4th Sunday of Lent (B) – March 10, 2024

St. Paul – Lyons, KS

2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23; Psalm 137:1-6; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21

GET ALL MATERIALS FOR “RECONNECTING…” INCLUDING HOMILY HANDOUTS, DEEPER DIVE VIDEOS, AND DISCUSSION GUIDES HERE.

The Practice of Listening

Just before her death, Mother Teresa made a rare TV appearance on 60 Minutes. And there’s a spot in the interview where Dan Rather—back in all of his 90’s Glory—mid interview, Dan asks her, “When you pray, what do you say to God?” And Mother Teresa is quiet for a moment, but then she says, “I don’t say anything. I listen.” I listen. What Mother Teresa is referring to is a a stage of prayer that, sadly, many of us followers of Jesus never experience. But for those who do, it’s like a whole other dimension to our life with God, this relationship with Him called prayer.

There is a big shift that has to take place in our relationship with God, this relationship we’ve been talking about for six weeks. And that’s a shift from a one-sided monologue, to a dialogue. We’ve talked about our need for prayer, our need to implement a regular practice of prayer in our daily life, the need for silence, the heart. But now, today, we need to address: “Well is this Other going to speak?” In other words, we need to talk about hearing God.

And the reason this is so important for us is because (listen)—learning to hear God’s voice is the single most important task of a follower of Jesus, of a disciple. Why? Because if we’re not listening to him, that means we’re listening to someone else or just to ourselves. And that’s not going to get us anywhere.

There is a famous passage—a little later on from the passage in John’s Gospel that we read today—Jesus is talking about us as his sheep. He is the shepherd, we are the sheep. And he says, “My sheep hear my voice… They follow because they know [my] voice.” Isn’t that beautiful? Go look it up on YouTube: there are videos of random people trying to call the sheep, and nothing happens; but when the shepherd comes and calls, the sheep come running. It’s really cool! But the question is: Do you? Do you know the voice of the Good Shepherd? Do you feel confident that you can hear his voice? That you can hear and follow him? God speaks to me in different ways, and throughout my life I’ve learned little by little the ways God prefers to talk to me. But do you know how he speaks to you? Do you? Can you hear God?

What does it mean to “hear” God’s voice?

The first question is, “Well what does it mean to really hear God’s voice?” Like, for instance, I’ve told you my story before. When I was fourteen years old, I was over there at camp WaJaTo, at Totus Tuus camp. And one night while in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, kneeling in front of the Eucharist, I heard clearly—not an audible voice, but a voice clear as day in my mind: “Michael, I want you to be a priest.” Clear as day. Freaked me out. But clear as day. Ok: when we talk about hearing God, it is easy to assume that that is what we’re talking about. And many of you will tell me and have told me, “Well Father, I sit there and listen and listen and listen…and I don’t hear anything!” 

But here’s the thing: when we talk about hearing, we’re talking about much more than just hearing words. Remember, we live in the modern world. And in the modern world there are a lot of mindsets and assumptions that aren’t in sync with the Christian worldview. One of them is that hearing doesn’t just mean sound waves hitting your ear and being interpreted by your brain, no. It’s so much more!

Growing up in the Brungardt house—well, we were strange. For one, we based our daily routine off of the lives of Benedictine monks. My dad went to Benedictine College and was very much struck by the monks and their lives. And in our house, we set up a routine very similar to theirs: prayer and work, work and prayer. These monks, though, live by a very ancient rule of life, a Rule written by a man named St. Benedict. And in the very beginning of that Rule—literally, the first word: obsculta, listen. Benedict tells his monk, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.…The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience.” Do you see how quickly and seamlessly Benedict moves from listening, to attending with the heart, to the work of obedience? HEARING is much, much more than just sound waves hitting our ear. Hearing—in the Judeo-Christian worldview—hearing involves a response, an obedience.

Benedict is actually playing off of the Jewish prayer called the shema. Just like we as Christians have prayed the Our Father three times a day since the earliest of days—well we got that practice from the Jews, who three times a day would pray the shema. And the shema goes like this: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” You know that one, you’ve heard it before. But shema is the first word: hear. And that word, shema, in Hebrew—it means so much more than sound. It means paying attention, focusing in on. It means responding to what is heard. (Have you ever been yelling for you kid to come downstairs or come inside—but they don’t. And when they finally do—what do you say, “Didn’t you hear me?” Isn’t it infuriating when they say, “Well, yeah…” Why? Because you didn’t just want sound waves to hit their ears; you wanted them to respond!) That’s why Jesus will quote that famous passage from Isaiah: “They have ears, but do not shema—they do not hear.” And for Jesus, when he is asked what is the most important of the laws, he quotes this prayer! To hear, to respond—this is essential to the life of a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Why listen to God’s voice? We Trust Him

So why do we say we’ve never heard him? Because we haven’t heard audible voices from the clouds? No, we’ve heard God—but have we heard him, have we shema-ed God? Because let’s be honest: we don’t always like what we hear. And so this is the second thing: I don’t think the question is so much,“What does it mean to hear him?” as is it, “Why listen to him?” Learning to hear God’s voice is the single most important task of a follower of Jesus, of a disciples—learning the obey his voice is the even greater task. What did St. Benedict say? “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.…The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience.” Hearing is actually pretty easy. But hearing? This is the challenge.

I think we see this exemplified perfectly in our readings today. This first reading from 2^nd Chronicles—it is a vignette from the history of Israel, a time when things were falling apart. At this point in the story, God has given covenantal promises to Abraham, formed a people through his son Isaac and his son Jacob, led the people out of slavery in Egypt to the promise land, given them an international kingdom—and yet everything is falling apart. Why? Listen: “In those days, all the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people added infidelity to infidelity, practicing all the abominations of the nations” (2 Chron 36:14). Infidelity to infidelity, did what every other nation was doing. And what was that? Giving their life to idols, giving their life to everything except God. Politics—they were always worried about politics. Work—they had stopped observing the Sabbath rest. Sex—they were controlled by their sexual desires. Child sacrifice—they killed their own kids. Sports—their kids’ sports were more important than anything else in life. Ok, I made that last one up—but you see my point? Can you see yourself in that? The people were no longer listening to God! Their lives were not organized around God, they were not a response to God and everything God had done for them. Their lives were just like everyone else’s—and “every else’s lives”…they were listening to anyone and anything—anyone except God, that is.

Hearing God—it’s actually pretty easy. But hearing? That’s the challenge. Learning to obey what we hear is a challenge. Because in order to do this, we have to believe—or a better word there is we have to come to trust that obedience to God is not an obstacle on the path to a happy life. It is the path. So why do we avoid it? Why don’t we obey?

St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits—Ignatius said this: sin is “an unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness.” This is what happened with Adam and Eve, this is what still happens to you and me: we are deceived into believing the lie that what God wants for me, obedience to God, isn’t going to make me happy. It’s an obstacle to my happiness. Right? That’s what our modern culture has taught us! “I’ll be free when I can just do whatever I want!” That’s such a lie. 

But that’s the question, the challenge we have to face: do I trust that what Jesus wants for me, the path he wants to lead me down, is for my greatest happiness? I know I sound like a broken record—but it really is the issue: Many of us still DO NOT TRUST, WE HAVE NOT PLACED OUR FAITH IN Jesus Christ and His Church. We come to church. We know that it’s important. But we also—in small ways and not so small ways—we are what we call “Cafeteria Catholics”: we pick and choose what we like and don’t like, what we follow and don’t follow. And when that’s the case—well, we’re still just listening to ourselves, adding infidelity to infidelity.

How do I hear God?

The key to hearing God voice—the “how?” (we’ve talked about the what, the why)—the “how?” of this is truly becoming his disciple. In other words, a process of learning to trust Jesus’ wisdom over our own—slowly but surely, year after year. And until we come to trust (in the deepest parts of our hearts)—to trust that what God wants for us is only our deepest happiness, we will not desire to even hear God’s voice much less obey it; we won’t want to know what God is saying to us because we’ll be scared that God may ask us to do something we don’t want to do, and we will still trust our own desire desires more than His. But once we come to trust Jesus wisdom and good intentions toward you and I, the driving aim of our life will increasingly become to listen for his voice; not to control our life, but to more deeply surrender it.

So how do we hear? Well, real briefly, I want to walk through just a few practical ways we can hear God so that we can HEAR God. Are you with me? Ok.

The first is Jesus and the Church. And this may seem like a “duh!” sort of answer, but seriously. If you want to know what God is saying, if you want to hear Him—listen to Jesus and the Church. The Church is the continuity of Christ in time, the Church is how Jesus continues to speak to us, to be among us. What Jesus says, what Jesus teaches, the Church teaches—that’s where to listen. Do you want to hear God’s voice? Do you want to hear Jesus? Then listen to the Church. Listen to the teachings, the Tradition, the Magisterium of the Church. Fr. Mike Schmitz just finished a thing called Catechism In A Year—you can listen to a summary of everything the Church believes and teaches. Obsculta, listen carefully to the Church.

Another way—again, a kind of “duh!”—is the Scriptures. In the Sacred Scriptures, God speaks to us. A very serious thing we need to implement in our lives as Catholics is a deeper love for and study of the Sacred Scriptures. This is our story, our God speaking to us. We fill our minds and ears with so many talking heads nowadays. But have you ever thought about immersing yourself in the Word of God? There are so many lies we face in our world. What if we could begin to combat them with the Truth? And I don’t mean start quoting the Bible to get laws changed, no. I mean existentially, personally: what if your life could be changed by being soaked in God’s Word? So I put on your handout a simple practice called lectio divina—don’t let the fancy word scare you. It is a simple practice of reading and praying with Scripture—something we should do daily. Why? Because this is a powerful way to hear God speak to us.

A last big one is just the practice of listening prayer. In other words, like Mother Teresa said, “I don’t say anything. I listen.” But what does that look like? Again, it’s different for different people. But in essence, it’s allowing God to guide our minds and hearts; inviting God into our thoughts; allowing him to stir up memories, place things on our heart—and then listening for what he is saying to us. For example, one day in April of 2021, I was sitting in the chapel at St. Mary in Derby, doing my normal holy hour—just there in silence, doing this sort of listening prayer, thinking and allowing the Lord to guide my thoughts. And out of nowhere, literally out of left field, I begin to think about Lyons, St. Paul, about Fr. Rick up here. And it just becomes clear as day in my mind: I could be sent to Lyons. Four weeks later I get called into the Bishop’s office—and I knew what he was going to say before he said it. God speaks, but do we listen?

“My sheep hear my voice”

So yeah ,there are so many different ways: through our circumstances, through our holy desires, through prophetic words—people saying things that make a lightbulb go off in our mind—dreams, on and on and on! But at the end of the day it comes back to that same question: God is speaking, we hear him all the time; but do we really hear him, do we follow him? Learning to hear God’s voice is the single most important task of a follower of Jesus, of a disciples—learning the obey his voice is the even greater task. In this very famous Gospel passage that everyone knows, “For God so loved the world…”—that passage continues: “the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light.” And that’s been the issue for ages.

But perhaps—perhaps we can be the people that prefer the light. Here’s my challenge: take some time this week, three times this week—and simply pray lectio divina. Use the readings for the Mass today. Three readings, three times this week. Maybe get your Bible and find these three passages in your Bible. And then read, and pray, and listen.

Why? Because when we hear His voice, when we learn to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, when we follow him—he leads us only to the fullness of life. When we hear him, truly hear him—our lives are changed.