Homily for Saturday, 24 May 2014‒ Saturday of the Fifth Week of Easter

This homily was given at the convent of the Holy Child Sisters, Oxford, United Kingdom

Readings of the day: Acts 16:1-10; Psalm 100:1b-2, 3, 5; John 15:18-21

How many of us have ever had the experience of simply knowing “that God had called us” to take a particular action or to speak in a particular way relating to our faith? This was the experience of St. Paul and Timothy and of the other “Apostles and presbyters” of whom we hear in our first reading. Guided by the wise discernment of God’s will for them and for the Church by these leaders, the earliest Christian communities “grew stronger in faith and increased in number,” we hear from Acts.

The Acts of the Apostles presents us with a scenario of the earliest Church that is almost too good to be true. We know that Christians of this time faced sometimes severe persecution, even martyrdom. In our own time we may (I think rightly) question someone who says that she or he knows, without qualification, that she or he has been called by God to act or speak in a particular way.

And yet, with this caution in mind, I wonder if, in limited circumstances, it is possible, even probable, that we may be called by God to particular actions or words.  Perhaps these circumstances may include when we took religious vows. For priests, they may include when we were ordained. For others yet, moments when they know that God’s will for them is to serve in mission lands or to risk their own lives for our faith raise for me the question of whether these people have discerned a calling that is beyond their strength alone. Prayerful discernment of our calling; our vocation from God, in my experience and in that of many people I know, leads those who discern their divine vocation to a deep sense of peace that at times is not readily explained.

This sense of peace in knowing that we are discerning how God is calling us to act or to speak can even help us as Church to overcome persecution. It can help us to overcome a kind of estrangement from “the world,” in the words of our Gospel reading today; a world from which God has called us to God’s service because God nevertheless loves the world, despite its (and our) rejection of God when we sin.

In the times that gave rise to the Acts of the Apostles and to John’s Gospel, as in our times, our experience as Church is a mixed one. On the one hand, in places the Church was and is growing rapidly both in numbers and in the strength of faith of its members. The situation depicted primarily in Acts still takes place in many places today. On the other hand, the Church is still persecuted; martyrs still shed their blood in a world that “hates” God and rejects God’s Christ at times.

And yet, amid both the growth in numbers and strength and persecution and rejection, we are called as Christians to come to know, as well as we are able, God’s will for us; to discern how we are to act as God acts and how we are to speak the words of God. In discerning this will of God and our vocation in light of it, we find our greatest peace.