Superheros

Vocation Homily to St. Joseph's School Fairhaven

In the beginning of the book of the prophet Jeremiah the word of the Lord came to a young man named Jeremiah saying: Before I formed thee in the womb I knew you; and before you came forth from your mother’s womb I sanctified you, and I ordained you a prophet to the nations.

This is one of my favorite passages in scriptures, Because it demonstrates a key truth of our Faith: God called Jeremiah to be a messenger to the world to bring the truth to people who were living a lie. But this wasn’t just a job, it was who Jeremiah was born to be.

Just like Jeremiah, God has a unique plan for each of us As today’s Psalm says we are wonderfully
Made each of us is an unrepeatable gift to the world. Like Jeremiah, each of us has a vocation, a
calling and if we take it seriously our vocation is always an adventure! Because God calls each of us
to live heroic lives—in a sense to be super-heroes. God wants us to take huge risks to love one
another and in turn to spread the message of God’s love, this is the example of the Saints—who are real life superheroes!

You know when we think of superheroes we think of people with awesome power and super-human strength but God’s plan—asks us to be more courageous than the comic book heroes we all know, braver because he asks us to do the same type of heroic acts without the super powers—using just our brains and our muscles, and our trust in God.

When you really think about it it’s not really bravery to fight evil, when you can stop bullets in your teeth

God wants us to be superheroes, in our ordinary lives. He wants us to take a real risk:
To risk our comfort and our pleasure
To risk our reputations and our friends
And sometimes to even risk our lives.

It’s easy to be a super hero when you have superman’s strength, or Spiddy senses, or Batman’s cool gadgets and ninja training. It’s easy to fight for good when you can control the weather like Storm, or have psychic power like Gene Gray. But God wants you and me to stand up to evil, chaos, and despair,without any special powers. He wants you and I, in spite of our weakness, to stand up to be a prophet to the nations, letting people know that good always triumphs over evil.

He wants us to fight our enemy who is a Liar and the Father of Lies not with fists, bullets, and laser beams, but with a stronger weapon—with the truth of our life, with our witness to the beauty and goodness of God’s plan, and with our willingness to sacrifice ourselves and to die to do good, to speak the truth the Truth, and to love God!

God made each of us to save lives! There is an old Jewish saying: he who saves one life saves the world. If you think about this saying, you see how true it is, and you begin to realize just how important you are in God’s plan how important you are to the world. This is the beauty of God’s plan: each of us are so important. Each Christian, in fact each person open to God’s plan, is a part of a chain reaction more powerful than a nuclear bomb, the chain reaction of the Cross of Jesus Christ. You see while, to some, one life may not seem important, we know that in God’s plan we are all tied together like links of a chain. If you save me, and I save another person, and that person another, eventually in Christ we all save each other—and the world!

And sometimes saving someone doesn’t just mean protecting them from death! Sometimes the most important thing you can do for someone is to give them life, to give them hope, to save them from sorrow and despair, some times you can save them simply by pointing that God loves and has a plan for them

In this way like a drip of water, our small seemingly insignificant lives multiplied by the lives of millions upon millions of saints, of other Christians, will change the world.

So as God says to Jeremiah I say to you today: Do not say you are too young.

God has a plan for each of us a plan that will make us happy, a plan that will fill us with love, a plan that will require us to be heroes, and a plan which will transform us into His Saints in Heaven!

Therefore each and every day take some time to listen for God’s voice, in prayer, to listen for him calling. Listen to him say: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you before you came forth from your mother’s womb I sanctified you

Do not be afraid to listen to Him, and to follow His plan for you:
if you hear him calling you to be a parent
If you hear him calling you to give your life in service as a religious.
Do not be afraid to listen to him—men—if he calls you to the priesthood

God has a plan for us and he knows us better than we know ourselves: listen to Him and do not be afraid! Become the heroes that God made you to be! Become Saints!