Not too long ago, someone was complaining to me about the way the church chooses its saints. And she thought it was a little bit insulting that almost all the saints on the church’s calendar were religious – priests, nuns, monks, etc. There were almost no married people. And she couldn’t think of any married couples.

This weekend, that’s about to change.

In a historic moment, the church on Sunday will beatify a married couple: Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux. It’s the final step on the path to canonization.

Barely a century after their deaths, they really seem like people from another age. After their wedding in 1858, they lived together for almost a year without having sex. It was finally Zelie who dragged her husband off to a parish priest, who reassured him that what he had been resisting was actually something beautiful and willed by God.

With that out of the way, the Martins went on to have nine children – and five of them entered religious life, including, of course, their youngest, Therese.

Pope Benedict chose this Sunday for the beatification because it is World Mission Sunday – and St. Therese is the patroness of the missions. As most of you know, she lived a very short, very sheltered life. But her great dream was to be a missionary. She had hoped to join the Carmelites in Vietnam, but her failing health prevented her. Near the end of her life, at the urging of her mother superior, Therese struck up a correspondence with a young seminarian, who eventually became a missionary in Africa and who also died very young. She once wrote to him of her parents: “The good God gave me a mother and father more worthy of heaven than of earth.”

What a beautiful testimony from a daughter – and from a saint.

The simple fact is that the missionary work of the church doesn’t begin in the jungles of Africa, or the slums of India. It isn’t launched in far off countries among pagans.

It begins here. It begins now.

It begins in the domestic church: the home.

I like to tell parents at baptisms that they are the first teachers of their children. From them, their children will learn courage and respect, perseverance and love. From them they will learn how to stand up when they fall down, and how to bring all their worries and hopes and fears to God. It’s parents who will take a tottering three year old to that font in the back of the church, and dip those tiny fingers into the cold holy water, and show him how to make the sign of the cross.

It is parents who are really the first missionaries.

And it is husbands and wives who act as missionaries, as well, to one another.

In my own marriage, my wife has probably taught me more about love and sacrifice, resilience and faith, than any of the religion teachers I had in school. And my first ministry of diaconal service – serving in faith and in charity – is to the woman to whom I made my first vow, my wife. The young Catholic writer Michael Lickona has said that the joy and challenge of marriage to him is that it is the one chance he will have in life to truly love his neighbor as himself. To which I can only add: Amen. Marriage is the great classroom where I have learned that. The work of Christian charity toward my neighbor begins with my very closest neighbor, in my own home.

And the missionary work that we celebrate this Sunday also begins in the home.

It begins around the kitchen table, saying grace.

It begins over the checkbook, paying bills.

It begins when wiping away the tears of hurt child, or correcting a homework assignment, or simply listening when a young ego has been wounded because he was the last one picked for the volleyball team.

It is confronting all the hopes and the heartaches and the headaches that crop up in any marriage, and remembering Christ’s words: “Love one another as I have loved you.” It’s having a heart big enough to at least TRY to do that. Beginning with the one you have promised to love for the rest of your life.

Because if you do, you will be more than a husband or a wife or a parent. You will be a missionary.

The first great missionary of the church, St. Paul, begins his letter to Thessalonians this Sunday by writing that their mission is a “work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That is also the great mission of family life, the great mission of marriage. Louis and Zelie Martin understood that, and lived that.

Some of you may know that the Vatican is in the process of revising the Roman Missal – the prayers of the mass. We won’t see these enacted for a couple years. But one of the changes just approved by the pope involves the last words spoken at mass. I took particular note of them because they’re the words spoken by the deacon.

One of the options includes these words: “The mass has ended…go in peace, glorifying the Lord with your lives.” The Vatican has explained that the reason for those words, is to emphasize the missionary work of the church — work that doesn’t end once we head out the door, but work that goes on.

Let us strive to carry that idea with us – and make the mission of the church OUR mission…in the workplace, in the community, in the family. Let’s all of us commit to those beautiful words: to go in peace, glorifying the Lord with our lives.

Let’s pray to be missionaries.