I’m happy to celebrate a special anniversary with you all today – the anniversary of a prayer answered. This Sunday we are celebrating the 53rd World Day of Prayer for Vocations. Twenty years ago, on April 28th, 1996 – the 33rd World Day of Vocations, I was the reader for Sunday morning Mass, sitting in the front pew of my home parish, and right before the Eucharistic Prayer the priest celebrating the Mass reminded everyone “let us pray today on this World Sunday of Prayer for Vocations that young men and women come forward to answer the Lord’s call to work in His harvest.”
I knew those prayers were pointed right at me.
It was a bucket of water in the face: so many ambitions and expectations were doused as illusions, and also a chord struck deep within my soul: that what I’d sought all my life, my deepest aspirations, would be found in God by following the path he traced out for me from all eternity. So I followed him. A year later I entered the Legionaries of Christ, and ten years later, on December 8th, 2006, I was ordained a priest.
Each of us has a dream for our life. We aspire and yearn for something greater, and in our hearts it becomes a dream we hope for and strive for whenever and however we can. God has a dream for us too, a dream he shows to John in the Second Reading today: that all be united to him and around his Son – the Lamb – for all eternity, washed clean, bearing the palm of victory, and rejoicing. The white garments in the reading show us kept clean by Baptism and kept clean by living a Christian life and receiving the sacraments, but it is all thanks to the blood that the sacrificed Lamb – Jesus – shed for us, taking away the sins of the world.
God’s dream is our dream, and answering his call is how we follow it and achieve it. In the First Reading Paul and Barnabas extend God’s invitation to follow the dream the People of Israel had long awaited – but many declined the invitation. We can fall into the same trap, thinking that making God’s dream a reality through living our life in this world is just the job of priests and monks and nuns and, forgive the expression, “Holy Rollers.” If that were true, Paul and Barnabas would have stopped right there when the Jews rejected their message. But God’s dream was bigger than the Jews’s or the Gentiles’ earthly expectations: Jew and Gentiles – everyone – are called to help God make his dream for us a reality in this world and through how we live our life in this world.
The Gentiles were eager and overjoyed to receive the dream and spread it. Following our dream broadens our horizons and opens us up to unimagined possibilities. How much more so is this true when we have faith that God’s dream and our dream are one and the same thing: God doesn’t just have any big picture in mind – he has the biggest picture in mind. Jesus, the Lamb in the Second Reading, shows us in eternity what Jesus, the Good Shepherd in today’s Gospel, shows us in history – both our history and his history. God became flesh and won our redemption because how we live this life does matter. If we heed the Good Shepherd’s voice, God’s call in each moment of our life, he will lead us to the Father and to our dream: eternal life, not just for ourselves – something good in itself, but incomplete – but for everyone we love.
God’s dream and ours – deep down – is that everyone get their dream, the dream that is really possible and really will make them happy: eternal life, the answer to all the aspirations and yearnings they have in this life.
Let us pray today on this World Sunday of Prayer for Vocations that young men and women come forward to answer the Lord’s call to work in his harvest. Let us pray for all those who’ve answered God’s call, that they may continue to follow it. Let us pray for all those discerning God’s will for their life, that they may receive clarity and courage to follow their true dream. Let us pray for each other, that we may all seek our dream by following God’s dream for our lives.
Readings: Acts 13:14, 43–52; Psalm 100:1–3, 5; Revelation 7:9, 14b–17; John 10:27–30.