“Your Vocation and John the Baptist’s” by Colleen O’Sullivan

“Your Vocation and John the Baptist’s” by Colleen O’Sullivan

Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

Hear me, O coastlands, listen, O distant peoples.  The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.  You are my servant, he said to me, Israel, through whom I show my glory. (Isaiah 49:1, 3)

My soul also you knew full well; nor was my frame unknown to you
When I was made in secret, when I was fashioned in the depths of the earth. (Psalm 139:14c-15)

John heralded his coming by proclaiming a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel; and as John was completing his course, he would say, ‘What do you suppose that I am? I am not he.  Behold, one is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten the sandals of his feet.’  (Acts 13:24-25)

All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, “What, then, will this child be?”  For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.  The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel.  (Luke 1: 66, 80)    

Piety

Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord!

Study

Some people go through life like veritable tumbleweeds, simply tossed from one thing to the next.   Wherever the wind blows, they are borne, never asking themselves if this is what God intended for them.  That God, however, does have a plan for each of us, I have no doubt.  And it is our lifelong job to discern that vocation and live it.

In today’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah says he was named and called by the Lord from the moment he came into this world.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, to be named is to be known.  Your name revealed a great deal about you.  Isaiah’s name meant “God is salvation.”  Isaiah was destined to be a prophet from the very beginning, reminding God’s people that salvation is to be found in God.

John’s name, too, had significance.  Left to their own devices, his elderly parents might have named him after his father, Zechariah.  But Zechariah had been silenced for months before the birth for his lack of faith in Gabriel’s message that he and Elizabeth would have a son, and he wasn’t about to go against the angel again. 

The child was named John, which means “God is gracious.”  And immediately people began to wonder who this infant would grow up to be if he wasn’t destined to follow in his father’s footsteps.  We know that John was the one sent to prepare the way of the Lord.  John preached in the wilderness and he baptized people, always with the admonition that he, John, was not the Anointed One.  No, the One so longed for was so great that John didn’t think himself worthy even so much as to unfasten his sandals. 

Action

In a broad sense, we all share John the Baptist’s vocation.  We may live it out in ways that differ greatly, but we’re all asked to point others to God, to draw our family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors into Christian fellowship with us.
 

Writing Daily Tripods each week is one of my ways of living that out.  I have a good friend who travels around the world, often to fairly remote areas, to offer missionaries pastoral care and counseling they otherwise have little or no access to.  Some people volunteer as Stephen ministers in their parishes.  Others are lectors.  Some are ordained to the priesthood.  Some are parents teaching their children what it means to be family and what it means to be a member of the family of God. 

Sometimes we’re even pointing the way to God without being conscious of doing anything special.  Years ago I worked with a young woman who was moving to another city.  She wrote notes to each person in the office before she left.  In mine she said that my faith had bolstered her wavering faith and brought her back to the Church.  I had no idea!

How are you living out your vocation?  Has that changed over time?

Picture:  Jacopo Tintoretto, Birth of St. John the Baptist (c. 1563), Church of San Zaccaria, Venice, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons