Call, Choice, or Fate?
David C. Myers
January 20, 2008
Epiphany - 3rd
Isaiah 49:1 - 7
I Corinthians 1:1 - 3
John 1:29 - 34
Text: "I, Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God."
. . . I Corinthians 1:1
One of the hats I used to wear for the New England Annual Conference was to be Chair of the Enlistment and Recruitment Committee for new ministers. Part of that job was to help coordinate the Bishop's Convocation on Ministry. About 60 persons of all ages would gather to explore their call to serve the Lord as minister, missionary, or diaconal minister. A frequently asked question would go like this: "How did you know that you were supposed to be a preacher? Was there some voice, some word out of the blue? Did you take an aptitude test that told you?"
And due to the nature of this gathering, we knew that behind the question wasn't so much a deep sense of curiosity in how we - the staff - were called, but rather whether or not the one asking the question was called - as in "called by God".
Now, while that is especially relevant to people contemplating a life of service to the church, it is just as relevant to each and every person here today.
How do you know what you are supposed to do with your life? Do you feel that your gifts and talents are being used for the benefit of humanity as a part of God's total ministry - the priesthood of all believers? What is your calling?, and does it have anything to do with what you are doing now?
We may envy the claims made by all three people featured in the Scripture Lessons this morning. Isaiah's claim that he knew what God wanted him to do, "from the womb, from the body of my mother God called my name." We wonder how Paul could say that he was, "called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus", or how John the Baptist knew for sure that he was "sent to baptize with water."
"Even before I was born, God knew my name. . . ." God said, "Linda, Elizabeth, and Jesse, study your lessons well, and then go forth and teach others how to make music."
Lisa and Alison are called to gather the little children and bring them before the church for the growth of all.
Let's look at the three possibilities suggested by my sermon title - call, choice or fate - to see how we live out our lives.
1.) The first is that of choice. For us, the notion of call, the sense of vocation, has been reduced to something you do because you choose to do it - a sort of, "I am here because I decided to here." This is choice, not call.
The contemporary understanding of vocation is the result of our modern infatuation with autonomy - do your own thing, self-actualize, self-fulfill. In other words, society attempts to elevate the uncalled life, a life which is not referred to any purpose beyond one's self. "I am where I am because I listened to my own voice." "I gotta be me." "Have it your way." In today's time often there is no "call" other than the one originating within myself. "We have," says Erik Erikson, "made ourselves our own favored children. . . . (we have been deluded) into thinking that there is no voice to be spoken over our lives more significant than our own voice."
The issue here is to whom and to what we listen.
It's hard to hear the voice of another, whispering over our lives when we are so busy speaking to ourselves. Isaiah, before he responded to God's call to be a prophet - when he talked to himself - heard only the voice of despair. "I have labored in vain." "I have spent myself for nothing."
When I have based my life, my choice of direction, my expenditure of myself solely upon "what I want to do with my life," I am setting up myself for despair. My wants are fickle and twist and turn with the changing wind. I usually choose what want based on my assessment of possibilities for happiness or financial reward within a given path. But no path insures continual happiness. So then I say, "Did I choose wrong? Did I have all the facts? Is this really what I want to do?" When we base what we do with our lives solely on our own choice, we may find ourselves echoing Isaiah's words, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing."
2.) Or perhaps worse, let's look at the possibility of fate as the controller of our lives. With fate we admit that we are here because we were placed here. There really isn't vocation, it's all a matter of sociological, economic, racial or gender determination. You are where you are because you were stuck here - an accident of birth, if you will.
This past summer, on a TV program on gangs in Los Angeles, I watched grown men, loitering on a street corner, talking about their gang, about the times they had been in and out of jail, as they passed a bottle of cheap wine. When asked why they were in a gang, one responded, "I was born in Watts. Do you need another reason?"
And there was another scene where a Los Angeles police officer, also born in Watts. He looked at little children at play on a Watts school ground and just wept, because he knew that so few would make it out, so many would end up at thirty on that same street corner drinking cheap wine and wasting time.
Deb and I had an amazing thing happen this past two weeks. Out of the clear blue I got an Email from Russ Carmichael - he had been an usher in our wedding. We hadn't heard from him in about 30 years. Periodically I worried about Russ; he was an ex-offender, had spent 5 years in prison before I met him. But when I met him he was leading an Intern Program at Boston University School of Theology on prison ministry. Later he was the Executive Director of Emergency Adjustment Services for Ex-Offenders, until the Federal Funding dried up. Then he disappeared. For a 5 year period, Russ and I were very close friends. He always said, "I can be good today, I can't promise tomorrow." Had he gone back into a life of crime?? The Email answered that question. Now he is Father Russell Carmichael, an Oblate Father serving a prison and homeless ministry in New London, Connecticut. I also reflect back on the time he told me that in the neighborhood he grew up in boys either grew-up and worked for the post-office, became police men, or went to jail. Was that vocation? Hardly. Instead, "I was born in Watts. I was born in Waltham, MA. From my mother's womb I was nothing."
Choice or fate, that's what vocation has become for us. Isaiah listened to his own voice and was unfulfilled. Saul's fate was to be a Pharisee par excellence, but to no avail. Russ started out as a thief, a prisoner. Their true vocations still awaited them. Because, you see, we can be called at any time, from any circumstance in life.
3.) This is my third point. Called to what?, and, what is the nature of this call? I would like to suggest that call means that one's life is somehow caught up in the larger purposes of God, is attached to divine work which has greater significance than you yourself. Call is rarely an event, a phone call, the result of an interview, or completion of a questionnaire. Call - a biblical call - is a process of referring to yourself to the workings of God before you decide and choose where to go next. The "called life" is a life underway, . . . a life at risk, . . . in process, . . . as Isaiah's own struggle with his call testifies.
When Isaiah says that he was called from the womb of his mother, he's not speaking of some dateable event. What Isaiah is saying is that he somehow had the courage and the freedom to march to a different drummer because, somehow, his life was claimed, defined, and shaped by one greater than himself, even before he decided or chose anything.
Our call from God may be like that of Isaiah, to be a "mouth like a sharp sword" in a world of co-opted speech and smooth talk. God needs people who turn their backs on the world's definitions of success and power, to care for people rather than money, or to take the time to have and care for children. God - and this world - needs people who have a clear sense that what they do is more important than their own wants and desires.
Think back on how bleak your life would be if you had not met a coach who thought there was nothing more important in life than learning the fundamentals of that sport well. Or perhaps a teacher who had been totally absorbed by the beauty of geometry. Maybe you had a parent who really believed that she was loving God when she was putting up with raising you! Such people point to something beyond the teaching, the coaching, and the parenting.
John, the one presented in John's Gospel to bear witness to Christ is such an example. In John's Gospel; John appears and disappears with but one reason to be on stage: he is a witness to Christ. He does not speak of end times of the chopping axe, the cleansing wind or the consuming fire; rather he points to Christ: "Behold the Lamb of God." In short, John in the Fourth Gospel is a witness. In fact the author gives this section a heading. "This is the witness of John." As such he is the perfect prototype of the Christian leader: sent of God to witness.
This is not to say there was no struggle, no temptation to use his gifts to elevate himself. On the contrary, such a battle must have raged within him at times. Since temptation is commensurate with strength, the unusually gifted face tests the rest of us do not. As the late George Buttrick once observed, "There is no seastorm in a roadside puddle." But even with the wrestling, the great can and do turn all their gifts to the service of the Gospel, and in so doing discover that their powers are not diminished but increased.
Harry Emerson Fosdick titled a chapter in his autobiography, "Ideas That Have Used Me." A used life is a meaningful life, provided that the ideas which use us, the call to which we respond is true, rooted in the purpose of the true God rather than a false idol.
And this is one of the great joys of working with people who have been called to music. A woman I dated in college was part of the Chapel choir and one evening she offered to me as an excuse as to why she was late for a date. She said that the conductor wouldn't let them go. When I inquired further she said that they were learning Handel's Messiah - but apparently not very well. She said finally the director said in a characteristic pique of perfection, "For God's sake, this is Handel, and we're going to stay here until we do it the way Handel deserves!"
For God's sake indeed, not for our own sakes do we find ourselves caught up, lost, given over, absorbed in our vocation, be it making music, healing, computing, nursing, administering, teaching, raising families, or whatever God has called you to do.
I didn't say God would hit you over the head with a call. I didn't say that your call would be spoken in some definitive way, or be some dateable moment. Nothing in Isaiah's text would indicate that. John was totally consumed to be a witness to - to point beyond himself. And while Paul had a remarkable experience it was a mid-course correction, for he was called to God in his new religion as he was in his old one.
What we can say is that someone listening more for the expression of God's purposes rather than merely listening to the voice of one's own ego is someone whose life has a purpose. We can say that someone who expects to be used by God for important work, the person who clings, through thick and thin in life to the conviction that God knows his or her name, has purposes for his or her life, will not be disappointed.
After all, you are part of a great priesthood - the priesthood of all believers!