Please God and your fears will be eased

Published: January 16, 2010

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor

By Bishop Anthony B. Taylor

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor delivered the following homily Jan. 3 during a "Come and See" vocation retreat at St. John Center in Little Rock.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Epiphany of the Lord. The word "epiphany" means "manifestation" and celebrates the eye-opening events whereby Jesus' identity and role in God's plan were first revealed -- and there are three such epiphanies in the Gospels.

Today's feast we actually call "Epiphany" and the events in today's Gospel reveal four aspects of God's plan: 1) the Magi are foreigners, proving that Jesus came to save all nations; their gifts reveal that Jesus is 2) king (gold), 3) God (frankincense) and 4) will die for our salvation (the myrrh to anoint his body for burial).

Next Sunday's feast of the baptism of the Lord is in fact a second four-fold epiphany because it reveals that 1) he is the Christ (who will baptize with the Holy Spirit) and the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity: 2) the voice of the Father 3) declares Jesus to be his Beloved Son 4) while the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove.

And two weeks from now we have Jesus' third epiphany at the wedding feast of Cana, where he changes water into wine, 1) manifesting the arrival of the Messianic age and 2) prefiguring the Eucharist with which he continues to feed us today. God has a plan for our salvation and these epiphanies open our eyes to Jesus' role in that plan.

Jesus has a role for you in his plan too, and I hope that this "Come and See" retreat has been something of an epiphany for you, something of an eye-opening experience for you, to help you begin to discover what God's will for you might be. The question I'd like to address now is: Where do you go from here? This is a very important decision -- your future happiness depends on it. Indeed, since it's a matter of doing God's will or not, your choice even has implications for your eternal salvation! After all, if God is calling, how can you refuse?

I am a very fortunate person because I always knew that God had a place for me in his plan. That already before I was born, he had chosen me for something he wanted me to do with my life. That step by step he would give me and develop in me all the gifts I would need to accomplish his will. But at first I didn't know what that would be.

As an 11th grader four possibilities stood out in my mind: to be a doctor, a lawyer, a social worker or, yes, a priest. I came from a religious family and I was active in my parish. But simply going to church is not the same thing as having a living, personal relationship with Jesus and the way I got to know God's will for me was by getting to know Jesus a lot better. And I got to know him through prayer, study and action.

At that time, as a 17 year old, I began to spend 10 minutes a day in prayer (which later grew into a daily holy hour), study about the world around me in which I was to do God's will and action: doing things every single day to act on what I thought Jesus wanted me to do that day. And then reflecting later on how things went -- which then ideally I would bring to prayer and study the following day and then try to act on again in accord with what Jesus had taught me in our 10 minutes together that morning.

The thing I like most about being your bishop is celebrating the sacrament of confirmation, in which God gives you the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. And my favorite of these seven gifts is "fear of the Lord" because it is the least understood. Fear of the Lord does not mean that being terrified of God out of concern that he might do us harm. Rather, it has to do with deciding who we most want to please.

When I was your age, the thing I most feared was the rejection of others -- I think every teenager fears this. The need to feel accepted, the need for the approval of others is especially strong in adolescence but it does not go away as we grow older, even as we learn to deal with it better. In that sense, we fear our friend, that is, we fear losing their approval and we do things to try to win their acceptance, including things we know are wrong because we fear their disapproval. And that's where fear of the Lord comes in. Whose approval do you most want: God's approval or the approval of your friends? Whose rejection do you fear the most? Or put more positively, who do you most want to please? Whose will do you most want to do?

Hence the question I asked you earlier: If God is calling, how can you refuse? Fear of the Lord means living for something bigger than yourself. Most of you have already received this gift in confirmation, so now it's a matter of allowing God step by step to develop in you this gift he has already given you. But like any other relationship, this won't just happen automatically. To get to know Jesus, you've got to spend time with him in prayer, study and action -- every single day. If you start your day with 10 minutes of prayer, you will soon discover that you fear the disapproval of others less, because the person you most want to please is Jesus.

I discovered that the more I focused on doing what Jesus would want, the less I worried about what others thought of me -- I was no longer willing to give them that power over me. And ironically, my friends' regard for me increased precisely because I was not afraid of them, was not afraid of their disapproval, was unwilling to do wrong in a self-defeating attempt to gain their acceptance because I was living for something bigger than them and indeed, for something bigger than myself. What I wanted above all was to do God's will every day. That's how I eventually discovered God's will for my life, that God had chosen me to be a priest. At which point I made Mary's words to the angel Gabriel my own: "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. May it be done in me according to your word." And the same can -- and should -- be true for you.