Opened the Heart
Candidates for ordained ministry regularly meet with lay persons and clergy who are monitoring their spiritual growth and their fitness for ministry. In our annual conference, every one of these meetings begins with this prompt:
In three minutes or less, share with us your call story.
It is my experience that the first time candidates hear this prompt, they are a little overwhelmed. Really? I could talk about that for hours. I can write about it for pages. And you want me to do it right here and now in 3 minutes? It is so much bigger than that?
But over time, candidates really sharpen their understanding of the vital details of their call story. If they are growing spiritually, their listening is being fine-tuned, encounter by encounter. They may be hearing from God in the stirrings of their heart and soul.
Or they may be seeing God in patterns that surround them or even in dreams or visions.
They may be encountering God in people around them, hearing from others or observing in the actions of others the ways that God is moving them forward.
And so over time, the candidates’ ability to share their call story is refined and their call becomes clearer and more concise – to them and to those who hear it. They recognize that their call is part of their spirit, part of the way they move in the world, and they come to claim it and it moves in them and through them.
Now, I hear some of your brains at work: “That’s nice, Pastor, but I’m not called to ordained ministry. What does this have to do with me?”
You’ve heard me say this before: We are all called.
Each of us is created with unique gifts and graces that God needs us to put to use in the world so that the Kin-dom of God might flourish.
We are called individually.
And we are called as a community, as the body of Christ.
Call is not exceptional.
I would suggest it is universal.
But we don’t always have ears that are attuned or language to talk about call in our churches and our communities of faith today.
In the early church, in the early movement of Christ-followers as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, to have a vision or to hear a voice or to understand that you are being given divine direction somehow (and to FOLLOW that divine direction) was not unusual. The idea of “VISION” is expressed most frequently in Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures and in Acts of the Apostles in the new testament. It seems important that vision is central to how the early church reached people.
Today, from the Acts of the Apostles, we have a story of calls received and calls answered. We have a story of Paul called to a specific place and of Lydia called to open her heart to the Good News. We have a story that is short on words but contains some key details – and the rest of the chapter, along with the surrounding chapters, lend to a fuller understanding and application of this story. Take time to read chapters 15 and 17 this week.
The story begins with Paul having a vision at night – a man pleading with him to come to Macedonia. Paul’s travels have been guided by visions and nudges and messages from God – both direction about where to go and where NOT to go. And so when he has this vision, he goes to Macedonia.
As indicated in the text, Paul and his companion (Timothy) eventually arrive in Philippi, a Roman colony. Paul is a Roman citizen, and so for Paul, moving and traveling within Roman occupied spaces holds different acceptability, protection, and safety. When Paul is in Roman controlled spaces, he has some privilege.
Paul and Timothy spend time in Philippi, and on the Sabbath, leave the city gate in search of a place of prayer, perhaps a synagogue. Pay attention to the fact that they have left the city – they have crossed a threshold from the safety of the city – they are now outside of the city.
Near the river, they discover a gathering of women. There they are received by a woman named Lydia, whom the text describes as from Thyatira. This places her outside of her home turf. She is an outsider here – a believer in the God of Israel, but like Cornelius in last week’s story, she is a gentile, not Jewish. And on this day, she is a place of prayer with other believers.
The text says that the Lord opened her heart and she received Paul’s teaching and witness eagerly. So eagerly that she and her household were baptized. After that, she invites Paul and Timothy to stay in her home – which once again would have been a place where Paul, as a Roman citizen was an outsider. The disciples stay with her, and if you follow the story through, Lydia also hosts Paul and Silas after their imprisonment. Lydia becomes a supporter, a patron, of the early church’s ministry.
I want to lift of some themes that surface in this text.
Let’s remember that in this season of Easter, we have been talking about what it means to be a witness, remembering that to be a witness is not merely to see or experience but to go forward from our seeing or experiencing to act differently, to share what we’ve seen, to invite others to see as well. Paul and Timothy shared their witness of what God did and continued to do through Jesus the Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
It is noteworthy that Paul set sail because he had a vision of a man calling him to Macedonia. But he encountered and witnessed to a group of women. Women were outsiders in the culture by nature of their gender.
The place by the river where Paul and Timothy found Lydia, where Lydia received the Gospel, was outside the gates of the Roman colony Philippi. Paul was an outsider in this location, and so was Lydia. God’s call to them both wasn’t rooted in a place of safety, familiarity, and belonging.
After Lydia received Paul’s message of good news, she opened her home to his team – becoming a worker in the field for the gospel. Her home base, Thyatira, became a safe haven at one point for Paul’s work. As an outsider, she made her home a new “inside” for the early church.
Today, I hope that you will leave thinking about two big overarching things. And beyond thinking about them, I hope we will begin adapting our shared life as the body of Christ in light of what God is saying to us.
First, how might we attune ourselves to God’s call in each of our lives and collectively?
Beginning with the assumption that everyone is precious to God and everyone is created with gifts and graces for the building up of the Kin-dom, how is it that we are listening and understanding, vetting and refining, sharing and encouraging our calls – individually and collectively?
How is it that we are open to vision, to dreams, to voices, but also to music and worship and prayer and service and to people speaking into our lives, pointing us, nudging us, touching something in us that adds shape and definition to the way we are called?
Rev. Dr. Derek Weber, Director of Preaching Ministries for the United Methodist General Board of Discipleship poses work this way:
Hearing God’s voice begins with the faith that God is speaking and then a needed determination to listen. So we sing about the voice of God; we pray for that blessing; we commit ourselves to the task of hearing and obeying the word that we hear, both the written word gathered in the scriptures and the ongoing prompting of the Spirit that speaks to us in this moment, for this moment. How do we hear?
It is my hope and prayer that we will all set out to do the work of hearing – with faith that God is indeed speaking into our lives.
Second, what does it mean that in the call stories we have explored these past two weeks, the parties involved were crossing boundaries, moving out of their comfort zones, transitioning at times from insider to outsider, meeting one another.
And in the process, God was at work opening their hearts. Opening their hearts to share and to receive. In both stories this past two weeks, both parties in the story of witness received something that led to their transformation and growth, something that helped to expand the action and story of God.
What boundaries are we called to cross? What does it mean for the work of witness to be beyond our home base – beyond our church, beyond our property, beyond our comfort, beyond our sense of preparation?
What if you were exploring these two ideas around the dinner table in your home?
What if you were exploring these two ideas with your small group? Your committee?
What if each committee meeting began with an invitation for us to discuss what we have received in terms of vision, voices, nudges, synchronicty, connection that points to our call?
What if we regularly asked one another to share our call story?
We are called. Each of us. Individually and as the body of Christ.
The work is to listen and to be willing to go.
Will you join in?
May it be so.
Amen.
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