Sunday, August 21, 2016 | 8:00 a.m.

Lead Me Out

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 71:1–6
Luke 13:10–17
Jeremiah 1:4–10

All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that
you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love.
Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need
to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power
that will work through you without your knowing it.

Thomas Merton

Back in the day, before email, texting, Facebook, and cell phones, people wrote letters. One letter I received while I was in college I kept and reread several times. It was from my home church pastor, Jim Cook. Reverend Cook was my pastor when I first sensed a call to ministry while I was in high school. He was very supportive of me. My conviction about my calling was strong in the beginning, but during college and even seminary I sometimes struggled with it. “Is God really calling me to be a pastor? Who am I to become a minister? Can I really do this?” My pastor addressed that doubt in the letter I kept. I read and reread one particular sentence: “When God calls us, God provides all we need to fulfill that call.” In times of doubt and uncertainty, I have hung onto those words, words of faith and trust.

All of us are called to be servants of God. Each of us has a particular calling to be God’s agent of love and justice, healing and mercy, in this world. Some of us have a call that coincides with what we are paid to do; many of us do not. Our calls are many and differ from one another. But we seem to have in common how we respond to God’s calling. Typically we think we are not good enough. We question that God chose the right person. Jeremiah, as a boy, was called by God to be a prophet. He protested. “Me? I am too young. I don’t know how to talk. I cannot do this.”

Many others in the Bible respond this way. When Abraham and Sarah were told they would conceive and bear a son in their old age, Sarah laughed in disbelief. When Moses heard God telling him to go to Egypt to liberate his people, he responded, “I can’t do that. I am slow of speech and inarticulate.” When God called the prophet Jonah to go to Nineveh to urge the people to repent, Jonah headed in the opposite direction. For Paul to be converted from persecuting Christians to making disciples, God stopped him in his tracks and blinded him for a few days to get his full attention.

Resisting God’s call is understandable. God’s call always seems impossible. The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., teaches its members how to discern whether something is a calling from God. They say one of the “marks of call” is precisely this: “A call always seems impossible.” What God calls us to do is counter-cultural; we are to be builders of a new reality of God’s reign. We may be called to prevent further climate change or improve public education or care for people with Alzheimer’s or revitalize the church or reform the immigration system or reconcile enemies. Whatever it is, it is change. God doesn’t call us to maintain the status quo. We react, “Who am I to do this? This is beyond me!” That is true: your calling is beyond you. God’s call is impossible if we try to do it by ourselves. God doesn’t call us to do something we can do on our own. We need God’s grace in order to do it. The impossibility of the call necessitates that we rely on God. You cannot fulfill your call just by working harder or smarter, acquiring new skills or strengthening your network. It is not you who are at work, but God. You must see yourself as a channel for God’s Spirit to work through you. You must rely upon God in prayer for help, for guidance, for strength, for courage, for endurance and hope.

Relying on God, or even other people, doesn’t come easily for us. Last week there was an article in the Chicago Tribune by Eric Zorn about giving advice to his son when he first went off to college. “My mistake,” he said, “was to use the word help, as in ‘reach out for help.’ Help carries a hint of pathos, desperation, and emergency . . . an admission of weakness that can feel, to young adults with pride in their burgeoning independence, like a slide back into childhood. . . . Therefore I have rebranded: Reach out for assistance”(Eric Zorn, “To Help Freshmen, Don’t Tell Them to Seek Help,” Chicago Tribune, 17 August 2016).

Whether we use the language of help or assistance, it’s hard for us to acknowledge we need it and for us to ask for it. We don’t like to see ourselves as dependent, limited, or in need of Someone who is greater than we are.

But when it comes to the work that God calls us to do, we cannot do it alone. We are to embody compassion, to be bearers of light and hope in a broken world. That is challenging. What we are working for may not be realized in our lifetime. God needs to make it happen. We need to show up and let God lead us. We need to pray and rely upon God’s presence and power to be faithful to our call.

Personal prayer was crucial for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was called on to preach at a mass protest rally at the time of Rosa Parks’ arrest. He had only twenty minutes’ notice to give what he called “the most decisive speech of my life.” So he prayed, trusting God would give him the words he needed.

Driven to distraction by vicious life-threatening phone calls, he prayed. Gripped by a strong sense of guilt for having provoked the very violence he and his people had suffered, he stood before them and prayed. Without ceasing to work, without losing his realism, in season and out, Martin Luther King Jr. prayed. Praying expressed the strong inward wrestlings of a man whose final resource was not himself but God (Martin Luther King Jr., Stride toward Freedom.) He relied on God, and God gave him what he needed.

Another part of our resistance to God’s call is rooted in our fear of failure, and it is likely, doing God’s work, that we will fail at times.

The pastors of our church have recently begun meeting monthly to support one another and address issues in ministry. We begin our clergy conversation with a check-in—each sharing how we are, really. This past week I confessed to my comrades that much of the time I feel a bit lost in uncertainty. I don’t know how best to work with our church to try to end gun violence or reduce mass incarceration or break through racism or stop human trafficking. I was surprised that some of my colleagues shared that same feeling of uncertainty. Several of us felt we didn’t really know what to do next or that we were not making much impact in the direction we felt called to lead. Perhaps that is exactly where God wants us, so we will turn to God for help. One of us also said we need to develop a theology for failure. We need to remember God calls us to be faithful, not necessarily successful.

Failure is an issue tackled by the former dean of Duke Chapel, Sam Wells. He said,

Failure is the sense that if you were a better person or if you’d tried harder or if you were a more charismatic or skilled leader, then things would have turned out fine and dandy. The reassuring thing about failure is that it allows you to preserve your narcissism, your deep-lying pride that says this is really all fundamentally about you, and then if it went wrong, it was because you got it wrong—all of which preserves the underlying conviction that you can get it right and that, if and when you do, it’ll be because of your brilliance.

There is that truth again: It is not all about you. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton also addressed failure. He wrote:

Do not depend on the hope of results. . . . You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

The big results are not in your hands or mine. . . . All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do [God’s] will, we will be helping in this process. (Thomas Merton, “About Results” from “A Letter to a Young Activist”)

Some members of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., built a residential treatment center where people seeking to stay free of drug addiction could live for up to two years. The ministry was very effective. There was a long waiting list of people who wanted to live there. The church felt called to build a second residential center nearby. But before the hole in the ground could be dug for its foundation, they were stopped by a lawsuit filed by residents who lived in the neighborhood—a syndrome of “not in my back yard.” Two church leaders had to testify in the courtroom. The pastor of the church, Gordon Cosby, showed up in the courtroom the day of the trial and asked his parishioners how they were. They said they were nervous and afraid. Gordon responded, “Don’t worry. God will give you the words you need to say.” And God did. They won their case, and the treatment center was built. The key was for them to move forward and do what God called them to do, trusting God to give them what they needed.

God dismissed Jeremiah’s protest that he was too young to be a prophet. Jeremiah was not to worry or be afraid, for God promised to be with him. God would give him the words he would need to say. God dismisses age—whether too young or too old—as an excuse not to be God’s instrument. God also dismisses the excuse of being inarticulate or a past with a less-than-stellar record or lack of experience or being a nobody or fear or the fact that the odds are not in your favor.

A baby was born, as God promised, to Sarah and Abraham, through whom God made a great nation. God promised Moses to be with him and gave him his brother Aaron to do the talking. Moses led his people out of slavery. Jonah finally went where God sent him, and the people did, in fact, repent. God directed Paul to go into the city where he would be told what to do next, with his sight and his strength restored. Through Paul’s ministry, many became believers. Martin Luther King Jr. led a powerful civil rights movement that brought about desegregation. God gave people all they needed to fulfill their calling.

The Spirit of God bore much fruit in all these cases. But it is also true that Moses and Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop and saw the promised land but did not enter into it. The prophet Jeremiah experienced deep anguish as he warned his people to repent and return to God and they did not. He, and later the Apostle Paul and other followers of Christ, were persecuted and imprisoned for their faith. Some were killed. The One we seek to follow died on a cross. Jesus was betrayed and executed in the prime of his life. For all appearances, it looked like his ministry ended in failure.

And yet . . . what is also true is that the wilderness and exile, failure and death, do not have the last word. God’s Spirit works through those God calls to bring new life, fresh hope, and victorious love. God works in ways we do not see and cannot predict. God’s Spirit provides all that is needed for us to be faithful to our calling. Not necessarily successful, but faithful.

Shortly we will sing a hymn whose third verse I hope you will claim as your ongoing prayer:

In all the tensions of my life, between my faith and doubt,
let your great Spirit give me hope, sustain me, lead me out.
(Fred Kaan’s hymn “Lord, When I Came into This Life)

Amen.