Called

Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, February 24, 2016

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 I will never forget the culmination of the process. 

Five men stand at the front of the church. Prayers invoking the Holy Spirit are prayed—several looong prayers. An elder of the church holds up to each man a row of matchsticks, all appearing to be identical—from the outside. Concealed by his hand is the fact that one of the matchsticks is way shorter than the others.

Each of the five men takes a matchstick, and the man who chooses the short one is thereby “called” to be our next pastor.

Choosing Mathias

Casting lots to determine God’s call was standard practice in Mennonite churches at that time. It was based on scripture—specifically, the story just read of the choosing of St. Mathias to replace Judas. We Mennonites believed it to be the way to get ourselves out of the way and let the Holy Spirit decide.

The Bible offers many stories of God’s call to various people. Some are dramatic. Every time I hear the story of Isaiah being touched on the mouth with a live ember, I shiver in awe and apprehension. What must that have been like!

On the other hand, 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 God is actually able to penetrate our defenses and be heard above the din of our busy, busy lives, we experience it as supernatural. It shouldn’t be. It should be as natural as the air we breathe.

It is also clear from call stories in the Bible that feelings of unworthiness in the face of God’s call have a long and honorable history: Moses, Isaiah, Amos, John the Baptizer and more.

Nevertheless, such feelings do not constitute justification for avoiding the call. God’s grace is sufficient, 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.

That does not mean you are called to ordained ministry, although you might be. It does not mean you are called to change jobs or careers or move to a new place or reinvent your entire life, although you might want to do that.

It does mean that whatever you are doing with this one glorious and precious gift we call life, God is at work loving and reconciling this world, and you, me, all of us… are called to be a part of that.

We are all called. If we have been baptized into Christ’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, then we are called to be ministers of that church in the world. The thing that unites all followers of Jesus is that we are all called.

The only questions are, what is each of us called to do? And how do we know?

Please do not hear in any of this the tired notion that “God has a plan and if you just pray hard enough and are good enough, God will send signs—like drawing the short matchstick—to tell you whether to take this job or that one, move here or there, sell the farm or not, start that business or not, be ordained or not, etc., etc.”

Consider the possibility that God really does not care much about those specifics!

Caroline Fairless is an Episcopal priest who has wrestled with this question of “call.” She came to the priesthood by way of a lover committing suicide, and she struggled mightily to experience herself and her call as authentic.

In her autobiography, she describes a particularly challenging life transition in which she found herself quite indecisive and praying madly for direction. Dear God, shall I go here or go there, or perhaps not to a parish at all but into some other kind of work for the church?

Then one day she is out walking the dog, who insists upon snuffling through every bush along the sidewalk. As she stands with her face in a bush that seems to be growing right before her very eyes, she remembers a conversation reported to her by a friend about his own conversation with God about his call.

It went like this:

Friend: Well, God, is this what you want me to do?

Silence.

Friend: Do you want me to be a minister?

Silence.

Friend: So, yes? Or no?

God: You already are a minister.

Friend: Okay. Word games. How about a priest? Do you want me to be a priest?

Silence.

Friend: So, yes? Or no?

God: You already are a priest.

Friend: But ordained? Seminary trained? Do you want me to be an ordained minister?

God: I don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference.

Friend: You don’t care?

God: I really do not care.

Fairless and the dog continue down the path, she struggling with the decision she must make about which of her options constitutes the “right call.” Suddenly, she says, I hear a smile, somewhere in the universe, ‘It really doesn’t matter, Caroline. It just doesn’t matter.’

By the end of her autobiography, Fairless is able to see and claim that the Spirit is in her and working through her, regardless of what, exactly, and where, exactly, she is doing whatever she is doing at any given moment in time.

Here’s what I think, she concludes. I think it’s not so much the particulars of God’s call—almost anything will do—(blasphemy, you say!). The call is to the person. The field hardly matters. Priest or plumber, carpenter, bus driver, poet, teacher, the call is to me. I am to be the richest, fullest, most loving, generous, kind, bold, fearless, funny, creative partner to God… and to you… that I can be. The context is secondary.

 

I do not mean to make light of the question of what, exactly, we are called to do. Countless times throughout 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, our rich imaginations and wishful thinking, our arrogance, our hope that our own answers to the mysteries of God are the only answers—these things and more get all tangled up in our sense of God’s call.

Tonight’s Gospel lesson is huge help in sorting out this business of being called. Jesus offers us the concept of “abiding,” and specifically of abiding in his love.

That means a lot more than “poke your head in the door once or twice a day.” It means more than “give thanks before every meal.” It even means more than “consult me about every decision you have to make.” I really can’t conceive that God wants to micro-manage our lives!
    

For our Lenten study, I and the Canterbury group at ULM are using this workbook and a series of short videos produced by the Brothers of St. John the Evangelist (available free online) to consider “growing” a rule of life. Rules of life give us focus and direction and support—like a trellis does a climbing rose—to grow and abide in Jesus’ love.

And when we abide in Jesus’ love, we will know what God calls us to do. It’s stated right here: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. And he goes on to say, ‘I have chosen you and appointed you to go out and bear fruit that lasts.’

What more do we need to know? Does it really matter whether we do that in a law office or a classroom? In a hospital or a TV studio? As a construction worker or a banker? As a garbage collector or a brain surgeon? As a lay person, a bishop, a deacon or a priest?

My friends we are all called, and at the most basic and foundational level, we are all called to the same thing: We are called to participate in God’s reconciling love already at work in the world. Everything else is window dressing.

In the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit.AMEN