The Voice in the Crowd

Homily for the Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
When he was a boy, Joe looked forward to the Sunday mornings when he and his brother would be altar servers at his church. He found himself paying attention to the priest, watching everything he was doing during the mass. Somewhere along the line, Joe started to think that he might want to do the things the priest was doing when he got older. But for Aaron, things were very different. Growing up in a Protestant church, he didn’t really know anything about Catholics or Catholic priests until he was in college, majoring in art. He felt drawn to the Catholic faith, went through the RCIA process and joined the church, and then became a grade school art teacher after graduating from college. He loved art and teaching, and was good at it, but something else was drawing him.

On Saturday, these two men, now Father Joe Newton and Father Aaron Jenkins, were ordained to the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. The journey that has brought them to this point contained many twists and turns, but for both of them, the goal has always been the same: to follow Christ. The challenge for each of them was figuring out how to listen.

When Jesus called Matthew, the tax collector, the crowds were astonished – it simply did not make sense for a man who seemed to be a Messiah or King to surround himself with sinners, and tax collectors were most definitely at the top of the list of public sinners. But it seems like none of this phased this particular tax collector. When Jesus said, “Follow me,” Matthew just got up and followed him – no questions, no hesitation, no second-guessing. Think about it: Matthew was in the middle of a large crowd, sitting at his desk, counting money – as busy as a person could be – and yet he heard Jesus call him. Something must have been going on inside Matthew to make him ready to answer the call – he must have been listening, even in the midst of his activity, he must have been listening for God.

It’s an understatement to say that we live in a noisy world – most of us can easily identify with Matthew, the tax collector, the business man, constantly surrounded by crowds of people rushing around. Add to the noise of Matthew’s world the constant sound of people talking on cell phones, the rush through the fast-food drive through window, and the honking horns of busy traffic, and the noise can become deafening. Can you imagine being able to hear and comprehend the two, quiet words of Jesus in the midst of all this noise: “Follow me?” That is the real challenge for us: not the listening by itself, but listening in a noisy world. To hear one soft voice in the middle of a crowd, we have to become so familiar with what that voice sounds like that we know it when we hear it. To listen to God in a noisy world, we have to be ready all the time for God to speak to us. That might be the hardest part about being a Christian, because it takes time to get to know God, to recognize his voice in a noisy world, and in our impatience we want to hear God now. For the two priests ordained on Saturday, it took time to hear God’s call to the priesthood. For Matthew, it took a lifetime of collecting taxes before he became an apostle. It takes time to be able to hear the voice of God, but the more we work on it, the greater the reward when we finally do hear a soft, clear voice whisper through the noise, and we suddenly realize that we recognize the one who is saying: “Follow me.” And by that point, we realize that we are already following him.