God's Call

God’s Call (September 23-October 6)

Who does God call?  What kinds of people?  Is God calling me?  These are great questions.  They’re the kinds of questions pastors get asked a lot.  It happens pretty often in my work, and it happened especially often when I was in seminary, that people would ask me, “When did you receive your call?”  They sensed that there was something sacred about a person deciding to enter into ordained ministry and serve the church.

The result of being asked so frequently “When did you receive your call?” was that I became pretty good at sharing a story as a response.  It went something like this: When I was a junior in high school, I had to tell my dad that I couldn’t be a farmer.  That was really difficult, but I just knew it wasn’t something I was called to do.  So, I started imagining that I’d be an accountant.  I wanted to be an accountant so I could make good money, retire early, and golf a lot.

I told this to my youth pastor once when we were eating lunch together at synod assembly, and he said, “You really ought to consider being a pastor.” My senior pastor down the table told me something similar.  Later, I felt embarrassed having had as my highest priority retiring early to golf.  Somehow it didn’t seem faithful to God and to who I was.

Then I started to realize that I had a lot of gifts for church ministry, and a passion for it.  I was already very involved in youth ministry in my church, and so it wasn’t a huge stretch to imagine working in the church.  From that time on, I’ve been living from that original call.  The voice of God came from the mouth of my pastor, and a few others.

The Bible shares a lot of call stories with us.  Some of the earliest are short and cryptic, like Abraham’s call to “Go to a land that I will show you.”  Other calls, like God’s call of the biblical prophets, are pretty clearly calls similar to mine to pastoral ministry.  They were called to “proclaim the Word of God.”  Or in the language of the Bible, to go somewhere and say, “Thus says the Lord.” Sometimes, like in Isaiah or Revelation or Peter’s call in Acts, the call comes as a vision, in a dream.  Other times, like the call of Samuel and Jeremiah or Paul in Acts, God speaks directly and calls them.  Oftentimes they are very dramatic and direct.  Some of us wish God would speak so clearly to us.

But then, on the other hand, when God speaks THAT directly to people, their whole lives are turned upside down. Abraham has to move, Saul goes blind, Peter has to learn to eat shellfish, Jonah runs away and gets swallowed by a really big fish, Jeremiah is given only really bad news to share, etc.  Maybe we should be happy that God generally calls us in much less dramatic ways.

Nevertheless, it is an article of our faith that God does call us.  Each of us has been given a gift according to the one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12); each of us is therefore “called” to share these gifts with others.  We are called.  We are called first of all to speak the Word of God to each other the way the prophets spoke them.  We are called to proclaim God, to tell the truth, to witness.  Jesus says, “You are my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”  That call is upon all of us, not just prophets and pastors.

But we also have our individual callings, our vocations.  Some are called to milk cows, others are called to care for sick neighbors, some are called to be married and raised children, some are called to a life of singleness, some are call work in various professions, and yes, some are called (just not me) to be accountants and farmers, or even to play golf professionally, or to take leisure and rest.

The question is: Are we listening for God’s call?  Are we regularly asking God what God’s call is on our life, now, in the present?

As you read each of these call stories in Scripture, live deeply into them.  Imagine what it must have been like for each of these people to be called.  What was it like for the disciples to hear “I will make you fishers of people”?  What must it have been like to be given the revelations John had and wrote down?  Consider each in turn, and appreciate each one on its own merits.  But then, try and compare it to your own life and situation.  Have you had a dream that was really a call, and you just overlooked it?  Are you in the vocation God has called you to?  How would you know?  Keep working on these texts, day after day, and ask God, “Is there a word for me here?  For our community? For our family?”  Speak, Lord, that I may speak!