Homily for Wednesday, 23 July 2014– Ferial

Wednesday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 1:1, 4-10; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4a, 5-6ab, 15, 17; Matthew 13:1-9

If I were to ask all of us here, “When did you know that God was calling you to be a Christian; a disciple of Jesus Christ,” would it be possible for us to answer this question?

I ask this question as I reflect on the many times recently when I have been asked by family members, friends, and eve parishioners, “When did you know that God was calling you to be a priest?” I have trouble pointing to only one particular instance in which I knew I was being called to priesthood. In my case, it has taken many small encounters with God over the years; many seemingly insignificant experiences in which God was calling me to be a priest.

The first instance of our calling from God; our vocation to be Christians happens at baptism. But how many of us were baptized as infants and so could not possibly have any memory of our baptism?

In our first reading today, we encounter the prophet Jeremiah, who was called by God to be a prophet; a messenger not so much of what the people to whom Jeremiah would speak God’s word wanted to hear, but what they needed to hear. God says to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you.” Jeremiah’s first reaction is to dismiss God: “I know not how to speak; I am too young.”

Imagine if God were to say to us, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a disciple of Jesus Christ by baptism “I appointed you.” Would we think of God as strange? Would we simply dismiss God: “I know not how to speak; I am too young”; I am too old; I am not well enough; I have not taken the right courses or had the right experience? Or would we respond generously to God’s call to us in baptism to be disciples of Jesus Christ?

In countless ways many of us already respond generously and lovingly to our vocation just by gathering here to worship (as many of us do daily) and then living by the example of the God we worship in service to one another.

And yet how many of us think of and celebrate the origin of our common vocation to discipleship in Christ: our baptism? In one of the oldest prayers of the Rite of Baptism, we pray that God may open the ears and mouth of the newly-baptized to hear and then proclaim the Word of God. And so when did you know that God was calling you to be a disciple of Christ; a Christian?

We hear in our first reading that God knew and dedicated Jeremiah to his service as a prophet. In a similar way, God has known and dedicated each one of us to Christ before we knew our Christian vocation ourselves; “from the womb… before [we] were born” and sacramentally in our baptism.