Hear and Heed the Call

Summary of a Fr. Gerry Creedon homily from January 16, 2005
Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend

"The Lord has spoken who has formed me as his servant from the womb." Is 49:5
"Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will." Ps. 40
"Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God." 1 Cor. 1:1

THIS FIRST MONTH of 2005 is a natural time to consider the fresh ways God may be calling each of us in a new year.

God also calls communities. Today the congregation is asked to consider the ways St Charles parish may respond anew. You are invited to share your wishes and hopes in writing to our office or online. Our parish Council in an upcoming Town Meeting will consider with you the concrete plans that we can offer to act on the hopes you express.

In our personal lives we may also listen again to the promptings of the Spirit. While you may be content with your vocation within the family or in your profession, perhaps you may be resisting that nagging instinct to do something great or good.

Mother Teresa was a woman who already had a vocation as a professed religious, teaching in a school, when she heard what she identified as a "call within a call, a vocation within a vocation." She heard the cry of the poor and followed that voice to the dying on the streets of Calcutta.

Martin Luther King was the busy, respected pastor of a large Baptist Congregation in Georgia. His preaching was well recognized. His tenure was secure. Yet his heart was open to the call to lead a movement for justice. He saw in the injustice of racial discrimination and in the cause of civil rights an issue that went beyond politics to morality and faith. Despite his fears, he discerned the need to affirm in a new way across the land the conviction that all people were made equally in the image of the Creator.

One of my favorite passages from his sermons reads:

"Deep down in our non-violent creed is the conviction there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they're worth dying for. And if a man happens to be 36-years-old, as I happen to be, some great truth stands before the door of his life--some great opportunity to stand up for that which is right.

A man might be afraid his home will get bombed, or he's afraid that he will lose his job, or he's afraid that he will get shot, or beat down by state troopers, and he may go on and live until he's 80. He's just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. The cessation of breathing in his life is merely the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. He died...

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true."

(The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks from the pulpit on courage, Selma, AL, March 8, 1965.)

The call each of us receives may be less dramatic than that of Teresa or Martin, yet no less important. Let us heed, let us follow. In today's liturgy let us speak our so be it.

Amen.