The Graces of Our Callings
1 Peter 2:2-10
May 22, 2011
Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have a more expansive list of official sacraments of the church. I’m offering no opinion on whether or not that’s a good thing; it simply is the truth of the matter. They have seven; we have two.
Among the official sacraments of the Roman church is the sacrament of Holy Orders, or what we refer to as ordination. We are just coming through the beginning of the end (I hope) of our denomination’s long struggle over one aspect of ordination – that is to say, over who may and who may not be ordained.
But in one crucial way, we are all ordained. We are all called to ministries. We all have our orders, as it were, and they are holy.
Broadening our perspective on what it means to be ordained might just help us live more fully into the new reality of the denomination. When each of us claims our own calling, claims our own ordination to ministry, and understands the sacramental nature of our callings, it becomes easier to see more clearly in each other the gifts for ministry that God has given us.
Broadening our understanding of the sacramental nature of so much of life ought to change the way we look at a lot of things, and broadening our view of ordination, in particular, ought to change the way we look at the manner in which we spend so much of our lives: that is to say, it ought to change the way we look at our work.
But to begin with, before blowing up, tossing out or replacing any definitions, let’s just put it out there baldly: ordination is a visible sign of an invisible grace. In other words, ordination is sacramental. Moreover, let’s put it out there as well that building fences around just a few recognized “offices” in the church – elder, deacon, minister of word and sacrament – my help us organize churches but it may just get in the way of actually being the church.
To be called by God, and to be blessed in that calling by the gathered community – that is the fundamental understanding of ordination that has guided the church for a long, long time. Indeed, it goes all the way back to Paul, who understood that various members of the church – of the body of Christ in the world – had various gifts and various callings to use those gifts for the good of the whole community.
Paul may have been thinking only of the community of Christians, but our challenge is far bigger: how do we use these gifts of ministry for the good of the wider world?
Stepping outside of the institutional structures of the church, which have their place and purpose, I want to conflate for now the idea of ordination and that of calling. For the purposes of our conversation today, they mean the same thing. There is some of this conflation already going on in Paul’s great riff on gifts and call in his first letter to the young church at Corinth:
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of healing, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”
Our passage from First Peter is also concerned with gift and call, but there’s a different emphasis:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
We should hear some tension between these two passages.
The tension rests on the essential pivot between individual calling, on the one hand, and the calling of the entire community on the other. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, is concerned about in-fighting in the church and he insists that there are as many gifts as there are members, that each and all of them have important roles to play, and that, basically, they ought to quit squabbling over it and get on about the business of the church – which is the business of showing forth God’s love in the world. That is the more excellent way toward which he points in the great hymn to love that follows the words we just read.
There’s a whole lot going on in First Peter, but the social tensions that prompted this letter existed not inside the faith community but rather between the faith community and the larger Greco-Roman culture. Let me pause for a moment to mention that the version of this sermon that will be posted on the sermon blog has a long footnote here that goes into the weeds of Pauline authorship, patriarchy and other historical notes that you may find interesting, but that are not directly germane to the key point.
The crucial thing is not simply getting some more or less interesting historical information. The crucial thing is how we make use of these texts in our own context, in our own lives. For this morning’s purpose, the main point – the “take-away,” as it were – is simply this: we are all called, individually and as a community, to the ministry of reconciliation that Jesus launched.
So, what of that calling? What of your calling? What of our calling as church?
We say in our worship bulletin every single week that all of the members of the community are the ministers of the church. To each of us and to all of us has been given this ministry and the wide variety of gifts for carrying it out in the wider world. We have all been ordained to this ministry. It is our common calling.
When we do it well, we do make grace visible in the world. It is sacramental. Our several callings are sacramental. Vocation is a sacrament, and not just in the Roman church. That is to say, we can and do make grace visible in the wider world when we go about our work responding to the Spirit’s moving in our lives – and in every aspect of them.
The idea of vocation clearly touches on our work lives in some fashion, and this should raise questions for us. Do you consider what you do for a living to be a calling? If not, does what you do for a living support your callings? Does what you do for a living conflict with your callings?
Note that I’m using the plural – while most of us have only one job that pays us, we all have several callings. For example, I feel a deep sense of call to this job – that’s one calling that happens to coincide with my job. On the other hand, I do not feel called to every aspect of the job. Some of it I do because it has to get done, whether or not I feel ordained to it: locking up the doors; changing out light bulbs; minor repairs; furniture moving – I don’t feel called to it, but I do it and, to some degree, it does support my calling.
On the other hand, I have a deep a sense of call to parenting – that’s a separate calling and while it is certainly work it is not a job because nobody pays me for doing it. Or, if they do, the check keeps getting lost in the mail. Sometimes my call to parenting conflicts with my call to ministry. Sometimes it supports it.
Likewise with being husband. Those are not just roles that we play; they are callings of God, or they can be. Surely there are folks who get married and have children but have no gifts or callings toward either, and we’ve all witnessed the results.
All of which is simply to say, all of us have several callings, several vocations, to which we have been ordained by God. Sometimes they coincide with our jobs. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes they coincide with each other; sometimes they conflict. These callings, our vocations, touch on every important aspect of our lives. But most of us do not think about them as sacramental: as signs and as means of grace.
What difference would it make to think of these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our job as a sacrament?
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
So, what difference would it make to think of this “chosenness,” these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our jobs as sacraments?
May 22, 2011
Our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers have a more expansive list of official sacraments of the church. I’m offering no opinion on whether or not that’s a good thing; it simply is the truth of the matter. They have seven; we have two.
Among the official sacraments of the Roman church is the sacrament of Holy Orders, or what we refer to as ordination. We are just coming through the beginning of the end (I hope) of our denomination’s long struggle over one aspect of ordination – that is to say, over who may and who may not be ordained.
But in one crucial way, we are all ordained. We are all called to ministries. We all have our orders, as it were, and they are holy.
Broadening our perspective on what it means to be ordained might just help us live more fully into the new reality of the denomination. When each of us claims our own calling, claims our own ordination to ministry, and understands the sacramental nature of our callings, it becomes easier to see more clearly in each other the gifts for ministry that God has given us.
Broadening our understanding of the sacramental nature of so much of life ought to change the way we look at a lot of things, and broadening our view of ordination, in particular, ought to change the way we look at the manner in which we spend so much of our lives: that is to say, it ought to change the way we look at our work.
But to begin with, before blowing up, tossing out or replacing any definitions, let’s just put it out there baldly: ordination is a visible sign of an invisible grace. In other words, ordination is sacramental. Moreover, let’s put it out there as well that building fences around just a few recognized “offices” in the church – elder, deacon, minister of word and sacrament – my help us organize churches but it may just get in the way of actually being the church.
To be called by God, and to be blessed in that calling by the gathered community – that is the fundamental understanding of ordination that has guided the church for a long, long time. Indeed, it goes all the way back to Paul, who understood that various members of the church – of the body of Christ in the world – had various gifts and various callings to use those gifts for the good of the whole community.
Paul may have been thinking only of the community of Christians, but our challenge is far bigger: how do we use these gifts of ministry for the good of the wider world?
Stepping outside of the institutional structures of the church, which have their place and purpose, I want to conflate for now the idea of ordination and that of calling. For the purposes of our conversation today, they mean the same thing. There is some of this conflation already going on in Paul’s great riff on gifts and call in his first letter to the young church at Corinth:
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of healing, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”
Our passage from First Peter is also concerned with gift and call, but there’s a different emphasis:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
We should hear some tension between these two passages.
The tension rests on the essential pivot between individual calling, on the one hand, and the calling of the entire community on the other. Paul, in writing to the Corinthians, is concerned about in-fighting in the church and he insists that there are as many gifts as there are members, that each and all of them have important roles to play, and that, basically, they ought to quit squabbling over it and get on about the business of the church – which is the business of showing forth God’s love in the world. That is the more excellent way toward which he points in the great hymn to love that follows the words we just read.
There’s a whole lot going on in First Peter, but the social tensions that prompted this letter existed not inside the faith community but rather between the faith community and the larger Greco-Roman culture. Let me pause for a moment to mention that the version of this sermon that will be posted on the sermon blog has a long footnote here that goes into the weeds of Pauline authorship, patriarchy and other historical notes that you may find interesting, but that are not directly germane to the key point.
The crucial thing is not simply getting some more or less interesting historical information. The crucial thing is how we make use of these texts in our own context, in our own lives. For this morning’s purpose, the main point – the “take-away,” as it were – is simply this: we are all called, individually and as a community, to the ministry of reconciliation that Jesus launched.
So, what of that calling? What of your calling? What of our calling as church?
We say in our worship bulletin every single week that all of the members of the community are the ministers of the church. To each of us and to all of us has been given this ministry and the wide variety of gifts for carrying it out in the wider world. We have all been ordained to this ministry. It is our common calling.
When we do it well, we do make grace visible in the world. It is sacramental. Our several callings are sacramental. Vocation is a sacrament, and not just in the Roman church. That is to say, we can and do make grace visible in the wider world when we go about our work responding to the Spirit’s moving in our lives – and in every aspect of them.
The idea of vocation clearly touches on our work lives in some fashion, and this should raise questions for us. Do you consider what you do for a living to be a calling? If not, does what you do for a living support your callings? Does what you do for a living conflict with your callings?
Note that I’m using the plural – while most of us have only one job that pays us, we all have several callings. For example, I feel a deep sense of call to this job – that’s one calling that happens to coincide with my job. On the other hand, I do not feel called to every aspect of the job. Some of it I do because it has to get done, whether or not I feel ordained to it: locking up the doors; changing out light bulbs; minor repairs; furniture moving – I don’t feel called to it, but I do it and, to some degree, it does support my calling.
On the other hand, I have a deep a sense of call to parenting – that’s a separate calling and while it is certainly work it is not a job because nobody pays me for doing it. Or, if they do, the check keeps getting lost in the mail. Sometimes my call to parenting conflicts with my call to ministry. Sometimes it supports it.
Likewise with being husband. Those are not just roles that we play; they are callings of God, or they can be. Surely there are folks who get married and have children but have no gifts or callings toward either, and we’ve all witnessed the results.
All of which is simply to say, all of us have several callings, several vocations, to which we have been ordained by God. Sometimes they coincide with our jobs. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes they coincide with each other; sometimes they conflict. These callings, our vocations, touch on every important aspect of our lives. But most of us do not think about them as sacramental: as signs and as means of grace.
What difference would it make to think of these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our job as a sacrament?
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
So, what difference would it make to think of this “chosenness,” these callings, these vocations, as sacramental? Parenting as sacrament? Being a husband or a wife as a sacrament? Our jobs as sacraments?
posted by David Ensign at
12:10 PM
<< Home