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.
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.
posted by David Ensign at
12:16 PM
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