This week I will be sharing parts of my own call story with the hope that it will help others consider how God calls them. One of the challenges, of course, is to get people to think of call as more than just to ordained ministry or the things that we do as part of our church work.
When I was a young boy, I drank the last little bit of a bottle of Drano that I had taken out of the trash to use as a canteen. My mother found me next to the bottle in the back yard spitting up and rushed me to the emergency room. I remember drinking something (maybe orange juice) in the car on the way to the emergency room to try and counteract the poisonous Drano. As my parents tell the story, the doctor was astonished that there was no damage. He told them that the day before another young child had swallowed a similar liquid and had burned his voice box and would have trouble talking. This story became part of my call story -- I understood that the ability to talk was a a gift from God and I had to use my voice -- maybe as a lawyer arguing cases or, as it turns out, a minister preaching every week. that story is also one reason I have always gravitated to the Isaiah call story -- the burning coal touching Isaiah's lips as he hears the call to go and prophesy.
I also have a funny (sort of) story about being called to particular places. When I was interviewing with the Pastor Nominating Committee in KY, I walked into the sanctuary there and immediately had the sense that this was the place where I was called to lead worship and preach. From that first step into the sanctuary, it was a done deal, at least from my side of things. When I arrived in Troy to interview with the Nominating committee, I anxiously looked forward to walking into the sanctuary to see if I would get the same sense of call. When I walked into the sanctuary, however, I looked down at the carpet (understand, I had never been in a church with a pattern on the carpet in the sanctuary) and was so caught up in thier being a pattern that I had no sense of this being the place where I might be called to lead worship and preach. Perhaps the hardest part of hearing the call to come to FPC, Troy was convincing myself that God might be calling me here even though I did not have "call" experience in the sanctuary.
Paul challenges us to "consider your own call, brothers and sisters," in the context of realizing that our call is not built on that which we might boast because we are called to "boast in the Lord." We often think about interpreting our call in the context of our successes (if we are really good at it, God must be calling us to do it), but Paul challenges us to consider how we hear our call as ones who carry to the world the message of the cross, which is "foolishness" to the world.
As I ponder how to preach on call, I am playing wiht these images from others:
1. This is how it is described in Wendell Berry’s wonderful
novel Jayber Crow. As a child, Jayber lived in The Good Shepherd orphanage. He
describes it this way. “For as long as I could remember, I had been hearing
preachers tell in sermons how they
had received “the call.” … Not one of those [preachers] had
ever suggested that a person could be “called” to anything but “full-time
Christian service,” by which they meant either the ministry or “the mission
field.” The finest thing they could imagine was that an orphan boy, having been
rescued by the charity of the church, should repay his debt by accepting “the
call.” Wendell Berry. Jayber Crow, pp.
42–43
2. "Well, this is what I believe: The call is not to be a
preacher or
teacher or doctor or mother or father or elder or deacon or orthodontist
or floor manager at Macy’s — even if you are any of
these things. The call of Jesus is not to a particular job, but to a way of
living life, no matter what job you have. When Jesus calls,
you
don’t get a new job; you get a whole new life. Tom Are, Jr. 11/11/12 Sermon
“It's a Whole New Life”
4. : “When I'm honest, it irks me that God called Moses through a burning bush, and God has sent nothing of the sort in my direction as far as I can tell.” The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soultending for Youth Ministry, Kenda Dean and Ron Foster (74)
6. Tony Campolo says that whenever anybody asks him, “How were you called into ministry?” he replies that when he was a little boy, his mother used to say to him, “You were brought into this world to love other people in the name of Jesus Christ, to serve other people, especially the poor and the oppressed. Do you understand that, Tony?” People ask Tony, “How did you get called to the ministry?” and his response is that he never once was called, his mother decided!
(By the way, sometimes people tell Tony that parents can’t decide things like that for they children. His response is, “Why not? Everybody else is telling their children what to do with their lives: the media, their peer group, the counselor at school. What is wrong with a parent standing up and saying, ‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ My calling to serve Jesus Christ came from my mother and that’s a good place for it to come from. I advise all mothers and fathers to do that for their children.”) (1) Tony Campolo, “Becoming What God Intended You to Be,” sermon and interview broadcast, Chicago Sunday Evening Club 30 Good Minutes, January 25, 2004. www.csec.org.
I am reminded of what Catherine Marshall, Peter's wife, wrote about him: "Always Peter felt inadequate for the tasks to which God called him, but because he knew God had called him, he also knew he would get the help he needed" (The Best of Peter Marshall, Catherine Marshall, xi).
What call stories do you have?
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