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"Chosen" | Isaiah 43: 1-7 | January 11, 2004 |
William Willimon teaches a class at Duke Divinity School for people who are in their first year at seminary, people who feel called on today to be pastors. One of their first assignments is to write a paper titled: “My Call to Ordained Ministry.” Willimon reports that he loves to read these. They range from tales of visions in the middle of the night to lives that are tossed and tormented until they finally realize that they are being called and they finally summon up the courage to say yes. Here I am, send me. Some tell of calm gradual awareness that God had something for them to do.
He recounts the story of one woman who said that she had been married for about 15 years to a pastor. One afternoon she was setting on the sofa in the parsonage, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and reading some trashy supermarket, checkout-line novel. Her husband walked in, the pastor, and said something to her like, “You sure don’t look like a pastor’s wife.” With that she crushed out her cigarette, threw down her novel and shouted out, “I’m a wife, but not a pastor.”
She meant it as a way of telling her husband to back off. But she said that as soon as the words came out of her mouth, “I am not a pastor,” she said it was like this voice in her brain which said, “How do you know you are not called to be a pastor?” A voice, just like that. She said the thing started working on her brain over the next few days. After a period of over a year of struggle with the idea, now she was entering seminary.
Then there is the story of a young man who wrote “I was the teenager from hell. I made my parents’ lives utterly miserable. I flunked out of college.” He got a job, married and began attending church with his wife. Gradually, he came to the surprising awareness that God seemed to be calling him. So he went back to college. He wasn’t sure how to tell his parents, after all he had put them through, that now his life was taking this unexpected turn. He met with his parents and told them the story of the surprising turn of events, the way that even though his life had been punctuated with a series of mistakes and accumulated irresponsibility, he now believed that God wanted him to become a pastor.
Suddenly, his mother burst into tears, saying, “I’m so ashamed! I can’t believe this has happened. Do you remember I told you that before you were born I had had a couple of miscarriages. I didn’t think we would ever have a child.
So I prayed that If God would let me have a baby, if it were a boy, I would name him Samuel and would dedicate him to God, just like Hannah did back in the Old Testament.”
Astonished, her son Sam asked, “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“We’re Methodists,” the mother replied. “How was I to know something like this would happen? I didn’t even know that we even believed in this kind of thing. How was I to know that it would work?”
Indeed, I don’t think I expect that sort of thing. I remember a joke we used to tell about some of our more pious brethren when I was in college. We would say that Brother John had seen a huge cloud in the sky in the shape of the letters “P C” and he was sure that they meant “preach Christ.” But we thought it might have meant “Plow Corn,” or “Peal Carrots,” or “Program Computers.” Certainly we don’t expect the skies to open like the description in Luke’s account of the baptism of Jesus. Each gospel tells the story of Jesus baptism a little differently.
Mark tells it urgently: immediately after Jesus came out of the water he saw the heavens torn open and the spirit, like a dove, descending upon him. Matthew is much more academic by comparison. According to him, John the Baptist and Jesus engage in a theological debate about who should baptize whom before John relents and dips Jesus in the Jordan like any other Galilean. John’s Gospel, on the contrary, is so defensive about Jesus’ purity that it does not mention his baptism at all. In that telling, John the Baptist testifies that he saw the Spirit come down from heaven and rest upon Jesus like a dove, but he does not mention that Jesus happened to be standing in the river Jordan at the time.
And then there is Luke, whose account is likewise eccentric. Just before he describes Jesus’ baptism in detail, Luke tells us that Herod has put John the Baptist in prison, so, in this story there is no mention of John the Baptizer at all. In addition to scholars arguing over why the accounts differ, they have argued about what Jesus was doing there in the first place. John had made it clear that his baptism was for sinners, sinners who came to him to be washed in the waters of repentance.
What need did Jesus have for that? He had nothing to repent of and nothing to be forgiven for. But all Luke wants to emphasize is that a voice from heaven declared, “You are my beloved son, and I am very pleased with you.” If you were listening to this telling by Luke with ears that had often heard Jewish scripture you would recognize that the first part of that is from the second Psalm, a coronation psalm used to proclaim a king. The second part–“with you I am well pleased,” was a direct quote from Isaiah–from the chapter just before our lesson for today. Here is the declaration of Jesus beginning of his ministry; here is Jesus saying yes to the call. As one preacher put it “the point is not the watery dip, but in the heavenly quip!” What Luke wants to emphasize is the divine favor that is bestowed upon Jesus.
Did you hear the passage from the book of Isaiah for today? Isaiah reports of God’s proclamation “I created you,” “I formed you.” then “I called you by name.” You may recall that when we baptize little ones in our worship there is a place in the ritual when the minister asks the parents “By what name will your child be called?”
In some liturgies the name of the child is not used until this point. Note that the question is not what are you going to call this child? But “By what name will this child be called?” And when adults are baptized they are asked if they respond affirmatively to having been chosen to be in God’s family. My point is that all of us who are in the family of faith have been called; we are chosen.
I know, I know, we have transformed the idea of “call” so that we think that “call” applies only to people who are set apart for professional ministry. But I think you can make the case that the ancient vision of the church was that of a whole people who were set apart by their baptism to be God’s servants to the world. Somehow we have come to think of clergy as the purveyors of religion and lay people as consumers, who shop around for the church that offers them the best product. But I really believe that God is in the calling business and that it is an ongoing thing.
Think of the many ways that God may speak to us—in worship, through the music, in the words of a hymn, in the beauty of the room, in words from the scripture lesson that suddenly strikes us in a new way, sometimes even something in the sermon, or the prayers; or the call may come in conversation with a trusted friend, a teacher. But the call also may come when God is the last thing on our minds while reading the newspaper at the coffee shop, or watching a television documentary. Suddenly our identity clarifies; our role to play in God’s ongoing redemptive work in the world comes into sharper focus. We don’t see the sky split, or hear booming voices but we know we have been called and the Spirit is being poured on us to give us the power to perform the task–if we are willing.
There are many in this room who have received a call. Somebody else looking at your life, might say, “Isn’t it interesting how she could have done almost anything with her life, anything she wanted to. And yet she decided to be a teacher even though she would not make a lot of money.” Or someone may say, “Have you noticed what an asset he is to our community?” Or “I don’t know where he or she finds the time to do all they do at the church, or to serve on that social agency board.” Or “I wonder how he decided to be a volunteer?”
But, if you tell people that every baptized Christian is called they may resist like the woman who, when she heard a lecture on the ministry of the laity, said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be that important.” Like many she heard the invitation to respond to God’s call as an invitation to do more–be on another committee, cook for the homeless, teach in church school and so forth–or she heard it as a call to be more generous, more loving, more religious. But no one had introduced her to the idea that her ministry might involve just being who she already is and doing what she already does, with the difference that now she understands herself to be God’s person in and for the world. She is called to be who she is as a person chosen.
That is the good news for today. You are chosen. One of the great messages of this season of Christmas and beyond is what the angel said to Mary: “The Lord is with you.” So as we hear our call let us also hear, “The Lord is with you, and you and you.” Amen
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2004 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |