Obedient Listening

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A
Isaiah 7.10-14 Psalm 24 Romans 1.1-7 Matthew 1.18-24

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Anyone can be a saint. Anyone can be holy. But to do that, we have to change. This Advent, we have been reflecting on how we can become holy, how we can become saints. We started on the First Sunday of Advent by hearing the story of St. Augustine, who reminded us that wanting to be holy doesn’t depend on who we are or what our life has been like; it simply takes a change of heart. On the Second Sunday of Advent, we reflected on the necessity of being welcoming and hospitable to everyone we meet. Last weekend, on the Third Sunday of Advent, we heard the call from St. Paul to not complain about one another, and we looked at the great power of words to both encourage and harm the people around us. Today, we hear one final lesson in the Scriptures, one more challenge to help us become holy: like Joseph, we must listen to God and be obedient to him. This last lesson might be the hardest part of trying to become a saint, especially for us today.

The first part is to listen to God – and the more noise we have in our lives, the harder it is to pick out God’s voice from all the many voices that compete for our attention. To hear God’s voice we have to spend time in prayer, reading Scripture, and growing in our faith – and then we have to tune out everything else and find silence. It’s not that God only speaks in silence, but that’s when it’s easiest for us to listen, because nothing else is competing for our attention. To become holy, we have to listen to God, we have to find some silence in our lives and spend quality time in prayer.

But then we have to take the next step. Joseph didn’t just listen to what God had to say, he obeyed God, even when God was asking him to do something he didn’t want to do. To do that takes courage. It takes faith. But most of all it takes trust. If we trust that God always has our best intentions in mind, if we trust that he will never abandon us, if we trust that he will always lead us toward joy and happiness, then we will follow him and obey him always. And the more we come to know God, the more we learn to trust him. When we see all the great things he is able to do, when we feel the outpouring of his love and grace, when we can trace the ways he has directed our lives, even through hardships and suffering – when we see what God has done, then trust becomes natural.

You might say that’s the difference between someone who is truly holy and someone who’s still working on it. A really holy person, a saint, trusts in God all the time. Most of us aren’t there yet. We want to trust God, but we have a hard time doing it. We have a hard time figuring out God’s plan, especially understanding the reason for the sufferings and trials that are in our paths. But if we really want to be holy, we have to work hard each day on listening to God, trusting in him, and obediently following his will for our lives. Because the truth is that God is in control, God is in charge of our lives. And if we learn to trust, then with God’s grace, we will find peace and joy in this life, and eternal happiness in the life to come.