January 16, 2005 Isaiah 49:1-7, John 1:29-42
God’s Calling, It’s for You
Standing in the corner of our dining room is a wooden piece of furniture which we use to display a silk plant, but which is really a pulpit, built by my grandfather for me when I was eleven years old, so that I could “play church.” Every Friday night, for a couple of years, when the relatives gathered at our house, I would invite them – my brothers would say “force them” – into the family room for a church service, where I would hand out printed bulletins, play the piano and stand at the pulpit and preach. “Richie’s Church”, my grandmother called it. This went on for two or three years, and only stopped when I got a guitar, and then began subjecting everyone to Friday night concerts instead. That went on until I got my driver’s license, and then was never seen at home on Friday nights ever again, much to the relief of my brothers!
The pulpit languished for years in my parents’ attic, until they moved and I got it back, and Pam thought it would make a good plant stand. On seeing it in our house and then hearing the story behind it, people often remark, “So you always knew you wanted to be a minister!” But that’s not really the case. Like most children, I “played at” a lot of things – from a civil engineer in the sandbox, as I constructed elaborate roads for my toy cars and trucks, to an astronomer as I rose at four a.m. to get a view of Jupiter through my 80 power telescope, to a chemist, as I concocted a portable water analysis kit which I took on family vacations to test the water, to a basketball player, farmer, cowboy, and of course a rock star and failing that, a folk singer. I tried out a lot of things, and was called to ministry only later, after I thought I had outgrown it, had “put away childish things.”
Now, after 28 years n the profession, and 35 years after first hearing the call, I am getting older, to the point where I find myself thinking about the hereafter. Like some of you, I get up, walk into the next room, and then ask myself, “What am I here after?”
That’s actually a very good question, one we all face in our lives, often more than once. What am I here after? What am I here for? What is my true calling? Like me, we try out a lot of things, but it’s not always easy to figure out what it is we are supposed to do.
As Mary Oliver writes:
"Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?"
That’s the question we all ask ourselves. And we often struggle for a lifetime figuring it out. Of course, once we do, we have to deal with the answer, which may be more difficult than not knowing.
Eric Utne, founder of the Utne Reader, puts it this way: “Like most Baby Boomers, I’m addicted to having options. We call it ‘freedom.’ The American Way. No limits. Keep all possibilities open at all times. We want A and B. When faced with a choice, always take both.... But this attachment to keeping all my options open was killing me. When I had to make major life choices, the decision making process always became terribly fraught and portentous. Behind one door stood the tiger and behind the other, hopefully, the lady in white (but more likely, a gorilla). I usually worked myself into a bundle of competing contradictions until I collapsed into a twitching puddle of indecision, letting ‘life’ somehow decide for me.”
That sentiment is echoed by the poet Lee Pieper:
"Many are called but most are frozen
in corporate or collective cold,
these are the stalled
who choose not to be chosen
except to be bought and sold."
Our Old Testament reading for the morning comes from the second portion of the book of Isaiah, with the prophet speaking to Israel after the kingdom had fallen apart, been conquered, and its leaders sent into exile. Even there, he said, they had a calling, to be “a light to the nations”. And the prophet himself was destined to call Israel to its mission. “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb God named me.” Though he was despised at the moment, great things would happen: “Kings shall see and stand up, princes shall prostrate themselves, because of the Lord who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”
As much as I believe in free will, the antithesis of predestination, our capacity to choose our course of action, there is a very real sense in which we do not choose at all, but are chosen. Chosen not for privilege, but for service. We are called, and our choice is whether to respond to the call or not. And I’m not talking simply about our jobs – though it is nice when our jobs and our calling coincide, and then we have a vocation – coming from the Latin vocare, meaning “to call.” I’m really talking about our lives!
As Christians, we are all called to ministry. Some are called to be set apart for ordained ministry, to be professionals, but all of us are called to ministry, just like the first disciples were in our Gospel reading. It’s kind of a general call, an all-encompassing call to a life: to follow Jesus, to live by the golden rule, to incarnate the spirit of the Beatitudes, to be welcoming and inclusive as Jesus was, to be generous and loving and forgiving, to live according to an alternative vision, even subversively, and at last, to take up our cross and die and rise with Christ. It’s a very general all-inclusive sort of call, to which we keep trying to respond as we go through our lives.
But I believe the call is also specific, based on your gifts, and the situation in which you find yourself. For ordained ministers, the call is always to a specific place. In fact, in the United Church of Christ, you can’t be ordained until you have a call. It’s not enough just to believe that the Spirit has anointed you, that God has called you to be a minister. That calling must be confirmed by a community of faith that issues its own call.
When Martin Luther King was completing his Ph.D., at a northern seminary, he was offered several jobs, but had to figure out which was a call. A couple of prestigious northern churches asked him to come and be their minister. One university offered him a comfortable teaching position, another invited him to join their administration. He would have done splendidly at any of these. But he was also offered the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In his book Stride Toward Freedom he writes, “I was very happy to have this offer, but I did not answer immediately; for I was to fly to Detroit the next morning for a preaching engagement..... It was one of those turbulent days in which the clouds hovered low, but as the plane lifted itself above the weather the choppiness of the flight soon passed. As I watched the silvery sheets of clouds below and the deep dark shadow of the blue above, I faced up to the problem of what to do about the several offers that had come my way. At this time I was torn in two directions. On the one hand I was inclined toward the pastorate; on the other hand, toward educational work. Which way should I go? And if I accepted a church, should it be one in the South, with all the tragic implications of segregation, or one of the two available pulpits in the North? ..... I thought, as the plane carried me toward Detroit, I have a chance to escape from the long night of segregation. Can I return to a society that condones a system I have abhorred since childhood?”
Well, King of course chose to accept the call to Montgomery, but not for the reasons you might think. He went there because the South was home, he wanted to get back to it, and he believed that segregation was going to break down, and it would be good to witness that. And, he reasoned, if after a few years he didn’t like it, he could always move from the parish ministry into teaching.
Little did he fathom the real “call” that awaited him, the one that came to him head on when one Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and the boycott that ensued cried out for leadership, as indeed, the whole civil rights movement was soon to do.
King answered this calling, found his true life’s purpose, his vocation, even if it was not what he set out to do in the first place, for like most, he was a reluctant prophet.
A phrase that pop psychology banters about is “follow your bliss.” Go with what seems natural for you, what makes you happy, and you’ll find your calling. I don’t know of any prophets of God who got there by following their bliss, and the same would be true for most ministers! I don’t really know any who got there without protest, who don’t put off the decision for as long as they can, until they are overwhelmed by God’s persistence and they see they have no choice. The first reaction that most people have when they sense God calling them is that God is making a big mistake! Must be somebody else with my name, and there are a lot of Smiths! So I can understand how even God could get confused!
Every one of the biblical prophets’ first reaction to being chosen by God was to say, “Wait a minute! I’m not worthy! You can’t mean me!” Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land, tell old Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” And Moses said, “Excellent! I’ll get right on it?” No! Moses was full of excuses. “Why me? Who are you, anyway? What if they don’t believe me? Besides, I have never been eloquent. I’m slow of speech and slow of tongue...” But God answered him, every time – just as God answered Isaiah, who said he was not worthy, a man of unclean lips; just as God answered Amos, who protested that he lack all qualifications necessary to be a prophet; just as God answered Jeremiah who said I’m only a youth, way too young to have any credibility; just as God answered Jonah, who heard clearly the command to go to Nineveh but ran the opposite direction. Prophets are always reluctant, and those chosen by God for any task doubt at first that God knows what God is doing. None of them got there by simply following their bliss. But God always knows what God is doing, and even though God chooses the most unlikely of people to carry out a task – like you and me – to bring a message of judgment or hope, to demonstrate a life of self-giving love, to bring forth justice in the land— God also equips them for the work at hand, scary as it may be! And so our protests come to naught.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?"
I think if it had been completely up to me, and I had simply followed my bliss, I’d still be back there in the sand box, building roads and bridges, though it might be a much bigger sand box, emerging occasionally to sing some songs at the local coffee house. But instead I chose to be chosen, to follow a calling that has made me far more than I would be if left alone. And that’s the final thing I want to say about “being called”. For not only are we all called to ministry in general, not only are we called to a specific place and task, a call that we usually greet with some reluctance, if not outright fear and trembling – in the final analysis we are called to become our authentic selves.
That may be different from our “natural selves.” For example, if left to my own devices, I would be happy working alone, reading, researching, solving problems, writing, creating. I am temperamentally an introvert and I have to work at getting out of my self. But thank God, I have a job that requires me to do just that, to reach out and engage others, to care, to stretch my natural self out of its comfort zone and become my authentic self – the person God has called me to become. Through this ministry to which I have been called, I meet people I never would have met, I become aware of issues of justice that I might have ignored, I put myself out there and act on them, I share with others in life’s most difficult and rewarding moments. My world is wider, and my soul is deeper than it would have been, without that call. And, hopefully, the world is a better place because I respond – just as Martin Luther King’s world was better as he responded to the call – to be the drum major for truth and justice, and to become his authentic self.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?"
I hope and pray that you will plan to respond to God’s plans, and say “Yes” to God’s call – to ministry, to a task, to your authentic self. May God grant you open ears, big hearts, and willing hands!
