Calling
1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51

January 15, 2006


Let me say again that I am unashamed and unapologetic to be a Protestant. Protestants have made a lot of mistakes along the way - and we are specialists at certain kinds of mistakes - but I believe we interpret and live in the world in a unique manner. We are odd, not even, which is good for the nurture of the Christian spirit. Allow me to explain one of our oddities that makes humanity even.

One of the first things the Protestant Reformation did under Martin Luther and John Calvin was to rescue the word “vocation” from the theological ghetto. To speak of vocations today in the Roman Catholic Church means specifically the priesthood; so, therefore, only a priest has a vocation, the Latin word behind it meaning simply “to call.” God calling you to do God’s specific work has been the connotation of vocation for millennia. That is, until the Reformers recognized that here in God’s world, everything we do may be understood as a vocation, a calling. All work is holy, not just the ministry of the clergy. Every one of us is endowed with a vocation, no matter what our type of labour may be. A little divine imagination is needed to understand into which vocation God has fit you and placed you to keep all of life holy.

Bob Gay reminded me of the construction labourers working on one of those magnificent European cathedrals that took a couple of hundred years to complete. York, Chartres, Durham, Salisbury are marvelous to observe now in their completeness, but somewhere in the long middle years of construction it had to be difficult to see where one was going. One of the workers commented cynically to his pals, “I am just putting in time to get my wages.” Another said, “I cut stone.” But a third beamed, “I am building a cathedral!” There was nothing mundane, worldly-boring, about what he was doing. He was not building a place, but a space for God and human beings to encounter one another: his was a vocation, not a job, a calling by God to do work that makes holy.

Perhaps it has to do with our ears, what we are graced to hear. The most famous story of a literal calling is that of Samuel, the last of the Israelite Judges, the prophet who anointed Israel’s first kings. The story begins with his mother Hannah, the favourite wife of Elkanah, who like most important women in the Old Testament is initially barren, unable to bear a child. She prays to God in the words that Mary will borrow for her response to the angel Gabriel in the Magnificat. A child comes, Samuel, or “God has heard.” Hannah never loses sight of God’s gift to her, dedicating Samuel to the service of the Lord as a Nazirite, the same order as Samson, and then given over as an apprentice to Eli the priest of the temple in Shiloh. But “in those days there was no king in Israel; every person did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision” (1 Samuel 3:1). It was a barren time.

The boy Samuel had a job as a glorified, perhaps holy, gopher - but he was still blissfully unaware of what God did. He heard something go thump in the middle of the night - what Arnold Kenseth once called in his poem on ordination, “a rare thump.” It was a still small voice whispering his name, “Samuel,” and it thumped him enough to go to his master Eli several times on a false alarm. Eli had enough problems with two corrupt sons, but he could detect the thump in Samuel’s voice. The third time he told Samuel to respond to the call. Call and response is the only way we relate to God. The fourth time Samuel hears his name he responds, “Speak. I’m your servant, ready to listen.”

What God had to say was pretty heavy for a young boy, and obediently and truthfully Samuel would relate it back to Eli. Notice that God did not explicitly ask Samuel to serve him, to become a minister, to preach the Gospel, or to right some social wrong. God simply told him tough stuff, and God kept on telling Samuel important things for the rest of his life. Samuel didn’t get his ego and pride swelled up with, “God told me I am going to be a prophet! I am going to be the next Judge of Israel, the leader of the people of God.” No, God just told him things he needed to know and as Samuel grew and matured, what he knew and had been told couldn’t just lie there. He had to do something with them and he became something as a result.

I have no doubt that you have heard these whispers in one shape or another, but the issue is whether you listened and absorbed what was said to you. Hmm. That way biology works here is pretty intriguing. Hmm. So that’s how people think about these things. Hmm. Wouldn’t it be exciting to get that student excited about that idea? Hmm. I always seem to like it when I get working with numbers. Hmm. Whenever I start playing music, it’s like I’m in a different world. I want to thank God that somebody down at Harrison’s on the highway thought... Hmm. Isn’t that something when that little doodad in the engine goes this way rather than that?

Then you keep thinking about those hmm...hmm ideas and you get caught up in them and you are working at them full time. If you listened and didn’t just say, “I’m no good at that kind of thing.” “Who would be interested in something stupid like that?” You know it is a lot easier in this cynical world to think everything is stupid - except me! - than to start investigating something odd, something that’s unique, something that is downright amazing. Do you think these ideas come out of thin air? You can, if you want, but I have no doubt that God is involved, calling you, offering you a vocation.

God is usually subtle about it, that’s for sure. A lot of us don’t like subtlety. You want it in plain language. TV has sucked the subtlety right out of you, and you want it spelled all the way out. But the reasons you settle on a certain vocation as a banker, lawyer, nurse, therapist, mechanic are not so easy to spell out, and seldom do they make sense, because your name has been called in a whisper and you kept paying attention.

There is another way towards calling and vocation. Jesus goes up to Philip and says, “Come, follow me!” Philip gets his brother Nathanael and tells him this is the fellow they’ve always wanted to follow. Nathanael appears a little reticent, but Jesus sees him coming, and says, “Here comes an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Nathanael is caught off guard, for no one had ever complimented him that way, recognized who he really was and wanted to be. It doesn’t have to be Jesus talking for you to listen. Has anybody here had somebody tell you that you seem to have an aptitude, you seem natural at this, you’re good and kind with people who have certain problems. You didn’t know you had a vocation before, but somebody is selected to call you out and make you realize you’ve got a task to carry out, and what you are to do is important and redemptive for this world’s hurt.

Just to keep us honest, Jesus ends his recruitment conversation with Nathanael, saying, “Are you impressed because I said you’re good looking? This is a bigger game than that.”

You’re going to see bigger things in your vocation because it is a “call-ing,” a continuing call that doesn’t stop with that initial thump. The more you learn, the more you understand the subtlety of the Lord’s creation and how your vocation connects with other vocations. The Protestant insistence that every person has a vocation is driven by the fact that the Christians do little good if they stay ghettoized in the Church, huddled with their own kind of people. The point of being Christian is to be Christian in the world, in every activity and arena of God’s creation. So whatever you are doing as a vocation in the world is your divine calling. Don’t stop. It’s holy work.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan