February 6, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Called

Sarah A. Johnson
Minister for Congregational Care, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Exodus 3:1–15

Lord, days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. As we pause this day, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments where your presence, like lightening, illuminates the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see that wherever we gaze, the bush burns unconsumed and we, clay touched by you, might reach out toward holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place, and we did not know it.” Amen.

It may not have ever occurred to you to consider this, but religious traditions all have different ways of placing clergy into their particular parish or church. If you are a Catholic priest, you are placed in a particular parish by the bishop—or anywhere in the world if you are a member of a particular Catholic Order (Franciscan or Jesuit, for example). Methodists have a similar process by which a bishop assigns men and women to a particular parish. They call you up, tell you where you are going, and off you go. I always thought this sounded like a nightmare—no choice in where you were going, just called and told to pack your bags for who knows where. Somehow I image bishops assigning ministers placements like a good episode of reality T.V. “Hey, this guy grew up in the Bronx; lets dump him in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and see how that goes!” I can see them gleefully popping their popcorn and settling in for what is sure to be a disaster encounter between pastor and parish. Somehow, though, it is always true that someone else’s way seems like a bad idea until you encounter your own.

We Presbyterians like to do things a bit more process oriented (big surprise). Ministers circulate their resumes and apply to particular positions, interviewing and entering into a long drawn-out process of mutual discernment. Only Presbyterians could make biblical call into a four-step committee discernment process.

Now I know most of you here this morning got here differently from the way that clergy do, and yet all of us are Christians, disciples of Jesus, so in a sense we all got here the same way.

Here we have Moses, standing on a dusty patch of wilderness, up to his ears in sheep muck, tending to his father-in-law’s sheep. He killed a man back in Egypt, and now he’s hiding out, just trying to keep his head above water, tending to his new day job. Suddenly a bush nearby bursts into flames. The leaves crackle, the twigs spark, and you can feel the heat shimmering in the already dry desert air. The bush is definitely on fire, but for whatever reason, it isn’t being consumed. It is aflame with miraculous fire—that is to say, fire that Moses didn’t understand any better than you or I understand it, except to explain it away as a fiery figment of Moses’ imagination or the pious invention of a later time. Moses steps closer to the bush, and when he does, God’s voice flames up and speaks his name: “Moses, Moses!”

“Here I am,” Moses responds. And that scrubby patch of desert wasteland that Moses had fled to for no reason holier than to save his own skin becomes holy ground. God makes God’s self known—“I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”—claiming and connecting Moses to the people and promises to which he belongs. The text tells us that Moses was afraid to look at God’s face. Perhaps he ought to have been afraid if he knew exactly what it was that God was going to say next, “Go”—a word as holy and fiery as any in all of scripture.

Many of you think that you are here because you chose to be here. Or maybe you felt guilty enough that you rolled yourself out of bed at this ungodly hour in the Chicago cold. No. No, you are here because God put you here, in this faith, walking this way, in this ministry. You are here because God, somewhere, somehow, however loudly or faintly, called your name in a way that you could not help but hear: “Moses, Moses!” And you said, “Here I am.”

It’s no coincidence that throughout scripture God reaches out into the ordinary spaces of human life and calls our name. Little boy Samuel was just trying to get some sleep before tomorrow’s full day of school and Wii video games when he heard his name called. “Samuel, Samuel,” the voice says, “the house of Eli will be cast down and the voice of God will be spoken to a new generation.” Guess who found themselves called?

Young adult Isaiah didn’t want to go to church that morning, but his mother made him. He didn’t get anything out the sermon and the music was a drag (classical was not his thing). Then without warning, the heavens opened, there was a vision, a voice: “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Young Isaiah says, “Not me. Nope. Done too many things I shouldn’t have done. Said too many things I shouldn’t have said.” God’s voice answers, “Perfect! Just the kind of person I need to tell my people the truth!” Guess who found themselves called?”

The disciples don’t even have time to pack a bag or a change of clothes. Fishing on the shore, doing what it is that they do to pay the bills and put food on the table, and a voice says, “Guess what? You’re fishing for people now. Follow me.”

In his book, A Room Called Remember, Frederick Buechner writes, “There are moments in the depths of each of our lives that give us an echo of a wild and bidding voice that calls us from deeper still. It is the same voice that Moses heard and that one way or another says, “GO! BE! LIVE! LOVE!”

Buechner muses that the reason why churches exist, the reason that you and I keep getting up week after week, dragging our children out of bed and putting on our Sunday best to come here (though we often forget it and come for far shabbier reasons), is that something extraordinary took place on that piece of desert that is taking place still.

We Presbyterians officially call it the priesthood of all believers. That is, the idea that each of us, not just clergy or ordained elders—“professional Christians,” a friend of mine used to call them—has been given gifts that God calls on and calls out. It affirms that we are all “priests,” we are all “ministers” whom God calls. You don’t have to do minister from a pulpit to have calling. God calls each of us by name from wherever it is that we happen to be.

People often want to know how it is that clergy have come to do what it is that they do. “So how did you get into this business?” “How did you decide to become a minister?” People are curious not just about the process, but the “voice.” I think that beneath the curiosity there is an assumption that we all had some kind of singular lightening bolt experience and that clergy are the only ones who have experienced this kind of call while everyone else is free to do whatever they would like with their lives.

It’s just not so. Scripture reminds us that God does not liberate without also calling human agents to the task of liberation. God works with and through the gifts and weaknesses of you and me, in Moses’ time and in our own. Teacher, businessperson, parent, retired and hoping just to work on your golf game—we are all called to the work of God’s kingdom. It is not about ordained religious qualifications. It’s about paying attention and answering the call to love and serve after the example of Christ.

Sometimes in popular American Christianity, we get this wrong. We say, “Since I have accepted Jesus into my heart” or “Since I gave my life to Jesus” That is not how the story goes! The story—Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Mary, the disciples—is that you aren’t bringing Jesus anywhere; he calls you places. It might be fair to say that you can’t give your life to Christ; he takes it! All of us are here because God called us here. For some of you it was dramatic and life changing; for others it was a lifetime of quiet coaxing and leading; and for others you are still asking, “Are you sure? Why me?” For every last one of you, God is reaching out. You are called, summoned to this life of faith.

I like the way Barbara Brown Taylor writes about God’s call to Moses in her book An Altar in the World. She argues that what makes Moses Moses is not his personal search for Christ, his wits, or even his religious qualifications. What makes him Moses is nothing other than his ability to hear God’s call and to be crazy enough to trust and to follow.

She writes,

What made him Moses was his willingness to turn aside. Wherever else he was supposed to be going and whatever else he was supposed to be doing, he decided it could wait a minute. Moses could have decided that he would come back tomorrow to see if the bush was still burning, when he had a little more time, only then he would not have been Moses. He would just have been some guy who got away with murder, without discovering whatever else his life might have been about.

Faith—biblical faith—is about the God who calls each of us by name, summoning us to a journey for which we surely do not plan, where there is no road map and where we will not know where we are really going until we get there. But the truly good news is that if we respond to that call, the God who hears and remembers, sees and knows, will always be there with us along the way and will never let us go.

Next time your neighbor asks you how you ended up attending Fourth Presbyterian Church, just smile and say, “Oh, that’s easy: I was called.”

All thanks be to God. Amen.