Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isaiah 6: 1-8; I Cor. 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
February 7, 2010

　

Called

The Christian Century is my favorite periodical. Unlike the magazines that tend to accumulate on the "must-get-around-to-reading" stack, I usually read the Century from cover to cover.

Yesterday I found the latest edition in the mailbox, and was thumbing through it on my way up the driveway when my eye was caught by an article entitled "Generational Ties." It was written by one of those young pastors who has a blog and a Facebook page and serves a small congregation in the frozen Midwest. Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Then I looked at the writer’s name: Adam J. Copeland.

The fact that Adam didn’t tell his father that he was to be published in the Christian Century comes as no surprise. I remember a Friday morning in his senior year of high school. He was dragging a suitcase down the stairs before breakfast.

"What’s that for?" I asked.

"Oh, I’m giving the keynote address at a presbytery youth conference. Mom knows about it."

"Where? Mariana? "

"No, Maryland. Didn’t I tell you?"

The scary thing is, he probably did.

Most parents like to think that they have a lot to do with how their children turn out. My own experience suggests that parents tend to overestimate themselves. Of course we do our best. We encourage good study habits in our children, drive them to soccer practice, and pay for trips to the orthodontist, but nothing we do guarantees that they will meet our expectations or fail to break our hearts.

Parenthood is, I am coming to believe, a great mystery. It ranks right up there with the doctrine of the Trinity and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As Calvin said, "I rather experience than understand it."

The same goes for this phenomenon we Christians label "vocation" or "call." I’ve never understood it, even though, in my own way, I have experienced it. I can’t tell you how I came to be a follower of Jesus Christ, or exactly when, but I can tell you that Jesus has called, and continues to call, and that I both have responded and continue to resist.

Perhaps it’s the same for you. Or perhaps it’s completely different. If you’re looking for one size that fits all, you won’t find it in the Bible.

Take Jeremiah. We heard about his call last Sunday. Jeremiah’s call came when he was a youth. "You can’t be calling me," Jeremiah tells the Lord. "I’m just a kid."

"Don’t say ‘I’m just a kid,’" the Lord replies. All evidence to the contrary, God knows what God is doing. God gives Jeremiah everything he needs to do the job God called him to do.

Or Isaiah. Isaiah’s call came while he was ministering in the Temple "in the year that King Uzziah died." Apparently, Isaiah was already a priest, but God called him to be a prophet as well – or instead, which is often the case with priests versus prophets.

Overwhelmed by a vision of God’s complete and entire holiness, Isaiah blurts out, "Woe is me! I’m in for it now. I won’t last three seconds in the presence of God because I’m a sinner and so is everyone around me. "I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips."

The Holy One responds by sending a six-winged seraph who takes a coal from the altar brazier and touches Isaiah’s lips with it. Cleansed of his sin for the moment, Isaiah cries: "Here I am; send me!" He is then assigned a task that appears to be doomed from the start. He is told to proclaim God’s word even though God’s people will not listen to it.

Apparently God’s call requires faithfulness, but not necessarily success. I wish the purveyors of the so-called "prosperity gospel" would put that in their pipes and smoke it.

And then there’s Peter. Peter’s call is in some ways like Isaiah’s, and in important ways different. After a whole night of back-breaking work in that boat on the Sea of Galilee -- lowering the net, hauling it back again empty, lowering the net, hauling it back again empty, over and over -- Jesus orders the disciples to let down their net yet another time. Peter can’t see any point in it. If there were any fish in that part of the lake, they’d have caught them by now. Nevertheless, like a preacher who labors at her craft week after week, year after year, whether she feels as though she’s getting through or not, Peter does what he is told.

"If you say so, Master, I will let down the nets."

The catch is so large that the nets began to break and the boats almost capsize. When the fishermen finally make it to shore, Peter falls on his knees before Jesus and says, "Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man." He could just as well have said, "Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips."

Jesus doesn’t send a seraph to singe Peter clean of his sins. Instead he promises to make him into a different kind of fisherman. "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." The verb Luke uses implies "rescuing," "snatching from disaster." A better translation might be, "From now on you’ll be taking men and women alive."

Whatever else the call to follow Jesus is, it’s a call to a new way of living – away from a life that makes us ashamed to be in God’s presence toward a life that rejoices in God’s invitation to be fully alive and working toward God’s reign.

Peter drops everything – including that profitable pile of fish on the beach – to respond to Jesus’ invitation. No doubt about it; it’s a fishy proposition. But Peter is used to that.

And don’t forget Paul. He starts off as Saul, first in his class in seminary, honor graduate of the school of Pharisaical Propriety, storm trooper for God. Then Saul meets the risen Jesus and becomes Paul, apostle to the Gentiles. He goes from teaching the grammar of religious purity to ministry among the very people up with whom he would not put in his former life. Paul’s very unworthiness to be an apostle becomes a kind of credential for him as he struggles to help the Corinthians figure out the nature of their call:

"I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God," he writes, "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain."

"By the grace of God and I am what I am." That could be the motto for Jeremiah, or Isaiah, or Peter, or Mary, or anyone of us. Grace seems to the factor common to every call:

Whatever else God’s calls us to do and say, God calls us to bear witness to the burning, healing, repulsive and yet irresistible grace made flesh is Jesus. God calls us to point not to ourselves but to Jesus, who in turn points to us and says, "Row out where it’s deep. Let down your net. Take a risk. Follow me."

One of the great re-discoveries of the Reformation is that all the baptized have a calling. Vocation is not just for monks and nuns and pastors. It’s for milkmaids and investment bankers, for candlestick makers and computer programmers. If you’re baptized and don’t feel called, chances are, you aren’t listening.

Years ago, in a little book called Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, Frederick Buechner wrote: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet." In other words, vocation is what’s good for you and good for the world.

That’s not a bad definition of vocation, so far as it goes. The problem with that definition is that we don’t always know what’s good for us or for the world. Left to our own devices, we are very likely to misread both. We are likely to go off to Haiti, fill a bus with children, and head across the border without so much as a nod to law, to culture, or to common courtesy.

There’s no underestimating our capacity for self-deception, which is another word for sin. That’s why, for Christians anyway, vocation always involves community. We need one another to discern the difference between an over-active ego and the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

As I said, exactly how vocation works is a kind of mystery. It involves acknowledging who we are as sinners in God’s sight, where we stand in the community of faith, and the grace that goes ahead of us, preparing the way.

Hearing today’s scripture readings, this much seems to be clear: If you’re saying to God, "Who, me?" you’re probably pointed in the right direction.

 

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