Psalm response: Proclaim God’s marvelous words to all the nations.

          These two men are well attested in Acts and the letters of Paul, and we know a fair amount about how they acted and what they accomplished, but that is not what draws my attention today.  Timothy and Titus were important members of that first generation of bishops, and by their response to the Spirit they began to define what a successor to the apostles should be. 

          We cannot see what their inner life was and we have only those meager records to show that response.  I would summarize it as meeting their times head on, finding the will of the Spirit in the people they worked with, adapting the Living Word of Christ to new situations as Acts shows the apostles and other members of that first generation of the Church doing. 

          Following them, other bishops held synods and councils locally and on the level of the entire Church to define as clearly as they could who Christ was and what that means to us in our lives.  These successors to Titus and Timothy and all the other early bishops spread the Good News and gave stability to the communities that formed around that hopeful message and to their celebration of that with a liturgy; they worked to support those communities by all sorts of means – orphanages and schools and medical care for all. 

          But what united them was love of the Lord in loving his people, service to the Lord in their serving his people.  Each of us is sent in our own way, as a priestly people, to mediate Christ to those we live with, by who we are and what we do, by our sharing of the Good News, not only with our lives, but with an active sharing of the faith and belief and understanding that motivate and move us.

          How are we ourselves preachers of the Word and, in his name, how do we drive out demons, heal all sort of diseases, and find and care for the forgotten and discarded people?