Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John.
Glory to you, O Lord Jesus said, my sheep, hear my voice.
I know them and they follow me.
I give them eternal life and they shall never perish.
No one can take them out of my hand.
My Father who has given them to me is greater than all.
And no one can take them out of the Father's hand.
The Father and I are one.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
My parents got married later in life. My mom was 40, my dad was 39.
And for the life of me, I don't know how my dad survived as a bachelor that long, because at least after they were married, he had two responsibilities.
He cut the grass and he changed the oil in the cars.
Other than that, not so much.
My mother would do all the banking, pay all the bills, do all the shopping, cook all the meals, do all the cleaning, all of that stuff.
Well, it was after I was ordained a priest a few years that my dad decided he wanted to go visit his two closest cousins, who he grew up with, who both had moved out to the Las Vegas area.
Now, if you have ever seen or perhaps put one of your children on a plane to go see a grandparent, you know how scary that could be. Well, that's kind of how it was taking my dad to the airport. It was like, I hope there's a good person working for the airline that can chaperone him from plane to plane.
Well, he got out there and it was my job then to pick him up when he returned and it was down at Metro Airport.
Well, I got down there to pick him up and my dad had painful punctuality. He never wanted to be laid around him.
But what happened is after I initially looked at where his flight was coming into, this was before you were restricted from going back by the gates. You could get in and walk right up to him.
I found the gate and headed over to it. By the time I got near there, which would have been about 15 minutes before his flight was due, they had switched gates to the other side of the old Metro terminal.
So I started hot footing it across and a perfect storm happened. Because this is probably the last time this has ever happened in the airline industry. His flight was early and by the time I got to the right gate, the last person and the flight crew were getting off of the ramp.
Uh oh, he's gonna be mad now. Realizing I didn't think he knew how to get his baggage, I just started wandering the terminal looking for him. He looked a little bit like me, so he had a beacon on top of his head, which is a little easier to see.
But I couldn't find him.
And as I was just ready to go to somebody to see if they could page him, I walked by one of the men's room there.
And then it happened.
I heard what was totally familiar to me, this unbelievably loud sneeze.
And I'm like, oh my God, that's him.
So I leaned up against the wall out in the concourse and just waited.
And about 30 seconds later, he came walking out, said, hey dad, let's go get your bags. And everything was fine.
I knew and recognized sort of his voice.
Well, here Jesus is telling us that we know his voice, we recognize it, and I believe that to be really true.
The problem is sometimes when we hear that voice, we ignore it.
And I'm going to explain to you what I mean by that.
If you have ever been prompted or had a feeling in the back of your mind that you need to do something, from back in grade school when you had that feeling that you ought to go sit next to the kid that was all by themselves at lunch, to helping someone load their groceries in a parking lot, to calling someone you've lost touch with because you knew they were hurting, to any other possible act of kindness and love that you feel a prompting to, that is the voice of Christ.
But my guess is if you are as bad as I tend to be, oftentimes you ignore that voice because you're too busy, or you're too self absorbed, or you're just too distracted, well, there is a difference between knowing a voice and responding to it.
And hopefully we all get better at not just hearing the voice, but responding to it. Living out whatever it is Christ is asking us to do.
And if you want a litmus test of how to know if that's really Christ talking to you, I can give you a simple one.
If whatever it is you're being asked to do is 100% wrapped in love and compassion, I can guarantee you it's his voice.
And if it's ever the opposite of that, I can guarantee you it isn't his voice. Because absolutely everything he did for each one of us was totally wrapped in love and compassion.
We just need to do more than hear it. We need to respond.
