1/21/18
There’s a man I know who’s a cradle Episcopalian, and been active in and a strong supporter of his church all his life – vestryperson, warden – but when you ask him about church, and what it means to him, his response is to say, Church is a nice quiet place; in such a way that politely ends the discussion. What he means is, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s my business. I don’t want to be labeled. Which point of view I understand, and agree with, to an extent. We each relate to God in our own way, that’s the way God created us, and there’s certainly a level on which talking about God is useless, and worse: that we’ve got God figured out, and under our control; which is, of course, ludicrous
But this way of thinking – that church is a nice quiet place, and we don’t need to go any further with that - can also be a way of compartmentalizing our faith – of actually avoiding God – and can prevent us from seeing where God is present and active in our lives, where God is doing something new (which God always is), where the Holy Spirit might be leading us. In the words of St. Paul, we proclaim “the God in whom we live and move and have our being”; God who loves us; and God who is continually inviting us to join in God’s work, in this broken world. In church this invitation has traditionally been spoken of as a call: we believe God calls each of us: calls us to faith; calls us to action.
This is a belief to which our church asks us to give our attention today. It’s in all three readings, one way or another; and the Collect for this third Sunday in Epiphany begins: “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ…”)
This belief that God calls us – God invites us, puts situations in front of us and says, What are you going to do about this? – this belief is attested to throughout the Bible, and has been part of the way the Christian church has been conceived from its earliest days. In the New Testament, the Greek word which is translated into English as “church” is ekklesia (from which we get words like “ecclesiastical”.) The literal meaning of ekklesia is, “those who are called out,” that is, out from among people who don’t hear that call. So from the beginning, church was never thought of as a building, or a service of worship, or a system of beliefs. The word “church” identifies a group of people who, together, are aware of having been called, in a particular way.
I wonder if, like me, you ever look around church at the people who are there and are struck by the same thing I am (and this is true of every church I’ve been part of). I look around and I see the people I see most every week, and I think, on the level of biographical details, how different we all are, and how odd it is that we all keep coming back to this same place to be together, we’re all on this same page – whatever it is, we’re figuring that out together all the time. We come from different backgrounds, we have different jobs, we’re of different ages, and different personality types (sometimes extremely so.) But we’re all here in church together because we’ve all heard a call, of some kind or other. We might describe it differently: that we hear the truth here, or that we like the sense of community we feel here: there are many different ways the call is lived out. But however we hear it, the call comes from a source we agree is the same, for all of us. This is what Jesus means when he talks about the good shepherd, in the gospel of John: the sheep follow the good shepherd because they know his voice. They may not understand the language, but they know they can trust the voice.
Part of the work we’re here in church to do is to grow in our discernment of God’s call to each of us, and to grow in our capacity to respond. This is one of the lessons of last week’s Old Testament reading, the story of the boy Samuel, who’s sleeping in the sanctuary, and three times God calls him, wakes him up, he thinks it’s his boss, the high priest Eli, who’s spoken, goes and wakes him up and says you called me. The first two times Eli says no, I didn’t call you, go back to sleep; the third time Eli recognizes that it’s God calling, tells Samuel that God will call again and tells him what to do. The lesson for us is that, even for a prophet like Samuel, the ability to hear God’s call does not drop on us full-blown out of the sky. We have to learn about it. And like anything worth learning, it takes work, attention, and guidance: it takes a church.
In today’s reading from First Corinthians, Paul is talking about what he expects will be the imminent return of the risen Jesus Christ: he says, “the present form of the world is passing away”, and therefore God is calling God’s people to a radical change in behavior (if you’re sad, forget it; if you’re happy, forget it: there are more important things to focus on.) The teaching for us today is that the present form of this world is continually passing away, that the world we see and feel around us is governed by a world that we don’t see, a higher reality, the life of God in eternity, that we participate in, and God calls us to live in that awareness.
The book of Jonah is all about call: how Jonah, the most comical figure in the Bible, ties himself into knots trying to avoid God’s call, but he can’t because he’s heard it so clearly. What we heard today is maybe the only straightforward passage in that book. It’s at the end, when Jonah finally gives in, and God, through Jonah, calls the people of Nineveh to repentance, and when they obey, withholds his terrible judgment and forgives them. The teaching for us here is that what we do makes a difference to God. God works through us – it’s not a small thing - and when we respond to God’s call it has real, big, practical meaning.
Sometimes the call is clear and unmistakable. That’s the case in today’s gospel, the story of Jesus calling the disciples, and because it’s Jesus, we’re not surprised that the call comes through as loud and clear as it does: Simon and Andrew and James and John hear a single sentence from a man they’ve never seen before, and drop their old lives and start new ones. Sometimes that’s the way it is. From this pulpit I have told the story of our former bishop, Clarence Coleridge, who in the early 1950’s, as a premed student at Tuskegee University in Alabama, was invited by a friend to come to worship at the friend’s church. The pastor of that church was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. At the conclusion of the service, Coleridge changed his life: immediately withdrew from college – walking away from a full-ride United Nations scholarship that would have taken him all the way through medical school – enrolled in a seminary in Atlanta, got a job in a gas station to pay his way, and wound up becoming the first African-American bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut.
Now, few of us hear calls so clearly, or from such powerful sources. And in talking about hearing a call, we have to be clear that it’s not like having a human conversation. God doesn’t speak out of the showerhead. Hearing God’s call is a matter of discernment: it takes work, and patience, and concentration to be open to the presence of God. But in this, we open ourselves to the infinite richness of life, which God wants to give us.
For me, it’s a matter of slowing down, being still, shutting out the ambient noise the world is full of, and trying to feel where God might be directing my attention. God calls each of us in different ways. And in ways that might seem tiny, but turn out to be huge; and in ways that seem so huge they’re impossible, but – one step at a time, with God’s help – turn out not to be. There’s a prayer that was written by a French physicist about 400 years ago: “Teach us, Lord, to do the little things as though they were great because of the majesty of Christ who does them in us; and teach us to do the greatest things as though they were little and easy, because of his infinite power.”
God is calling you to do things that only you can do: in this church, in your home, in your job, in school, in this community, in the world. And when you act on that call, there is joy, and peace, and freedom, that just keeps on growing. Thanks be to God.
There’s a man I know who’s a cradle Episcopalian, and been active in and a strong supporter of his church all his life – vestryperson, warden – but when you ask him about church, and what it means to him, his response is to say, Church is a nice quiet place; in such a way that politely ends the discussion. What he means is, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s my business. I don’t want to be labeled. Which point of view I understand, and agree with, to an extent. We each relate to God in our own way, that’s the way God created us, and there’s certainly a level on which talking about God is useless, and worse: that we’ve got God figured out, and under our control; which is, of course, ludicrous
But this way of thinking – that church is a nice quiet place, and we don’t need to go any further with that - can also be a way of compartmentalizing our faith – of actually avoiding God – and can prevent us from seeing where God is present and active in our lives, where God is doing something new (which God always is), where the Holy Spirit might be leading us. In the words of St. Paul, we proclaim “the God in whom we live and move and have our being”; God who loves us; and God who is continually inviting us to join in God’s work, in this broken world. In church this invitation has traditionally been spoken of as a call: we believe God calls each of us: calls us to faith; calls us to action.
This is a belief to which our church asks us to give our attention today. It’s in all three readings, one way or another; and the Collect for this third Sunday in Epiphany begins: “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ…”)
This belief that God calls us – God invites us, puts situations in front of us and says, What are you going to do about this? – this belief is attested to throughout the Bible, and has been part of the way the Christian church has been conceived from its earliest days. In the New Testament, the Greek word which is translated into English as “church” is ekklesia (from which we get words like “ecclesiastical”.) The literal meaning of ekklesia is, “those who are called out,” that is, out from among people who don’t hear that call. So from the beginning, church was never thought of as a building, or a service of worship, or a system of beliefs. The word “church” identifies a group of people who, together, are aware of having been called, in a particular way.
I wonder if, like me, you ever look around church at the people who are there and are struck by the same thing I am (and this is true of every church I’ve been part of). I look around and I see the people I see most every week, and I think, on the level of biographical details, how different we all are, and how odd it is that we all keep coming back to this same place to be together, we’re all on this same page – whatever it is, we’re figuring that out together all the time. We come from different backgrounds, we have different jobs, we’re of different ages, and different personality types (sometimes extremely so.) But we’re all here in church together because we’ve all heard a call, of some kind or other. We might describe it differently: that we hear the truth here, or that we like the sense of community we feel here: there are many different ways the call is lived out. But however we hear it, the call comes from a source we agree is the same, for all of us. This is what Jesus means when he talks about the good shepherd, in the gospel of John: the sheep follow the good shepherd because they know his voice. They may not understand the language, but they know they can trust the voice.
Part of the work we’re here in church to do is to grow in our discernment of God’s call to each of us, and to grow in our capacity to respond. This is one of the lessons of last week’s Old Testament reading, the story of the boy Samuel, who’s sleeping in the sanctuary, and three times God calls him, wakes him up, he thinks it’s his boss, the high priest Eli, who’s spoken, goes and wakes him up and says you called me. The first two times Eli says no, I didn’t call you, go back to sleep; the third time Eli recognizes that it’s God calling, tells Samuel that God will call again and tells him what to do. The lesson for us is that, even for a prophet like Samuel, the ability to hear God’s call does not drop on us full-blown out of the sky. We have to learn about it. And like anything worth learning, it takes work, attention, and guidance: it takes a church.
In today’s reading from First Corinthians, Paul is talking about what he expects will be the imminent return of the risen Jesus Christ: he says, “the present form of the world is passing away”, and therefore God is calling God’s people to a radical change in behavior (if you’re sad, forget it; if you’re happy, forget it: there are more important things to focus on.) The teaching for us today is that the present form of this world is continually passing away, that the world we see and feel around us is governed by a world that we don’t see, a higher reality, the life of God in eternity, that we participate in, and God calls us to live in that awareness.
The book of Jonah is all about call: how Jonah, the most comical figure in the Bible, ties himself into knots trying to avoid God’s call, but he can’t because he’s heard it so clearly. What we heard today is maybe the only straightforward passage in that book. It’s at the end, when Jonah finally gives in, and God, through Jonah, calls the people of Nineveh to repentance, and when they obey, withholds his terrible judgment and forgives them. The teaching for us here is that what we do makes a difference to God. God works through us – it’s not a small thing - and when we respond to God’s call it has real, big, practical meaning.
Sometimes the call is clear and unmistakable. That’s the case in today’s gospel, the story of Jesus calling the disciples, and because it’s Jesus, we’re not surprised that the call comes through as loud and clear as it does: Simon and Andrew and James and John hear a single sentence from a man they’ve never seen before, and drop their old lives and start new ones. Sometimes that’s the way it is. From this pulpit I have told the story of our former bishop, Clarence Coleridge, who in the early 1950’s, as a premed student at Tuskegee University in Alabama, was invited by a friend to come to worship at the friend’s church. The pastor of that church was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. At the conclusion of the service, Coleridge changed his life: immediately withdrew from college – walking away from a full-ride United Nations scholarship that would have taken him all the way through medical school – enrolled in a seminary in Atlanta, got a job in a gas station to pay his way, and wound up becoming the first African-American bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut.
Now, few of us hear calls so clearly, or from such powerful sources. And in talking about hearing a call, we have to be clear that it’s not like having a human conversation. God doesn’t speak out of the showerhead. Hearing God’s call is a matter of discernment: it takes work, and patience, and concentration to be open to the presence of God. But in this, we open ourselves to the infinite richness of life, which God wants to give us.
For me, it’s a matter of slowing down, being still, shutting out the ambient noise the world is full of, and trying to feel where God might be directing my attention. God calls each of us in different ways. And in ways that might seem tiny, but turn out to be huge; and in ways that seem so huge they’re impossible, but – one step at a time, with God’s help – turn out not to be. There’s a prayer that was written by a French physicist about 400 years ago: “Teach us, Lord, to do the little things as though they were great because of the majesty of Christ who does them in us; and teach us to do the greatest things as though they were little and easy, because of his infinite power.”
God is calling you to do things that only you can do: in this church, in your home, in your job, in school, in this community, in the world. And when you act on that call, there is joy, and peace, and freedom, that just keeps on growing. Thanks be to God.