Fifth Sunday After Epiphany
5 February 1995
St. George's, LeMars, Iowa
Lay preacher: Donald Wacome
Judges 6.11-24a
1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Psalm 85
Luke 5.1-11
"...they left everything and followed him." (Luke 5.11)
Three stories of vocation converge in this morning's readings. Gideon is at work on his father's farm when an angel appears and commands him to go and deliver Israel from the Midian oppression. Simon Peter and his partners are cleaning up after fishing when Jesus appears, calling them to follow him and become his disciples. And in today's epistle, St. Paul refers to the time he was traveling on the road to Damascus when the resurrected Christ appeared to him and called him to be his apostle. We'd be pretty obtuse not to hear a call to think for awhile about what it means to be called, to have a calling.
Maybe the first thing most people sitting in church pews will say about their vocations is that they haven't got one: that they're just ordinary people, not the special few who are given a call, who go through the formal process of discernment, become aspirants, postulants, candidates and finally, if they somehow make it through all this, become clergy. If we were somewhere else we might need to be convinced that this is a mistake, and learn on the contrary that no one is "uncalled." Each one of us who throws his lot in with Jesus has a vocation. But this is St. George's, where we've learned that each one of us has his or her own calling, his or her own ministry, without which we are not whole, without which this work of God's here and now would not be complete.
Even so, it might be easy to imagine some sort of special religious procedure for listening for, and hearing and understanding how to respond to God's call. Prayer and fasting, waiting on a quiet mountain top. Putting four years into EFM. Of course there's a place for these valuable things. But it's interesting that in today's stories of persons being called by God they are called out of their everyday work and daily difficulties. Gideon is beating out the wheat; I have only the vaguest notion of what that means, but I assume it's some pretty mundane bit of agricultural work - nothing special - a matter of daily routine on the farm. Except that now he's working against the odds, doing what must be done even though the conditions for doing it are not good: he's working in the wine press because if the Midianites see there's wheat to steal they'll show up and take it away. It's like this with Simon Peter and his fishing partners too. When their call comes they're just going about their daily business, cleaning up after what, it turns out, has been a frustrating night in which they've caught nothing. They're not in the crowd eagerly trying to hear a word from God: they went to work. And even Paul is doing his job as he sees it, trying to stamp out one more band of wayward followers of a false messiah, whose cult, he angrily discovers, has spread all the way to Damascus -- that's when the resurrected Jesus confronts and claims him.
None of these people were making any particular effort to hear a word from God calling them into their life's work for him. This suggests that for each of us the way to wait for a call from God is often mainly a matter of getting on with things, doing whatever work seems good and worthwhile to us, leaving it to God to summon us as he pleases. Our callings are not what we've made for ourselves, nor what we deserve to get from God; one's vocation is a gift, the grace of God shaping our lives as we hear, and respond to him.
Another thing to notice in these stories of people being given their vocations is how far they were from being ready to receive the gift. They are not prepared for a call to do God's work. In fact they are quite unlikely candidates for the mighty acts to which God calls them. Gideon may be a mighty warrior, but he has lost heart. He is hiding from Israel's enemies, after all. He is resigned to Israel's humiliating domination by her enemies. He is not attentively listening for God, eager to hear from him, confident in his strength and willingness to come to Israel's rescue. He is bitter toward the God who seems to have abandoned Israel. Yet unready as Gideon may have been to set out on the task God has in store for him, God is ready to use him, to share his work with this unprepared human being. He gives Gideon a task he's not worthy of and empowers him to do it.
Like Gideon, the fishermen in Luke's gospel seem unlikely candidates for the vocation of being Jesus' disciples. He tells them to put the nets they've just cleaned back into the water. They're frustrated and tired, yet they do what he says, but grudgingly, as if to humor him. They do not anticipate that something astounding is about to happen. When their boats are amazingly flooded with the fish that had eluded their nets all night, their reaction is fear, not gratitude. They aren't ready to hear the call of the man who has made this wondrous thing happen. Notoriously impetuous Peter is not ready to drop everything and follow Jesus. He implores him to go away. As unprepared as they are for their encounter with God, he is ready for them, and that's what matters. Despite their lack of readiness and understanding, they do leave everything and follow him.
And then there's Paul: he least of all is listening for an invitation from God. As he writes in his letter to the Corinthians, he's hardly fit to be called God's apostle; rather than waiting for God to invite him to share in his work he had taken matters into his own hands, doing what he thought was God's work, but really fighting him. By any standard, no one was less deserving of a call from Jesus nor less prepared to respond to it. The lesson Paul draws from his own experience is one we can draw from all these accounts: it's not the readiness or worthiness on our part that ultimately counts, but God's grace in calling us to come trust him and joyfully accept a share in his work.
The persons' whose vocations we're reflecting on here were given great, important, public tasks. God called Gideon to lead the nation of Israel out of bondage and back to God at a crucial juncture in its early history. Jesus called those ineffectual fisherman and that self-righteous, vindictive Pharisee Saul to play profoundly significant, world-changing roles in God's redemptive work in this world. Such callings are necessarily rare. There's not much chance that you or I or anyone we know will be summoned to the scene of God's rare, overt interventions in human affairs, to one of the pivotal moments of salvation history. But I think we are called to trust that things and events and tasks that seems to us grand and important may be relatively insignificant from God's perspective, and that from his point of view what seems insignificant or even trivial may be of great importance. Recall Jesus' saying: "just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me." And in the epistle to the Hebrews we read that small acts of faithful kindness have been done for strangers who are God's angels incognito- on who knows what profound errands? For us, the true shape and outline of God's work in this world, and thus the true significance of the work to which he calls us, is not clear. The importance of the things we do as we live out our callings is not measured by what they are, nor by their visible effects, but by he for whom they are done.
Another thing it's easy to imagine is that when we're doing God's work, heeding his call, fulfilling our vocations, we're likely to be sure of our call and confident in God's power, so we can do his work with confidence, skill and pleasure. I'm sure that sometimes it is like this: that God invites us to do things we're good at doing. But it doesn't have to be that way. Gideon embarks on his mission from God full of bitterness and doubt. Peter and the other disciples are tired, confused and afraid as they begin to follow Jesus. Paul goes blind when Jesus calls him and for days he stumbles around, led by his servants as he follows his new master's enigmatic instructions. If these stories are any indication, to be called into action by God is often a matter of not feeling up to the task, not of getting an opportunity to put to good use our natural abilities and well-earned skills, but to have our inadequacies lurch awkwardly into view. There will be a good chance of looking foolish, of everyone wondering what we think we're doing. When we're called upon to entertain an angel without knowing it we'll probably feel entirely inadequate. We'll have a keen sense of our need to rely on God himself as we hear, and try to respond to, his call. To receive the gift of a vocation, a calling, from God, as we all do, is not to be called to travel into familiar territory where we know what we're doing and can rely on our own powers. For me, the concluding chorus of W.H. Auden's wonderful poem of faith, For the Time Being, tells us what it's like to be following one's calling from God:
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
He is the Truth. Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
He is the Life.
Love him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
Amen