Sermon Text - January 27, 2008
“Who’s Call?”
Matthew 4:12-23
Rev. Susan Towner-Larsen
We’re going to get ready to hear a fishy story ourselves. We’re going to be reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 4, Verse 18. Before we begin the story, let’s take a moment for prayer.
You love us God and you call us to be your people. As we come once again to this time of wondering and reflecting may we hear your voice. Under and over, and around any words we speak, any words we hear, amen.
Last week we looked at the gospel of John and the sort of fishy story there. And this week we look at the gospel of Matthew and the way that Matthew tells the same story of the call of the fishermen.
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him. Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Most of us have been asked that question many times, especially as children, and we’ve probably asked the question ourselves, as many times. Can’t you just sort of picture it? One of the little tykes of our congregation maybe hiding behind a parent’s legs and one of us bending down to say, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And isn’t that question one of those life questions that we talked about last week. One of the ones we spend our whole lives answering.
Aren’t most of us still working on that question, “what do I want to be when I grow up, next year when I’m 40 or 58 or 67 or whenever. And what responses do we usually give to that question? How many times have you heard say “oh, I want to be a ballerina” or a teacher, or a firefighter?
It fascinates me that most often the answer to the question of what we want to be has more to do with what we might do. Ballet, teaching, being the president. And last week during our “Why Do We Do What We Do?” in worship talk show format we played around a little bit with the word “call” – specifically the call to worship.
In the lingo of the church, call also comes up in relationship to the question of what we want to be when we grow up. “What is your calling?” seminary students ask each other. Meaning do you want to be a pastor, or a chaplain, or a youth worker, or teacher or professor. “Have you gotten a call yet?” clergy ask each other when they’re looking to serve a church. Or perhaps have you been called to ordained ministry we ask someone who is heavily, deeply involved in the life of a congregation.
So in the life of the church, call is most often associated with vocation, with serving, with another form of what we do with our lives. It can be a churchy way of asking “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Of course it’s not really simple to answer. Our understanding of call has many different layers and dimensions. I’ve mentioned before Parker Palmer’s little book, “Let Your Life Speak” that I keep by my bible and at my nightstand. In this book, Parker wrestles with both call and vocation. And in an early chapter he uses words from a poem by May Sarton as he evokes his own vocational quest. “Now I become myself,” she writes “it’s taken time, many years and places. I have been dissolved and shaken. Worn other people’s faces.”
What a long time, Parker Palmer writes, it takes us to become the person we have always been. But that, he believes, is our deepest calling - to grow into our own authentic self. To find the joy that is at the center of our being that was put there when we were born. And to find our own path of authentic service in the world. It’s no small order – truly a lifelong quest. An unfolding of ourselves that we intentionally tend to.
But how do we live out that quest or that unfolding? As one of my favorite singers put it a couple of decades ago, “it’s an inside job - no one can do it for us.” Or in the lingo of some of my spiritual director’s friends, “it’s inner work.” We must do this inner work alone.
Several times in scripture Jesus models this – he goes off someplace and prays. He teaches the disciples and others how to pray. Meditation, journal writing, spiritual reading, discernment of gifts, all of this is internal inner work, done privately. And if we skip that inner work, as Parker Palmer wisely points out, the outer work will suffer as well. Because of course the journey is also about that outer work.
How do we live out what we discover that we are? How do we learn how to pray and how to meditate? How to read the bible? How to be reflective? Where do we get support and inspiration and challenge? Where do we connect with other people on the journey?
You may guess where I’m going with this. . . . we get all of that, hopefully, in the church, in the faith community. Because we need each other - a faith community is essential. Because while the unfolding of our authentic self and our path of service is intensely personal, it is not unnecessarily private, as Parker Palmer also points out, as does Jesus Christ.
Jesus called the disciples. He called the disciples into community. He could have just talked to them one on one for months on end. He could have just traveled from town to town, talking to small groups and to individuals. That’s important work too. But he didn’t do that – he called them to be 12 - to be travelers together, to go with him as he opened himself and others to inspiration and to challenge, to failure, and success – they went together.
When the inner journey is hard, when it’s overwhelming or when we get stuck, we need each other. When we can’t see or claim our own gifts, when we forget what we’re called to be and whom we’re called to serve, we really need each other.
In covenant community we spend time learning and worshiping together, praying together, we equip ourselves for the inner journey, and we get to know each other. And in that knowing, we call forth one another’s gifts.
I don’t believe we have to drop everything and follow Jesus exclusively, the way the disciples did. Scholars believe that even the disciples probably went back and forth between those they loved and the teacher they loved. But as with those disciples, perhaps the point is to give the journey our full attention. To set it as one, if not the highest, priority in our lives, at least one of them.
The cost of not doing so is pretty great. We get lost, we drift, we forget who we are, or who we’re called to be. And our gifts remain unnamed, or unclaimed, or not called for. We need each other as Jesus and the disciples needed each other. And when we give our calling, our quest for ourselves, and the joy within and our quest for our way of serving, when we give that our fullest attention, amazing things happen.
We are on the journey. How did Jesus begin the journey? What did he model in our reading from today? You could look at Verse 23 closely . . . .before he taught, before the Sermon on the Mount that follows what we read today, before he said another word, he practiced grace. He served. He used his gifts for healing and curing the sick.
He didn’t demand that they first listen to him, or that they first be baptized, or that they first recognize him as the Messiah. Once he had called together his community, once he had it in place, he simply went about randomly offering grace, and healing, offering his own gifts, offering his authentic self.
Your gifts and my gifts are different than Jesus’ gift for healing and for curing disease. What is important is the offering of the gifts for others, the grace, the serving, the calling forth.
What do you want to be when you grow up? What is your calling? Who will you be in this one glorious, juicy, amazing life that we’ve been given? Amen.