January 28, 2007
(Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany)

Waiting on the Call

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

Jeremiah 1:4-10  •  Psalm 71:1-6  •  1 Corinthians 13:1-13  •  Luke 4:21-30
(From The Lectionary Page)

Over and over again, the biblical writers wrestle with what it means to be called by God and how to respond when He does. And over and over again, the people of the Bible respond to God’s call in some fairly formulaic ways: First, they’re incredulous...incredulous that they’re being called at all; then they claim ineligibility--the divine tap on the shoulder is surely for someone else; and finally they protest their incompetence for the task assigned.

In tonight’s reading, Jeremiah comes down on at least two of these: ineligibility and incompetence. “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak [incompetence], for I am only a boy [ineligibility].”

Moses, by expansive contrast, hits on all three. The call, of course, runs like this; Yahweh says to Moses: “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people out of Egypt." And the response of our called hero, our eventual liberator, is first incredulity: "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt!?" Next he claims ineligibility by virtue of lack of authority: "Behold, they will not believe me." And finally, somewhat like Jeremiah, he claims incompetence through lack of verbal skill: "Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant."

Sound familiar? All of them reasonable excuses for trying to dodge an invitation to the party of the Kingdom.

Then there’s what I call the “Samuel Problem” – the confusion of voices. You will recall from the First Book of that title, the boy Samuel is attending to Eli in the Temple. And during the night, the voice of the Lord comes to the boy, and he rushes off to Eli saying, “Master. Here I am; you called.” Three times –- as is appropriate for storytelling –- the voice comes to Samuel and twice Eli says, “GO BACK TO BED. I DIDN’T CALL YOU!

Finally, on the third go-round, even Eli gets it. So he says to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant hears’”.

The word of the Lord seems even rarer in our day than it was in Samuel’s. But this probably has less to do with God’s having abandoned us to our own ambiguous history and more to do with competing voices. The voices of our world are so numerous, the various things that "call" to us are each so compelling--the din is so loud and the roar is so thunderous--that if we do hear the Lord's call at all, we are likely to confuse it with one of our Eli's.

I am reminded, for example, of a man I once saw in spiritual direction who felt he had a call to the priesthood. When we started out, I told him that one of my rules is that I do not entertain the issue of discerning priestly vocation until I have worked with someone for six months or so -- maybe even a year. It is important not to put the cart before the horse. We would need first to discover the "mystery of his name," who he was called to be...simply as a child of God, how the Spirit was moving within him in his ordinary life.

And I also told him there would be a cacophony of voices all too ready to affirm his sense of call--if for no other reason than he was an intelligent, attractive, heterosexual male under thirty. A lot of people out there complain that the church has discontinued that model.

So we all need to fret a little about just which voices are speaking, and whether we're being called to the wrong thing--or to the right thing for the wrong reason.

So how do we hear the call; how do we discern the voice of the Lord? Well, for starters, put away the notion that being called is about some elitist in-house, hot-house endorsement of vocation that ends in the priesthood. Call is about living out our baptisms, not about moving through the gauntlet of Parish Discernment Committees, Commissions on Ministry and bishops prepared to lay on hands. Being “called” and “being called to the priesthood” are two completely different things.

But Psalm 63 is helpful and puts it this way:

O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.

Or the Psalm for this evening puts it in a slightly different way:

In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge;
you are my crag and my stronghold.
I have been sustained by you even since I was born;
from my mother’s womb I have known you;
my praise shall be always of you.

FROM MY MOTHER’S WOMB, I HAVE KNOWN YOU.

In other words, the call is that sense of thirst not quenched and that sense of hunger not satisfied by any of our most prodigious human efforts or endeavors. The call, as it turns out, is not whispered in our ears. It comes from the thresholds of our being. It is a deep yearning for the Divine One, a flame that flickers within us for intimacy with God.

Accordingly, in John's Gospel, Jesus does not call in the sense of commissioning for a ministry and a mission. In fact, John’s Jesus has no articulated social program. There is no gathering of laborers into the harvest; no two-by-two; no sending-out of disciples to teach, to heal and to proclaim; no instruction to baptize all nations.

Rather, John’s Jesus is simply in the world so that the world may come to him. And in coming to him, the world comes to know the Father. That, in fact, is what the prologue to the book tells us up front: He came to his own and his own received him not; but as many as received him...to them he gave power to become children of God. Becoming children of God is what we’re called to; it is that which we seek; it is the light of desire that flickers deep within the depths of our souls.

More familiar to us, of course, are the stories of the calling of the Twelve in the Synoptic Gospels. Four Galilean fishermen. Andrew and Simon Peter his brother, and James and John, the Zebedee boys, are casting their nets on a lake. And an unknown, insignificant, itinerant carpenter issues as inscrutable call: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

A clear, blunt, direct command without much shape. A simple, unequivocal response without question. No agonizing introspection, no prayerful discernment. No testing, no teasing, no tying up loose ends. No looking back. He calls; they follow. It’s as simple as that. Drop the nets, get out of the boat, and go. And it has never been so easy since!

But in truth, answering the call is really not so difficult. All you need to do is get your head out of the way, and cup your hands in faith and trust around the flame of desire for God...the flame that flickers even now in your heart.

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There is, however, a coda to all this. When the call of God moves up from the center of your being, into your very heart, and then out through your speech -– it can be a dramatic movement towards a new center that is barely understood by others, and often badly received.

Sometimes you have to risk leaving behind everything in your own tradition and the text of your life that is safe and familiar. Sometimes you have to risk the scorn of a culture that considers “listening for a call” a kind of unbalanced fanaticism. Sometimes you have to risk being ridiculed by a world that calculates the long term consequences of every action -- always hedging against some future inflation -- a world where a “stab in the dark for the sake of desire” is imprudence-running-to-madness. Very minimally, to respond to the call is breaking with business as usual. And that is precisely what I think is going on with Jesus in tonight’s Gospel.

Luke says that when the young rabbi came home to preach for the first time, everyone in the congregation made quite a to-do over how well he did and how nice he looked. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son, the carpenter? Why, hasn’t he just grown right up?! And how well he speaks!”

Then, of course, he ruined it all by talking of how Yahweh used Sidonian widows and Syrian lepers to reveal God’s self. Nobody in Nazareth wanted to hear about how the saints of Israel had been called by God to minister to “the Nations.” So they all got hopping mad, and nearly ran him off a cliff. At that moment, his prophetic career took a downward turn and never recovered. In fact, he ended up being crucified on a cross while his hometown people stood around shaking their heads. “Such a nice boy. Such a bad end. But, you know, he was a little crazy. I could have told you he’d end up like this – running afer that madman John the Baptist!”

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A Christian veteran friend of mine and an old social activist told me once that if you preach and live the prophetic call of God, “You’d better look good on wood because that’s where you’ll end up.”

And, of course, there have been others besides Jesus. The late Cardinal Archbishop of Medellin once said, “When I fed the poor they called me a saint. When I asked ‘Why are the poor hungry?’ they called me a communist.”

And, of course, there was Martin Luther King staring down the police dogs and the fire hoses in Birmingham, and the racist’s bullet in Memphis.

Then, of course, there was also Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated by the Salvadoran military high command because he had made the dramatic move from alignment with elitist power to alignment with oppressive poverty.

Few of us will be called to answer with the life-giving heroics of the Oscar Romeros, the Martin Luther Kings, or the Dietrich Bonhoffers – much less Jesus. But here’s a story that hits closer to home.

This week’s Christian Century reports on a tall, gangly, self-conscious seventh-grader who was a member of her junior high girls’ track team. A Saturday meet was postponed to the next Saturday – when, as it turned out, her church had scheduled a mini-mission trip that the girl had signed up for.

So she went to her track coach and told him about the conflict; but left with tears when her coach told her, “Your teammates are counting on you, and you can’t let them down. I expect you here for the meet.” The next day she talked to him again: he responded, “You are either here for the meet or you turn in your uniform.” More tears from her that night. On the third day, she went to the coach again, handed him her uniform and walked away.

I wondered about the responses in her community. The religious conservatives are likely to have gone to the school board, wanting it to outlaw any function that conflicted with church events. Many of the liberal parents were probably upset but willing to go along with the coach. But everybody seems to have been surprised, and even shocked, when the girl said, “This is about God.”

I know! I know — the track team is not like race relations, or combating poverty while the rich get richer and hungry get hungrier. Nor is this even speaking out against the War in Iraq. Much less is it ending up on a cross. But prophets who respond to the call, that call which is the fire for God burning within them, well...they all start somewhere.