Called to What?

August 22, 2010
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 13:10-17
So God says to the young man, Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
The story of the calling of a prophet. Scripture relates many such tales, but what have they to do with us? Are you called to be a prophet to the nations? Am I called to that?
Frankly, I doubt it, and if so, then clearly we’re not doing so well at it. The nations don’t seem to be paying a whole lot of attention to what we’re saying or doing here. Truth be told, I don’t think the nations know we’re here at all.
One the other hand, we do have a story worth sharing here. In fact, one of the most heartening things I’ve heard in a while was a word from a seminarian in Richmond who says that she’s been singing the praises of Clarendon ever since she preached here last winter. You may remember her, Allison Unroe, one of the many kids we’ve met over the years at Camp Hanover. Allison told us this month that lots of her friends are looking for and longing for a church like this one. So, yes, we do have a story to tell, but are we called to tell it to the nations?
Frankly, I’ll be happy when we can tell it well to ourselves, and I’ll be thrilled when we figure out how to tell it well to the broader Clarendon community.
So, if we’re not called to be prophets to the nations, to what are we called? To what are you called?
What does it mean, really, to be called? To anything?
Put only slightly differently: what are you supposed to do with this one life that you’ve been given? When we can answer that central question, then these others flow from it: Are we already doing it? Doing it well and completely? Could we be doing it better and more fully? How?
The texts this morning invite us to explore these questions, and they invite you to explore your own sense of call as well.
But first, here’s a commercial interruption, from our sponsor: Sunday, September 12, we begin our next Life Direction Lab in the CALL program that we developed a few years back. A number of folks here have been through this small-group journey, and it’s gotten richer and fuller as we’ve repeated it. Perhaps this fall is your time to explore your own vocational journey, your own sense of call. If so, I urge you to sign up, and I’m happy to talk with you about it.
Whether or not you participate in the Life Direction Lab to explore the fine lines of your own vocation, the Jeremiah story and the gospel text invite us to consider some broad outlines of vocation this morning.
It would be easy to listen to the Jeremiah text and respond, “that’s all well and good for him; he was called to be a prophet, to be, as it were, a religious professional. That’s not my call.”
Without getting into the “job description” of the prophet in ancient Israel, let that question complicate the matter for our contemporary context. In other words, “yes,” to be sure, there is a legitimate question to ask of the text: is this about the calling to specific roles within faith communities or should we hear a more general word in this text?
The question itself gets at a problem that is, frankly, endemic in contemporary American culture for people of faith. Do we believe in vocation, in calling, any more?
A few years back, in a work entitled simply, Vocation, Douglas Schuurman noted that many Americans find it “difficult and strange to interpret their social, economic, political and cultural lives as response to God’s calling.”
In other words, when you consider your job do you feel as if your work is something God is calling you to? When you watch TV or go to the movies or listen to music or take in a ballgame or otherwise participate in the culture do you feel the leading of God? When you shop or make major economic decisions, are you following God’s call? When you participate in the political process do you do so in response to the call of God?
Does God have anything to do with any of that? Or do we sense God’s call only with respect to our most private lives or through participation in the life of the church?
In other words, do we reserve a carefully and narrowly circumscribed sphere of our lives for God and otherwise keep the Divine at bay, equally carefully fencing God out of our work lives, our cultural lives, our economic lives and our political lives?
Personally, I find these among the most difficult and challenging questions we affluent North American Christians can ask ourselves because they get at the heart of what it means to try to follow Jesus into the world and they challenge so many of our comfortable assumptions about work and about church, as well. So, whether I’m trying to preach a pastoral sermon responding to the lives you lead or an ecclesiastical sermon trying to build up the body of Christ, that is, the church, these fundamental questions nag at me, challenge me, confuse me.
So, here’s what I propose to do about it. First, I’ll share just a bit of my personal struggle, which I believe is not that different from many of yours. Then, I’ll point to where that struggle crosses with a deeper challenge that is, I believe, part and parcel of our economy. Finally, I’ll propose some ways through the confusion.
I began pondering the whole “church professional” sense of ministry in my own life when I was in high school. I’m sure that came from the stew of growing up in the church, having parents who are both elders, developing a mentor/older brother relationship with the youth minister at our church, lionizing Martin Luther King and William Sloane Coffin, and finding the conservative religiosity of so many of my friends so deeply troubling.
If you look back at your own life, you will no doubt see a web of relationships and experiences, of heroes and mentors, of gifts and circumstances that shape who you have become and the choices you have made about work.
I turned my back on the church as a job site even while pursuing a graduate degree in the best Divinity School in the country, because, frankly, I just couldn’t imagine a congregation that could put up with me or that I could put up with, and because I have always carried a satchel full of God questions that seemed like more baggage than a “man of God” should claim.
On the other hand, I have always felt that I should be giving my life to something bigger than I am, and that there should be some essential connections and congruity between what I say I believe in and the work that I devote so much time to. It was never enough for me to work for an enterprise that “did no harm.” I felt called, driven even, to put my time where my heart was led. After all, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives.
That sense of congruency, or, in any case, the desire for congruency, lies at the heart of the traditional Protestant understanding of vocation, captured well in the early 20th-century Book of Common Prayer’s prayer “For Every Man in His Work.” Recall the era reflected in the language: “Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men.”
Unfortunately, it feels altogether impossible to speak that prayer today – and not because of its outdated language, but rather for its quaint perspective on work and the economy.
As Wendell Berry wrote more than 20 years ago, “What is astonishing about that prayer is that it is a relic. Throughout the history of the industrial revolution, it has become steadily less prayable. The industrial nations are now divided, almost entirely, into a professional or executive class that has not the least intention of working in truth, beauty, and righteousness, as God’s servants, or to the benefit of their fellow men, and an underclass that has no choice in the matter. Truth, beauty, and righteousness now have, and can have, nothing to do with the economic life of most people.”
Truth, beauty and righteousness, however, have everything to do with the Christian life, and therein lies the challenge, to me as a “church professional” and to all of us in our several callings, in our work, in our lives. The challenge arises because only those in the full-time employ of the church, we “religious professionals,” can be expected to lead lives of equally full-time devotion to God’s purposes of truth, beauty, righteousness and all the rest. In other words, only the paid professionals can be “full-time Christians” whereas everyone else must serve the economy first and serve God in your spare time.
The situation is flipped entirely from the one Jesus confronts in the gospel text. By his actions in the Luke text, and his words in similar stories, Jesus insists that the Sabbath was made for us, not the other way around. Our challenge lies in trying to see the economy the same way. Are we made to serve the economy, or is the economy made to serve us?
What do our lives say about that question?
For Jesus, it is clear that life – all of life – is supposed to be about healing, about creating wholeness out of brokenness, about doing justice, about speaking and honoring the truth that sets us free, about care for the beauty of the created order, about living righteous lives. These texts – the call of a young prophet, the healing of a woman – challenge us to ask ourselves what our lives are about? What our whole lives are about? For God does not desire simply the edges, the margins, the extra bits, the spare time of our lives. God wants the whole of it.
The good news in all of this lies in the guidance that the Jesus story, as a whole, provides. It is abundantly clear from the gospels that we are called to particular ways of living – ways of healing, wholeness, love and justice. It is equally abundantly clear from the gospels that this way of living is not easy, nor should we expect it to be embraced or enabled by the broader economy in which we must function.
That may not sound like good news, but it is, because the gospel story also makes clear that we are not alone in this journey, this struggle, and that we are invited to struggle together as a new community that explores and exhibits to the world alternative ways of being in the world. In a broken and fearful world, no call, no job, no vocation can be more important. The good news is embodied right here, as we try to live together into the great economy that is the kingdom of God.
Friends, that is what the journey of call, of vocation, is all about. Struggling together as a community of the beloved: that is what we are called to do. That is what the world needs to see. We have been, as it turns out, called to be prophets to the nations.

Lakes, Woods and Fire

August 15, 2010
Both of our passages this week – the gospel text from Luke and the words of Isaiah – could well be read as weather reports, and weather reports for the present time, at least for the Richmond area where I’ve been the past two weeks: scorching heat drying the earth to dust, followed by clouds rising in the west bringing storms.
I can read the appearance of earth and sky – and weather.com – with the best of them, but interpreting the present time? Well, that’s a tougher one, to be sure.
What are the signs of our times? The signs of our lives? What do they portend, and how might we respond?
I wish I knew. I bet you wish you knew, too. I even bet you wish I knew, so that I could tell you. Maybe you came this morning hoping I might be able to do that. It would surely bring us some comfort, some peace, some unity of purpose and I honestly wish I could do it. I like comfort. I like peace. I don’t like conflict and division.
On the other hand, in Luke’s gospel Jesus puts it straight out there: I did not come to bring peace to the earth, but rather division.
So perhaps our own lack of comfort, our own discomfort with the signs of the present time, should not be so distressing. After all, if we read the present time with comfort, then there’s probably something seriously the matter with us. Look around at the world these days. Gulf Coast oil spill. Great Recession. Ten consecutive years of American warfare. Not to mention the weather, and what it might be trying to tell us! Are you OK with all that?
Think closer to your own hearts. Families fracture along no-fault lines. We all suffer the vicissitudes of our own human frailty. Our bodies fail, friends and loved ones die. Wills falter. Like Paul, we do the very thing that we hate, and we can’t seem to stop. It often seems as if we are caught up in circumstances not of our own making and far beyond our own control.
At the time of Isaiah, the people are similarly torn asunder by circumstances far beyond their control. They are exiles living in a foreign land. The early chapters of the Isaiah collection, including the passage we just read, tell the people how they got where they are, and place the blame squarely on those who oppressed the widows and orphans, those who are unjust and who lead the people into violence.
By the time of Jesus, the people might be called resident aliens, exiles in their own land; dwelling in a homeland, the people live under Roman occupation and domination.
Jesus utters the challenging words of Luke 12 as if to say, “which side are you on?” "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”
Choose this day whom you will serve. It is as if Joshua has returned. Jesus seems clear, it is a time of crisis, a time for decision.
Think back to the list of issues that confront us right now. Add your own to my brief account. Think about these things: social, economic, foreign, environmental crises and then add your personal concerns. It is a weighty load. Seriously. If we are OK with that stuff and all the rest, then there is something seriously the matter with us.
Moreover, if we think that we can solve these problems – the ones that can be solved – on our own, without deep disagreements over both ends and means, over tactics and strategies, then we are also seriously deluded.
I don’t believe for a moment that such delusion is our problem. No. We know much of what is wrong in our own lives and in the life of the world, and we are not OK with those things that can be changed.
The real problems lie in knowing what to do, and then in doing it, and in figuring out what to do when that doesn’t turn out the way we expect!
But take heart! God seems to have a similar problem in Isaiah. God plants a vineyard and expects a fine fruit to grow, but instead some nasty wild grapes take hold and the wine is going to be a bitter vintage. God expected a fine meritage but got grape Nehi instead. God expected justice, but got violence instead. God expected the beloved community but got … well, the Middle East.
Last week at camp I made a bamboo flute. I researched before I began the process. I measured carefully. I placed the holes at precisely the right spots on the shaft. I expected a standard Western tuning scale. I got this much out of my first try, and even “flute 3.0” doesn’t play a standard scale, at least insofar as I can play it.
Mick Jagger was only half right. Truth is, you simply don’t always get what you think you are going to get, much less what you ask for. As the Isaiah text suggests, this is true even for God.
Indeed, much of scripture suggests that God doesn’t always get what God imagines – at least not on the first go round.
To a great degree, though, the entirety of the Jesus story is about the second go round, second chances, another shot – in other words, it’s about grace.
And the challenging words that open Luke 12 offer a surprising form of that grace. Jesus’ words about division are usually read as a negative challenge, a threat even. But what if they are, instead, an invitation to dwell more fully and honestly in our human condition?
A while back, writing in Sojourners, Chilean author Michaela Bruzzese, suggested a different reading. What if, she wondered, “division is not only inherent to our faith, [but] actually essential to it”? In other words, she suggested, “Given that individual and communal perspectives are profoundly limited and based on different life experiences, expectations and needs, our interpretations must be understood as only part of the story. For who among us is the possessor of the whole truth, the most accurate interpretation of scripture and the most loyal implementation of its message? Jesus’ words could be a warning that no individual, denomination, or faith can (or should) even attempt to make such a claim.”
I’ve been reading a biography of John Calvin this summer, and it simply amazes me how many people were jailed, exiled, tortured or executed over differences of opinion about such things as the meaning and interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, or the doctrine of predestination, or the names children could or could not be given upon baptism.
Oh, to be sure, there were all kinds of secular political considerations at stake in such disputes as well, but it is clear that the Reformers and their opponents took the theological issues with deadly seriousness and would have interpreted Jesus’ words on division as a demand to choose which side one is on. It was a choice with often fatal consequences.
But what if Jesus is inviting us, instead, to live faithfully into division from the limited points of view available to us this side of the Kingdom of God? What if the whole of the gospel is condemning not disagreements – which are inevitable – but violence – which is not.
Disagreement is inevitable for we are all limited in knowledge, perspective and experience. But it is ours to choose how to live in the midst of disagreements. Pick an issue – personal or political, individual or broadly social. There will be more than two sides, and chances are exceptionally good that no single answer will suffice. Disagreement may well be absolutely necessary in order to solve complex concerns.
I’ve been at camp for the past two weeks. You put a couple of hundred people together and force them to live in small groups under occasionally trying circumstances – 100 degrees, no AC, living in platform tents or small cabins, cooking over an open fire, violent thunderstorms and so forth – disagreements will happen.
The choice before you, in every such moment, is how you will respond. Will you hang together, as Ben Franklin famously asked, or hang separately? Will you pull together, or pull apart?
There was a young man who lived in a village in Africa … so begins a story that we used to tell in camp. Before his day is done, he will understand divisions that destroy and those that can be united to some deeper purpose.
He was a young man who had grown into an outstanding hunter. He often led the other men of his tribe on their hunts for big cats, one of whom would feed the entire village for several days.
The older men told tales of the great hunters of the past; hunters who could track and bring down even elephants.
The young man was determined to match those great hunters of the past.
In the days preceding the one I want to tell you about, the hunters of the tribe had seen a few signs of elephants in the grasslands a few miles from their village. So the young man decided to rise before dawn, and set out well before the others. He would find, track and kill an elephant that would feed his family for an entire season. He would be the hero.
Amazingly enough, he almost pulled it off just that way. He did go out and find tracks. He followed them with great care, and just as the sun began to rise over the savannah he spotted a huge bull elephant. He snuck up on it with great care, silently stalking it. He pulled out his finest spear, the one he’d practiced with for hours outside his village throwing it at ever smaller targets until he could hit a pebble from a hundred paces.
He studied the elephant and picked out just the spot that he knew would bring down the great beast. He drew his breath, steadied his heart, and fired. The great animal fell, and the young man felt a surge of joy. He would be a hero. The meat would feed his family for an entire season, and the hide would provide a new tent for them.
His only problem was how to get the thing home.
He ran the three miles back to the village, roused the others and said, I’ve killed a huge bull elephant. Come and see. Bring ropes and we’ll haul it back.
Roused from their slumbers, they joined his quickly, bringing ropes to tie the elephant and drag it back to the village. They hurried the three miles out, tied ropes around the great beast’s feet and began to pull.
They surged against the ropes in rhythm and the young man began to chant, “my elephant, my elephant, my elephant.”
The others heard his chant and began to think, “whose elephant?” They dropped the ropes and the elephant stopped, too. The young man looked up from his chanting and pulling and said, “why have you stopped?”
The others answered, “if it’s your elephant, you pull it back to the village.”
So he grabbed all of the ropes together, picked them up and began to pull chanting, “my elephant, my elephant, my elephant!”
The great animal didn’t budge an inch. The young man dropped the ropes. His shoulders slumped. He thought of all the meat that would rot in the sun or be eaten by lions. He looked around at the others. He picked up one rope, began pulling it again, and chanting, “our elephant, our elephant, our elephant!”
One by one, the others picked up ropes, joined their shoulders to the effort and their voices to the chant: “our elephant, our elephant, our elephant!”
Together they pulled the giant beast back to the village. They divided the meat. The divided the skins. They divided the spoils into many different families.
But they united in one common goal.
May we, in all of our glorious differences, find an uncommon courage to pursue the common goals of love and justice as we together follow the way of Jesus.