Called
Today I want to talk about call.
I want to talk about how we are all called.
I want to talk about how we are probably called to things
we’ve not yet recognized.
Call is focused.
Call can be frightening.
And God is with us.
Our gospel text today from Matthew ends with Jesus leaving
his home turf and heading to Galilee where he taps four men on the
shoulder. Simon Peter and Andrew and
James and John are called away from their fishing nets and their families. They are called to follow this man of whom
John has spoken.
If we track back to last week’s reading from John, we can
connect Simon Peter and Andrew back to John the Baptist. It seems they might have been following him
until he was imprisoned by the Empire. History beyond the scripture suggests
that John the Baptist was imprisoned not just for calling out the immorality of
Herod Antipas, but also for critiquing the oppressive economic structures of
the Roman Empire, structures that made the poor more indebted, that forced them
into labor, all to line the treasury of Caesar.
So perhaps Simon Peter and Andrew have fled back to the
safety of the family business after seeing John imprisoned.
And I suspect that the sons of any family were welcomed back
to the family trade with open arms.
Fishing is hard business, business for young, strong backs. Business
that requires hands that cast, hands that draw up and pull and gather, hands
that sort, hands that get boats into and out of the water. Hands that repair
nets when not doing all those other things.
And without those hands working, there is much less work being
accomplished. Which must have translated into less food on the table, less
repairs to the roof, less financial security for the rest of the family.
When Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John walk away to
follow this relatively unknown teacher named Jesus, they were leaving a lot
behind. Not just their own
well-being. They were leaving behind the
well being of their families.
They must have recognized something might and powerful in
Jesus’s words to them. C’mon. Let’s go
fish for people.
I’m not seeing a transferrable skill set – fishing is bodily
work. But drawing people into community
is a different kind of work. People work
is not about skilled hands. It is about skilled hearts. About skilled
minds. About relationship.
About uniting people with the same mind and purpose…
Woo…there is a shortage of that these days, eh?
It would be easy to look at this story just as a way to
understand Jesus’s ministry and life…but today, I want us to look at this story
and hear what it says about how we might be called to some work for Christ.
I spent a few years as a seminarian attending a church outside
of The United Methodist Church. I was going through a divorce, the church was a
hard place, and I needed a small community that would love me and love my
family really well.
What I stumbled into was a small church planted in Columbia
in the late 60s, named Kittamaqundi Community Church – KC for short. It had
been planted by folks who had been part of the Church of the Savior in
Washington DC… a notorious congregation that launched so many ministries and
social services in DC in the 50s and 60s and 70s.
When I arrived in 2007, KC was a community that still had many
founding members who were committed to God and to one another. And central to
their identity was an awareness that everyone has a call on their life. And that answering that call is the day to
day work of being a follower of Christ.
Every year, in that community, members discern (remember
that work from a few weeks back?).
They discern how they are “called” to commit to the
community in the coming year. They
discern how they are called to support the worshiping life of the
community. They discern how they are
called to serve the world with their unique gifts. They discern how they will commit to a small
group for study, prayer and mutual support for the year to come. They discern how they will offer their gifts
to lead some aspect of the church’s life. And finally they discern how they
will support the work of the church financially.
They recognize that they belong to this particular church
because God has called them there – some have been around since the founding
and from time to time, new folks arrive, stay a few years, and drift toward
something else. Or they stick around.
Recognizing that everyone has a call, that KC community also
believes that all calls have a season. And
there is always a new call when one ends. When one discerns a call is ending,
one spends time listening and discerning for how God is issuing a new call.
In responding faithfully to the calls in our lives, as those
calls ebb and flow, wax and wane, we become closer to God. We learn to listen,
to understand, to adapt. And when we become closer to God, we are changed.
In church lingo, this KC community is known as a “high
commitment” community. That is to say,
there are few casual attendees. Everyone sees call as a huge piece of who they
are and how they interact with the world. For members of KC, the church is
their rock and their guide, the conduit for their work in the world and their
primary community.
I was someone called to that community for a particular
season and reason. That is the community to which my husband still belongs. I
give thanks to God for seasons of leading in that community, because it was
there that I recognized my call back to the church of my childhood – not to
maintain the status quo but to birth new things.
I share this story NOT because I believe that Faith is
destined to become such a high commitment community, but because I think that
it is a reminder of how we are all called, and what we might accomplish when we
recognize that for ourselves, for one another and for the wholeness of who we
are as one expression of the body of Christ in the world.
Oftentimes we want to make call about certain people – maybe
our committee leaders, maybe our pastors, maybe those who are attending
seminary. And it is true that these folks are called in some specific way. But so are we all.
One of our challenges here at Faith in the coming year is to
accept that we are all called, to determine how we are individually called, to
bring our God – given gifts to bear on our Faith church community and to
discern how God is calling us here as a body at 6810 Montrose Road to be with
our neighbors in the world.
Next week, after worship, we’ll dive into a conversation
about “call” specifically as it relates to the generous commitment you have
made to increasing our missions budget.
Choosing to expand our investments of time, talent and treasure in
mission is a return to the great commandment and the great commission – it is a
concrete effort in the direction of loving God and neighbor and making
disciples.
We necessarily begin that discipleship work by deepening
relationships with God – Father, Son, Spirit.
Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. We have to be deepening our own connection
through prayer, acts of mercy and compassion, worship and learning in order to
really hear and understand the way God is calling us to love others.
And…like those fisherman called away from their fathers’
nets, we’re not called to wait for the perfect moment, for some sign of
readiness, because Jesus is calling us away from what is familiar toward
something new.
As I returned this week to Paul’s first letter to the church
at Corinth, I was aware of his coaching to a young community facing the storms
of being in shared relationship and mission.
The storms of figuring out what is important and how to work together toward
what is important. Factions have formed in a young church and there is
disagreement about who is right and who is wrong.
Paul is coaching them toward unity. With some irony and some
sarcasm, Paul is bringing them back to their one baptism in Christ Jesus –
reminding them that they are unified by the oneness of Jesus, not by the
competing agenda of various leaders.
I know we’re not a “new community.” But as I think about the world, I wonder
this. Perhaps we ARE indeed a new
community that is seeking structure and clarity. We are a new thing not because we have
necessarily chosen to be a new thing but because the world around us is
becoming a new thing.
Research reveals the painful truth that people don’t claim a
religious identity like they once did.
Diana Butler Bass has done some work to dig into this a bit – noting
that while fewer people claim a specific “religion,” the number of people
identifying as “spiritual” is holding steady if not growing.
In her work she has asked people to explain what it means to
be religious and what it means to be spiritual. Overwhelmingly, words used to
describe religion describe an institution and words used to describe
spirituality describe RELATIONSHIPS.
Sit with that.
Since the announcement of new possibilities for
denominational structure in the UMC were announced on Jan 3, I’ve sat with a
lot of questions. Questions about who we are here at Faith and what it means to
be a church in this day and age. I’ve sat with what it means to be a pastor and
what it means to cast vision.
A colleague recently said to me, while I was wrestling with
this, “Are you focused on preserving the institution or on reaching new
people?”
Did you ever get smacked with a framing question that calls
you out…that puts your concerns in a framework that is simple but convicting?
Are we preserving who we are and what we want? Or are we
reaching new people who desperately need a relationship with God?
I know we fret sometimes about attendance. But people don’t
attend church the way they did. If you talk to some young adults in your life,
they might happily tell you that they don’t agree with showing up in the pews
once a week and then failing to love people like God throughout the rest of the
week. Or they might tell you that the economy is such that they have jobs that
require them to work on Sunday morning. Or they have jobs that suck so much
life out of them so that they can afford a place to live and some ramen in
their cupboard that the only time literally they have to be with family or
friends happens to be Sunday morning. Or
they don’t have clothes like you and I have clothes…perhaps because they have
never been in a church before or perhaps because they have never needed dress
pants and a tie.
I know that is hard to hear. And when I read Paul’s letter
in this season, I hear his biting wit as he makes the point – “I belong to
Paul, I belong to Appollos..” No, actually we all belong to Christ.” And so I
tune my ears differently to what is happening around me, to what is being said
about the church as we sitting here know it, because the world is not as it has
always been. It is not about me and my preferences. It is not about what is
comfortable. It is about what is real.
I am a mom of young adults.
But their lives are very different than my own. And so…I wonder if part of our “newness” is
sorting out what it means to be a community with many pathways to participation
and inclusion, growth and belonging. A
place where belonging has to do with the relationships we have with one another
and our world…more so than the traditional definitions of how one belongs –
attending worship, putting money in a plate, belonging to a study that is
centrally scheduled. But what if what
matters are the times we break bread together, the times we pray for one
another, the ways we work alongside one another to help the orphan and the
widow, the sick and the unhoused?
What if what matters is offering someone a way of learning
about God – even if it isn’t the way WE learned about God?
Today I pray you will think about call.
I pray you will think about how YOU are all called. And how
WE are called.
Fishing for fish takes some different skills than fishing
for people.
We are all called.
Call can be frightening.
And God is with us.
Hear the good news.
Jesus didn’t call folks who were specifically equipped with the skills
to fish for people. He called laborers
from another field. And walked with
them.
That is how we are called. Just as we are. Into shared work with Christ.
Are we willing to walk away from what is secure and what we
know to follow?
May it be so.
Amen.
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