ransomed, do we understand what God might ask of us, and are we prepared to follow the path that God wants of us? You know, we can say, "Oh well, God will never ask me to be a martyr, God will never ask me to go off into the woods and suffer the mosquitoes and the bites and the, you know,

[09:24] the hills and the valleys and going to preach to the natives somewhere far away." But each of us in our own time were chosen for these times. We were chosen to be where we are right now. And we were chosen definitely as Christians, as Catholics, to give an example of the faith, to pray to God, to know the mission that He has sent us on, and to be the same thing to

[09:58] the people of the future that the people of the past were for us. So ask ourselves, are we ready to do great things for God if He asks it of us? He may not. He may ask us to do the great things just internally in our interior life, which is similar. You have the bloody martyrdom, you have the white martyrdom, you have things that maybe people will notice, but then you have the silent, hidden things, like the Blessed Virgin Mary

[10:29] in her greatness. So whatever it may be that our Lord is asking of us and how it is that we are to follow the path that He leads us on to achieve that holiness, as our Lord said, "Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect," we must pray and ask for the desire and for the strength, the desire to be missionaries of His word and witnesses to His truth, and the strength

[11:00] and the light to be able to put it into practice. So let us ask God of this, especially at Holy Communion, when we will be united to Him and in which He will hear the inmost desires of our hearts, as long as they are for the good of our salvation and the salvation of those whom we come in contact with every single day as witnesses to the truth. Just as St. Augustine of Canterbury went out into the great unknown, into the hardships,

[11:33] and he persevered, and he was shown the fruits of his labor of love.