When I was a child, perhaps 8 years old, the pastor of the Mennonite church my family attended retired. I do not remember the details of how a pool of candidates to replace him was chosen. But the culmination of the process is etched in my memory.
Five men stand at the front of the church. An elder of the church holds up to each man a row of matchsticks, all appearing to be identical. Concealed by his hand is the fact that one of the matchsticks is way shorter than the others. Each of the five takes a matchstick, and the man who chooses the short one is thereby “called” to be our next pastor.
Casting lots to determine God’s call was standard practice in Mennonite churches at that time. And it was based on scripture—specifically, the story in Acts 1 of how Mathias was chosen from between two candidates to replace Judas among the apostles.
Today’s lessons provide three examples of God calling humankind. The scene described by Isaiah (6:1-8) is high drama indeed. It appears to have been staged, not for Isaiah’s benefit, but to proclaim the glory of the Lord. Only when Isaiah realizes and proclaims the profound implication of what he is witnessing does one of the seraphs come with a glowing ember.
Every time I hear this story, I shiver in awe and apprehension. What must Isaiah have experienced in that vision to describe it as being touched on the mouth with a live coal!
Whatever it was, Isaiah is purified, his sins wiped out. And then he hears God’s call, and his answer reverberates through the centuries: “Here am I; send me!”
Simon, also called Peter, and his partners, James and John, receive their call from Jesus in person (Luke 5:1-11). The drama on this occasion surely makes the hearts of many a resident of this Sportsman’s Paradise, Louisiana, beat just a little faster: nets so full of fish that the boat begins to sink. Wow! What a catch!
The response of those Galilean fishermen was amazement, of course, mixed with a bit of apprehension. But most importantly, Peter falls to his knees and, like Isaiah centuries earlier, declares his unworthiness. Only then does Jesus first reassure him then issue the call.
I’m not sure why—perhaps because enough food for the table was never a sure thing when I was a kid—but I’ve always enjoyed imagining the peasants who had gathered to hear Jesus helping themselves to the boatloads of fish abandoned by the new apostles who went off to follow Jesus.
The reading we just heard from 1st Corinthians (15:1-11) does not describe Paul’s conversion, but we know that story. Paul is struck down by the light of Christ, the Resurrected One, and is left temporarily blind by the experience.
In his letter to the Corinthians, he too emphasizes his unfitness for The Call. But he emphasizes even more the divine source of his ability to answer the call. “But by the grace of God, I am what I am,” says Paul, “and his grace toward me has not been in vain” (NRSV).
The Bible offers many stories of God’s call to various people. In contrast to the drama of today’s three lessons, God’s call to the boy Samuel was so subtle that Samuel thought it was the old man in the next room. Perhaps it is only grown-ups who require supernatural phenomena to get their attention!
Or, more accurately, perhaps, when we actually hear God speaking to us, we experience it as supernatural. Back when I was in the process of discerning a call to the diaconate, I parked my vehicle one day in the middle of a Louisiana thunderstorm. Just as I opened the door and began to get out, thunder clapped… right in my face, so close and loud the sound waves pushed me back onto the seat of my car.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m listening, I’m listening!”
It is also clear from these stories that feelings of unworthiness in the face of God’s call have a long and honorable history. Nevertheless, those feelings do not constitute justification for avoiding that call. God’s grace is sufficient for all, and working through imperfect, unworthy vehicles like us is precisely the plan. Clutching our sins and gazing at God in disbelief is never a substitute for answering the call.
Now, at this point in building this sermon, I considered spending a few minutes on how Paul, the reluctant and by his own designation the “least” of the apostles, teaches us that ALL are called. Not just those who can prophesy and those who can preach, but also those who serve in the most humble capacity. All are called. And by the grace of God, all have something to offer God’s work in the world.
I also considered spending a few minutes on making a connection between “showing forth,” the theme of this season, and “going forth” in response to God’s call. And that would have made a decent sermon for this Fifth Sunday after the Eiphany.
But this week’s breaking news compels me to go briefly in another direction. Today, ten Baptist missionaries from the United States sit in a jail in Haiti, charged with kidnapping. They had gone to a remote area of Haiti and gathered up a busload of Haitian children. They were stopped by authorities as they were about to cross the border into the Dominican Republic.
The details of the story are not yet fully known. At least one version I read suggests the children, and perhaps some of their parents who were still alive, were seduced by pictures of a beautiful hotel with swimming pool and visions of a relatively luxurious future for the children.
But the part of the story that most gives me pause and compels me to speak to it today is the insistence of the missionaries that they were called by God to save those children by taking them away from their ruined homes and out of their traumatized country.
I believe them to be sincere. I believe they thought they were following God’s call. They might well have known what they were doing was illegal but took the risk willingly in their zeal to follow what they understood to be God’s call.
Countless times throughout human history, human beings have inflicted great cruelty and suffering upon each other in the name of God’s call. We do it because we are no less human for having been called. And so our own human motives, like piety, righteousness, and wanting our own answers to the mysteries of God to be the only answers—these things and more get all tangled up in our sense of God’s call.
Yes, we are called, but how do we know what we are called to do? How do we separate our own rich imagination, our arrogance, our wishful thinking about who we are… from our response to the needs of a hurting world?
As usual, it’s easier to come up with the questions than the answers. But one thing we can do to avoid going down a wrong-headed path is to test our sense of call in a community of faith. Today, not even the Mennonites use the system of casting lots to determine who is called to what. Both our individual calls to ministry and our ministries as a congregation merit discussion and evaluation from various points of view.
Another thing we can do is to bring those we would help to the table to participate in decision-making about how we can help them. It has too often been the vanity of developed nations and well-established religions to impose their beliefs and practices along with the charity they hand out. Bringing people to the table to change the way decisions get made requires a good bit more courage and faith in both God and humankind.
And so today let us give thanks for God’s call, let us accept the grace that enables us to respond to that call, and let us pray for wisdom in discerning how we are to carry out that call in ministering to the needs of the world.
AMEN.
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