One afternoon in 1953, reporters and officials gathered at a Chicago railroad station to await the arrival of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner. He stepped off the train—a giant of a man, six-feet-four, with bushy hair and a large moustache.

As cameras flashed, city officials approached with hands outstretched and began telling him how honored they were to meet him. He thanked them politely and then, looking over their heads, asked if he could be excused for a moment. He walked through the crowd with quick strides until he reached the side of an elderly black woman who was struggling as she tried to carry two large suitcases.

He picked up the bags in his big hands and, smiling, escorted the woman to a bus. As he helped her aboard, he wished her a safe journey. Meanwhile, the crowd tagged along behind him. He turned to them and said, “Sorry to have kept you waiting.”

The man was Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the famous missionary-doctor, who had spent his life helping the poorest of the poor in Africa. A member of the reception committee said to one of the reporters: “That’s the first time I ever saw a sermon walking.”

When you think about it, people were attracted to Jesus during his earthly ministry because he was a sermon walking. He didn’t teach anything that he didn’t apply to himself. People marveled that he spoke with a new and authentic authority.

Think of some of the most difficult things he taught. Forgive your enemies, pray for your persecutors, he said. And on the cross he did precisely that: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

At the Last Supper he washed the feet of the Apostles, humbling himself, unashamed to be their servant. And he taught that what he had done was an example for them: wash one another’s feet.

When James and John wanted the positions of honor in Jesus’ kingdom, asking to sit at his right and his left, Jesus rejected that kind of thinking. Pagans do that, he said. But it shall not be that way in the new kingdom. And how ironic that, on the day that Jesus died, it was two criminals who were given those positions, one at his right, the other at his left. And when one of them repented and asked Jesus to remember him in his kingdom, Jesus replied that he would be with him that day in Paradise.

Jesus didn’t just teach; he lived the message. He was a sermon walking. They thought Albert Schweitzer was a sermon walking because a poor lady who needed help with her luggage was just as important to him as Chicago’s welcoming Committee.

People who encountered Mother Teresa said that she was a sermon walking. She didn’t just teach her nuns, she caressed the dying, nursed the sick, and cleaned the latrine.

The same was true for those who witnessed the example of Pope Francis. He went to the ends of the earth, to those who were forgotten, to those who lived in slums, to refugees at the world’s boarders, to jails and youth detention facilities, teaching by his example that all are welcome, no one is cast aside, no one is forgotten in God’s kingdom.

In today’s gospel, Jesus advises that we strive to enter through the narrow gate. Not the wide way of popularity, power and prestige, but the narrow gate of service, humility and love of the forgotten. You see what Jesus is doing? He’s lifting up the last and the least, and making them the first, the ones who have a sure ticket at the gate of heaven. How do we get in? By feeding them, nursing them, lifting them up out of misery, visiting them in their loneliness, standing up for them when others would deny them their rights—and by helping them with their luggage and making sure they get on the right bus. In short, by becoming a sermon walking.