A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam H. Fronczek

June 24, 2007 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Piece of Cake and a Cup of Coffee

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23–29
1 Kings 19:1–18

The calling to be faithful and loving is one
that extends to any and all walks of life
and that cannot be identified with any one of them.
And it this calling to faithfulness and love
with which Christian vocation is really concerned,
the calling to follow the one who obeyed the Father to the end,
who laid down his life for his friends—
the one who, as such, was raised from the dead
and exalted to the right hand of the Father.

Gary Badcock
Calling

There’s a new movie out called Evan Almighty. It’s a parody on the Noah story from Genesis, the latest edition in a long line of comedy that references Noah. My personal favorite is the old Bill Cosby sketch that many of you probably know: “Noah . . . It’s the Lord, Noah.” “Right!” The reason this story is so funny, so often used in comedy, is because it is bizarre. God came to a man named Noah, told him to build an ark and put two of every animal in it because God was about to destroy the world—what could possibly be more distant from our own life experience? And yet the story is also one that we joke about because it hits on something that makes us all a little uncomfortable. Most of us wish we had a lot more access to what God wants for us to do.

In my, albeit brief, experience as a minister, it has quickly become evident to me that the thing people most often want to discuss with their minister is the question, What am I supposed to do? Whether they feel like they have too many choices or none at all, it’s a question that comes up all the time in many different forms. And it’s a good question. So I’ve been mining the Christian tradition for answers, and this morning I thought I’d talk a little about what I’ve found.

In the early church, to be “called” usually meant the call to be a Christian. The world was, in some sense, much simpler then. Most people had little or no social mobility, no choice about what kind of work they would do, who they would spend their time with, where they would live.

The remarkable thing about being “called” in the ancient world was that Christianity was one of the few things people actually chose, and it’s perhaps even more remarkable that people chose to follow Christ, often at great peril, because at that time Christians were a minority; they were misunderstood and even persecuted at times. There are still places in the world, in 2007, where being a Christian is risky business, but for most of the people I talk to, sensing God’s call is not so much about taking the label of Christianity or showing up on Sunday, so let’s keep looking.

By the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, little had changed in terms of social mobility, but suddenly it was easier to be a Christian than it had been before and some people didn’t think that was right. Some of these Christians became ascetics, denying as many human comforts as possible and assuming that there was something to be gained by such behavior. Some of them did this in groups, and monasteries were born. Over time, people began to ask which way of being a monastic Christian was the most significant, because some monasteries focused on service and others on education, while still other monks and nuns focused on the inner spiritual life, devoting themselves to prayer and contemplation. Given the number of different types of monastic living that were possible, it’s fair to say that the church offered more vocational choices than any other part of society (William Placher, Callings). And, it’s a good thing that there were choices, because by this time, being a “professional” Christian who adopted one of these religious choices was the only way in which one was really “called” by God. This does some good for those of us who sit up here and wear the collars—it doesn’t tell us exactly how to do our jobs, but it does tell us that we’re called. However, most of you aren’t professional Christians, so I guess I had better keep looking for answers.

It’s really not until the time of the Reformation that people began to again ask the question of how one might be “called” if one was not called to professional religious life. This is the time in the history of the church when theologians were talking a lot about the importance of faith as opposed to works, and so it makes sense that God’s call began to be talked about not in terms of what you choose to do, but with the assumption that you can be called by God whatever you do. And so the Reformation theologians, the fathers of our tradition, started talking about God’s call in broader terms. Martin Luther, thinking about the far-reaching applications of God’s call, observed that the shepherds who came to see the Christ child didn’t follow him for the rest of their lives; they went back to work. So there must be ways to serve God in capacities other than the church. Luther expanded the idea of God’s call past people’s jobs and into pursuits that sustain family life as well. Those of you who are fathers of young children will appreciate that in 1522 Luther encouraged fathers to see their parenting as Christian work reminding them that while changing diapers, your friends may ridicule you “as an effeminate fool, . . . but God . . . is smiling.”

So I’m glad to be able to tell you that there are all kinds of things that you, the members of the church, may be called to do. But you still have this burden to bear: how do you know if you’ve chosen the thing you’re supposed to choose?

This seems to be the most frequent question, and more recently, questions about vocation have become even more complicated. It is difficult to think of everyone’s job as a calling. If a Sunday work schedule keeps you away from church, is that a calling? Some jobs provide us with what we need economically—they allow us to provide for our loved ones—but if the job itself doesn’t seem to contribute to our sense of self worth very much, is that a calling? Many of us find what is most meaningful to us entirely apart from the way we spend most of our laboring hours. So we’re left to conclude that our modern sensibilities on the subject of call may be highly sophisticated and nuanced, but they may have left us feeling more confused than ever.

For my own part, when someone comes to me as a pastor and wants to talk about a difficult decision, about jobs, about relationships, about finding meaning in their day-to-day life, it’s dissatisfying to me to have so little to offer other than to say that God’s call is different for everyone. It seems like our faith should be able to tell us something about what God has to do with the way we make choices. So, frustrated with my historical survey, I opened the Bible, and though it only frustrated me all the more, it turns out that that’s where I should have started.

Meet Elijah. Elijah is a prophet, which is to say he’s in the business of telling the government what God thinks of its work. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., he speaks out at considerable risk to his own welfare, and when we meet him, Elijah is burned out. No one seems to be listening anymore. He’s actually got a death threat from the queen, and so Elijah just leaves. It’s the ancient equivalent of having a really bad day at work during which you get up from your desk at 2:00 p.m., take a cab to O’Hare, and buy a ticket on the first plane going anywhere far away from here. When Elijah gets there, he sits down under a tree and cries.

This is where the well-known part of the story starts: an angel visits Elijah and tells him to go to a mountain, the same mountain where tradition says Moses met the Lord. While Elijah is there, there is a great wind, but God is not in the wind; an earthquake, but God is not in the earthquake; and a fire, but God is not in the fire. And then there is a sound of sheer silence. This is a well-known passage of scripture, well known, I think, because it seems to tell us what we want to hear about God’s call, that if we listen closely enough, God will speak clearly to us in a still small voice. God will tell us what to do. Read more carefully. The passage says nowhere that God was in the silence. God doesn’t provide a direct answer to Elijah’s doubts and questions, and even in the recommissioning that follows when God speaks to Elijah, God doesn’t fix his old problems for him. God simply shows Elijah what duties lie ahead of him, and God expects him to discharge those responsibilities with as much faithfulness as he has had in the past.

Note one other thing: not only does God leave it up to Elijah to make up his mind in this story, but this story is truly exceptional, because throughout the Bible, many of the personalities we meet are called to serve God in some way, but God speaks to very, very few of them. It is highly uncommon to hear in plain and certain terms what God is calling us to do. Faithful living is seen much more often in the voice of the psalmist from this morning, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; when shall I come and behold the face of God?” If you feel more like the psalmist when you seek God’s help, you are not alone; you are in very good company.

This may seem frustrating, but what I gain from looking at the whole course of the Bible is that there is some kind of creative tension where God permits us to choose what we will do all on our own but never ceases to uphold us in his everlasting arms. With this tension in mind, we can actually see things in the historical survey that we couldn’t see before. Let’s work backwards.

Wendell Berry is a novelist who visited us here at Fourth Church not long ago. One of his characters, Jayber Crow, was a man most of us might think of as simple, but his words on the subject of being called seem to reflect perfectly the nuance of having a call on one’s life that is not thoroughly understood but is, somehow, just right:

I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling, or a doubling back. . . . I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led.

There’s something about that kind of flexible, realistic wisdom that just seems right. And I love to think, looking back, how that kind of thinking never would have been possible without what the Reformation theologians taught us about seeking God’s call outside of the church. You see, if we all have a call, then Christianity is everyone’s responsibility. It’s everyone’s responsibility to stand up against the godless tyrants of our world and demand justice for all of God’s children. The philosophy of human rights that brought revolution to Scotland, England, France, and our own nation is largely the product of the Reformed Christian claim that seeing to the welfare of your neighbor is a call that is placed on every one of us. The Reformers taught us that God calls men and women to be sure that society is just, that people live apart from tyranny, and that we don’t engage in personal behavior that diminishes our relationship with our creator. That’s not just my job because I wear the collar; it’s your job because you’re a Christian.

That’s a tall order. And so it is perhaps in the shadow of the complexity of our postmodern lives and great demands of the Reformers that we finally come to understand the beauty of the medieval calling to a Christianity of prayer and contemplation. Whether they were particularly interested in feeding the poor or educating the people, the true calling of monks and nuns was to spend life preparing themselves for death, and in this respect, they understood the big picture much better than many of us. One seventh-century author described Christian life this way:

When we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall . . . on a winter’s day. . . . In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall and out through another. . . . [In the same way], man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. (Bede, A History of the English Church and People, quoted in Callings by William Placher, p. 114)

Many have come before us and many will come after. Don’t allow your anxiety over your present choices to keep you from setting aside time to praise the one who placed you in this world for but a brief stretch of time. You’re called to do that too.

Although they lived almost 2,000 years ago, even the first Christians share something in common with us that we should not forget. Like them, we live in a world where Christianity is not the official religion. As you drive toward Chicago, you don’t see Fourth Presbyterian Church rising above the rest of the skyline as the cathedral would have in a medieval town, because we are dwarfed by the banks and the hotels and businesses that surround us. As you work out God’s call in your professional life, your personal life, your family life, chances are you are doing so surrounded by people who do not share your beliefs, and such was life in the early church. And so as we work out our sense of call, perhaps it is most relevant for us to listen to the words of one of those early Christians.

[Christians] do not commit adultery. . . . They do not give false testimony, they do not covet other people’s goods, they honor father and mother and love their neighbors, they give just decisions. Whatever they do not want to happen to them, they do not do to another. They appeal to those who treat them unjustly and try to make them their friends. . . . They do not overlook widows, and they save orphans; a Christian with possessions shares generously. (Aelius Aristides, Apology, quoted in Callings by William Placher, p. 27)

The Christians who came first knew the thing we really need to know about being called. Christians are, in some significant way, called to be different. Christians are different because we are all called to live a life that makes people notice that we love God and we love one another. And why do that? Well, that’s another things the ancients knew, probably better than we do. God loved us first.

By and large, ancient peoples other than Christians did not expect love from their gods (Placher, Callings, p. 26). Relationships with the gods were most often based around fear and bargaining for the good life, for good crops and weather, and protection from disaster. But that’s not how our God works. Our God is the same one who meets Elijah when he is sad and depressed and burned out and sends an angel to offer him comfort. Our God is the one the psalmist says “will keep you from all evil. The Lord will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forward and forevermore” (Psalm 121). Our God is the one who came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ to live and die as a human being so that God might know what it is like for us to have to choose.

In a world full of people who argue with great certainty that God calls people only to one kind of job or one kind of relationship, I’m glad to worship a God that loves us and challenges us in the midst of all kinds of choices.

Hearing God’s call is not about being certain about what you do but is instead about considering how the things that you do are a demonstration to others that you love God. And the beauty of following God’s call is that it should always serve as a reminder to you that God loves you.

Amen.