A Chance to Be A Community Called

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

May 20, 2012

Have you ever found yourself agitated by a nagging feeling that something in your life needed to change? Ever felt as if there was something more that you needed to do or to explore or to try or, perhaps, to quit doing or trying? Ever had a still, small, internal voice whispering, “there is more to life than what you’re doing with yours”? Ever found some variation on this question running round and round your brain: “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

What does it mean to be called?

Well, part of it surely comes in having the experience of a sense of purpose that goes beyond the narrow confines of your own life. That would be a “higher calling.”

There are other, lower callings, as well.

Last week I read a quote from a billionaire who said, “that has always been the main focus of my life and my energies — to make money.” Clearly, as the pirates of the Caribbean might say, “the gold called to him.”

Actually, that was one of the saddest things I’ve read in a long while, and it left me thinking, “what an incredibly impoverished life this rich man has led.”

What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?

The Rev. Fred Rogers, better known simply as Mr. Rogers, once said, “the meaning of life is service.” Another way of putting it, that I’m pretty sure he would have embraced, would be “the main focus of my life and energies has been to serve others, in particular, children.” What an incredibly rich life he lived.

What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?

Or, to use the frame of the billionaire’s quote: what comes after the dash for you? In other words, how do you complete the phrase, “that has always been the main focus of my life and my energies”?

Some of you may have seen Friday morning that I “crowd-sourced” this section of this morning’s sermon by asking Facebook friends what comes after the dash for them. As you’d expect, some of the answers were elegant statements of faith: “do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with my God”; “follow Christ.” Others were a bit less orthodox: “live a good story, mine and no one else's.” Some were silly, “make David Ensign giggle.”

So, how ‘bout for you? Can you name, in a phrase, what has been the main focus of your life and your energy?

*****

Personally, I have a hard time with the question because I don’t think I have ever had a singular focus. I have always felt, to borrow the title from a little book one of my seminary profs wrote 25 years ago, that I had “several callings.” I think many of us do, and those callings are shaped by season and circumstance.

For example, for most of the past two decades, the central calling of my life has been to be father to my children. Obviously, I have also been called to serve as pastor of this congregation and a couple of others before. I’ve also felt called to the work of systemic change in the church around ordination issues, and change in the culture around GLBT equality and civil rights.

The discerning in these several callings has never been of the lightning bolt variety, but rather the still, small voice, calling in the night with a persistence like that of water dripping on stone and gradually reshaping it over the years.

In the midst of a few decisions I have been tempted to use the methodology that Acts seems to recommend.

The strange little story from Acts is one of the more enigmatic “call stories” in all of scripture. The call of Matthias to join the disciples is accomplished by the roll of the dice.

We’re having a congregational meeting in a couple of weeks. We could change the by-laws and adopt dice-rolling as our Biblically based method of electing ruling elders! I rush to add that I am not recommending that – just saying that it would be based on the Bible and on the earliest tradition of the church.

No, the calling of Matthias is not instructive to the church, as a body, or to us as individuals in our discerning at least not if we look to it for guidance on methodology. On the other hand, this story does remind us that discerning call is a matter of circumstance, of context, and of chance – at least insofar as we use chance to name things that we simply have no way of knowing with any degree of certainty.

Let me put that just a little differently. I am pretty sure that I was called to be a professional basketball player, but the matter of chance DNA left me swimming in the shallow end of the athletic gene pool.

Sometimes calling is like that. Your gifts, your capacities, your history of choices along the line and the choices others have made for you bring you, at various points in your life, either face-to-face with opportunities or they don’t. Sometimes it is just a roll of the dice – figuratively speaking.

Faith in the midst of the rolling dice is not a matter of trusting that God has weighted the dice in advance; rather, faith in the midst of the rolling comes in trusting that God will be there no matter what numbers turn up, and that God can work in and through our lives to redeem whatever moment chance has brought us to.

That trust is fundamental to our identify as a community called to a particular way of life. We are a community called, and the calling has enough specificity to guide our decision-making along the way as we determine how to focus our common life and energy.

In other words, we have come to helpful clarity when it comes to saying what we are doing with this one wild and precious life.

We have declared, as a congregation, that the focus of our common life and energies is welcoming people to this table, to be richly nourished in breaking bread and sharing cup, and to be sent into the world following the way of Jesus to nourish all our neighbors in body, mind and spirit.

We are, therefore, a community called. We have a common vocation. What are we going to do with the one wild and precious life that we have been given as a congregation? We’re going to feed people; we’re going to exhibit to the world a kind of hospitality that breaks down barriers and builds new community; we going to try together to live like Jesus out in the world feeding people, creating spaces of welcome wherever we are.

That’s why, for example, later this week one of our elders, Travis Reindl, will make an eloquent case for marriage equality before our sisters and brothers in National Capital Presbytery. That why, for example, tomorrow evening some of us will sit down to dinner with the volunteer coordination from the Arlington Food Assistance Center to talk about what’s next in our relationship with them. That’s why, for example, we are in the midst of a life-giving round of dinner groups, sitting down with one another to break bread and build relationships. That’s why, for example, we’ve got a green and growing garden out in the yard. That’s why, for example, we’ll be distributing bag meals for A-SPAN again next month.

We are a community called, and as we live into new models of ministry, our common calling binds us even as our way of living into that calling changes with time and circumstance.

This is true for us as congregation, and it is true for us as individuals. It is always immensely helpful to have some sense of specificity when asked about “main focus” and “where your energy will be spent.” That’s why we’ve worked and re-worked the congregation’s mission statement. It’s a fine practice for each of us to engage from time to time as individuals, as well.

What are you doing with this one wild and precious life?

You might not be able to say with perfect and predictive clarity. Sometimes, after all, it’s a roll of the dice. However, you always have the chance to answer, quite simply, this: I’m going to live, so God can use me, anytime, anywhere.

You and I, each of us and all of us together, no matter how the die may be cast – are called to that wild and precious way of living. Amen.