Simply following Jesus

Homily
4th Sunday of Easter
Good Shepherd Sunday and World Day of Prayer for Vocations
25 April 2010
St. Michael the Archangel Vocation Luncheon

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Listen and follow. Sounds simple. But oftentimes, the simplest things turn out to be the hardest. Keeping simple things simple is hard. Ask any parent if it is easy to get their children to listen and to follow. No, you can practice millions of times, and still not be very good at it. Ask any teacher if it is easy to get children to listen and to follow. Ask any pastor if it is easy to get children to listen and to follow. Nothing could be simpler. Listen, and follow. Yet ask any vocation director if he is having any luck in teaching young people how to listen to Jesus and how to follow His voice, and you will find out, if you didn't already know, that even though it seems simple, it is hard. What is worse, it's not only hard for children. Sometimes, its even harder for adults.

I know my sheep. In the end, we follow the voice of someone who knows us. If I think only I know myself, I will only follow my own voice, and no one else's. We disobey our parents because we think we know better. I ask teenagers all the time if they would allow their parents to pick out who they should date for them, or better yet, who they should marry. It is a reasonable question, but the teenagers react violently. No way would I let my mom or dad pick out who I should date or who I should marry. When pressed, they say that mom or dad, yes, the very people who changed their diapers and have watched them most closely from day one, just don't know them well enough. Our relationship with Jesus becomes complicated for this very reason. We don't simply listen to Him, nor do we simply follow Him, because at some point we decided Jesus doesn't really know us. We think it impossible for Jesus to know us better than we know ourselves.

Yet in choosing not to listen to Jesus something tragic happens in our lives. We lose the very best way to know ourselves. Too often, we experience the voice of Jesus as a voice that is trying to turn us into somebody we are not. The voice of Jesus can be experienced not as a voice of love, but as a voice of challenge. Be this, or else. Do this, or else. It can be a voice of which we are deeply afraid, a voice that leads to a tiresome tug of war between our will and God's will for us. There are few things scarier for our young people than to be invited by our Church to consider a calling to the priesthood or religious life. Such a invitation is experienced not as love, not as an invitation toward self-discovery, but as pressure to become somebody they are not. It is scary as all get out, and when I was asked to consider a vocation at a very young age, I told my mom to leave me alone.

But following the voice of Jesus is not supposed to be scary. It is only scary to the degree that we are prideful and sinful. The voice of Jesus represents for us the very best way for us to discover who we really are. Jesus' voice is not a voice of become somebody you are not, but is a voice of one who loves us and knows us and believes in us. His voice is an invitation to discover who we really are, and to not settle for anything less than the very best that is within us.

Today's Gospel assures us that Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and following His voice means eternal life for us. This eternal life that we receive more and more deeply as we go through the Easter season is a life that since it is no longer measured by days and hours, cannot be touched by sin and death. It consists simply in listening to God and following Him, trusting that our lives are held together forever by God's love through which all things were made and by which all things are sustained. Whenever we choose to listen to our own voice, it is a decision by us to measure our lives by a standard other than love, and to try to capture a life for ourselves that is measured and is under attack by sin and death, rather than to trust Jesus' promise that His love is the only security we should hope for, for no one can take us out of His hand.

This parish, and its leaders and its families, must somehow become better at refusing to adulterate the words of eternal life that Jesus speaks. I know that, his being a close friend of mine, that Fr. Bill's desire is that this parish would find a way to intensify Jesus' words to trust His voice and to follow Him more closely, and that this trust would be born of a personal experience of God's merciful love. Fr. Bill has always shared with me that even as this parish has passed with flying colors many tests in the last 11 years in showing its heart to God and to the greater community, that another great test lies in whether this parish might raise up many vocations to the priesthood and religious life in the future, even in a climate that seeks to discourage our young people from accepting these beautiful vocations from Jesus.

So today on World Day of Prayer for Vocations, so designated by our Holy Father, we renew our commitment to trying to do a hard thing, listening to Jesus and following Him, as simply as we can. To do this, we must stop trying to make Jesus the center of our lives, and trust more deeply that we are at the center of His life. We must stop asking our young people to put Jesus in their backpacks, and to bring Him along for the ride, and instead have the courage to teach them to respond to a call that will make them infinitely more happy; leave everything, and follow me. We must stop trying to recruit our young people according to the needs of our Church, and instead we must as parents, pastors and teachers show them how to pray, and where they can encounter the voice of Jesus. If we teach our young people how to pray, we will never have to talk them into the priesthood or religious life. It will be impossible to talk them out of it. Finally, as parents, we must do better than telling our kids to do whatever makes them happy, and must instead tell them how happy we would be if Jesus who knows them and loves them even more perfectly than we do would invite them to a vocation to the priesthood or religious life.