Nativity of St. John the Baptist.  June 24, 2007 Our Lady of Grace.  7:30, 11:30, 6PM. Isaiah 49: 1-6. Acts 13: 22-26.  Luke 1: 57-66, 80.

When I was growing up the Mass was in Latin and the priest stood at the altar for the Eucharistic Prayer with his back to the people.  As a little boy one of the parts of the Mass that I remembered most was the very end.  The priest and the people would kneel and we would pray together for the conversion of Communist Russia.  I think I remember these prayers so well because they were one of the few things in the Mass in English and that I could participate in. As young priest I made a trip to Communist Russia.  The Russian customs agent was very upset with me because I had a copy of the Liturgy of the Hours with me – a Bible-book that he said was offensive to the Russian people as he threw it back into my suitcase.  I remember standing in Red Square at night looking at the bright red stars on towers surrounding the Kremlin.  I had journeyed to the other side of the world and I felt very alone in a country that threatened to overrun and destroy the United States as it had overrun and enslaved Eastern Europe and much of Asia. 

On Christmas Day 1991 the Communist flag that flew over the Kremlin was lowered for the last time.  On the next day Communist Russia was officially dissolved and replaced by the new Russian Federation.  Had God answered our prayers?  Is God involved in human events and the unfolding of human history? The Bible affirms that God works among us in mysterious and very real ways.  Very ordinary people often have a profound sense of God’s presence in their lives calling them to transform the world.

Zachariah, the father of St. John the Baptist, was one of many unknown and largely unimportant priests serving in the Temple in Jerusalem.    One day when he was offering incense in the Temple he was greeted by an angel of the Lord.  He was told that he and his wife would have a son. All that Zachariah could think about was the fact that he and his wife Elizabeth were too old to have children.  He refused to believe in what God was telling him about his life.  Because he refused to accept the voice of God revealed to him in prayer, the angel made him unable to speak, thereby reminding him that it is very dangerous to refuse to listen to God.   God was faithful to Zachariah even when he refused to listen.  When Zachariah went home his wife Elizabeth conceived a son in her old age.  The angel had told Zachariah that his son was to be named “John”.  It was only when Zachariah wrote “his name is John” on a tablet that he could speak again.  God made John the Baptist the great preacher and prophet who prepared the way for the ministry of Jesus.  John the Baptist reminds us that God speaks to and calls all those who seek him and listen to his voice.   God uses very ordinary people like Zachariah, Elizabeth and John the Baptist, to guide and change the course of human history. In order to experience God in our lives we must learn to listen to God, especially in prayer, and to take seriously what God says to us.  God is more than an idea.  God is a living, guiding presence in our lives.

At the same time that many of us were praying for the conversion of Communist Russia God was working in mysterious and hidden ways to answer those prayers.  Three years after the Communist Russian Revolution, a child was born in Poland.  His mother died nine years after his birth.  This young man lived through the atrocities of the Second World War.  He witnessed the murders and other cruelties of Hitler’s army and the attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.  He was forced to work in a stone quarry under near slave conditions under the Nazi occupation of Poland.  He was hit by a German truck and almost killed.  He experienced the murder of one of his close friends by the Gestapo.  When the Russian Communists arrived to liberate Poland from the Germans he experienced the brutality of the Russian Army and the dismemberment and enslaving of Poland by the Communist Regime. He actively worked to protect Polish culture and the Catholic Church as he studied for the priesthood in an underground, illegal seminary.  He was trapped behind the Iron Curtain by a Russian regime that was sucking the life blood out of Poland.  He ended up being the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow.

At the height of Communist power the dictator Joseph Stalin had said, “How big an army does the Pope have?”   Stalin was confident that without an army the Pope could do nothing to stop the spread of Communism.  Then it happened – on October 16, 1978 Cardinal Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, was elected Pope – the first non-Italian Pope in 400 years.  On June 2, 1979 Pope John Paul II returned to Poland as the new Pope.  The Polish people greeted the Pope with so much enthusiasm, defiance of the Communist government and freedom, that a mighty blow was inflicted on the Communist world from which it never recovered.  Many people mark the Pope’s visit to Poland as the beginning of the end for Russian Communism.  While it took another twelve years for the Russian government to fall, the arrival of a Polish Pope behind the Iron Curtain marked the beginning of the end.   Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of Communist Russia, said that the collapse of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible without the Pope.  God had worked in strange and mysterious ways to lead very ordinary people to greatness in freeing his people from the scourge of Communism.   Pope John Paul, a man who lost his mother at an early age and survived the curse of the German Nazi’s and the Russian Communists became a very significant part of God’s answer to our prayers for the conversion of Russia.

“All who heard about the birth of John the Baptist said, ‘What is this child to be?’  For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.  And the child grew and became strong in spirit…”  Ordinary people who hear and live the call of God in their lives have great power in God’s plan for the healing and salvation of the world.  For the greatness that God has in mind for each of us as we listen for God’s voice and follow his call, we give God thanks and praise.