A Most High Calling

I know that most of you aren’t as addicted to news and talk shows as I am. But it may be that you’ve heard some of the talk about when we’re going to hear some calls for sacrifice from the administration, something on the order of the kind of sacrifice that was asked of the American people during World War II. Some pundits have complained that when asked what they should do to help in the war against terror, the president asked people to go out and shop! Of course keeping the economy going is important, I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t. But that doesn’t really feel like an exercise in patriotism, does it?

The other thing Bush asked for didn’t get as much attention. Perhaps because it wasn’t as “sexy”, as PR people like to call issues that catch the public’s attention. But he did ask for people to volunteer - to get involved in making their communities centers of reconciliation, places of justice and prosperity and healing. But whaddya know? Just a couple of weeks ago I heard a debate about making “volunteering” mandatory. The idea was that we should re-institute a sort of draft requiring everyone to do a year of “service”, either military or civilian. Now, they do have a point, sort of. We’ve lost the idea that we need to give more back to our society than just a check at tax time. But I think there’s an even bigger downside. Because once “volunteering” becomes mandatory, it becomes a burden rather than a privilege. People start putting in their time rather than their hearts. And so IT - whatever IT is - becomes a very low-paid job rather than a gift.

In order to me truly meaningful, a call to serve can’t be a draft. God knows that. I have a dear friend, a geneticist, who argues that God could eliminate sin by just tweaking our DNA - so that we’d be well-adjusted, non-competitive, monogamous, hard-working, thrifty, brave, loyal, reverent, etc. But that would take all the fun - that is, all the choice - out of our lives. And isn’t freedom of choice the absolute sine qua non of every good 21st century American? And besides, free will is kind of a thing in Christian theology.

Now, the first thing all theologians think of when they hear the word “Presbyterian” is “predestination.” That’s the idea that we didn’t choose God, God chose us. Isaiah makes it very clear: “YHWH called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me.” [Is 49:1] But at the same time - and don’t ask me how it works - we have free will. We can choose how we respond to God’s calling. We can respond gladly and enthusiastically, with all of our hearts, or we can respond unwillingly, dragging our feet at every step of the way. But many of us do drag our feet. Why is that?

Why is it, that when we are called into service by the actual creator of the universe, meaningful activity designed to transform both our selves and our world, the very work for which we were made in the first place, why do we drag our feet?

There are a lot of reasons - inertia, fear, selfishness, the everyday pressures of life, I’m sure you can all think of more I haven’t mentioned. But I’m inclined to think that the biggest reason we don’t absolutely leap at the chance to fling ourselves more deeply into God’s service is ignorance.

That’s right, ignorance.

Too many of us have only the faintest idea of what it means to be called by God.

The word “called” appears 3 times in this verse. Paul is called to be an apostle, and the members of the church were called both to be saints and to live in fellowship with Jesus Christ. The last two are general, words meant for all Christians. We’re all called to be saints, and we’re all called to live in fellowship with Jesus Christ.

Let’s look at those two first.

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as saints, do we? Most of us think of saints in as applying only to certain classes of particularly holy people. We may think of evangelists like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We may think of apostles like Paul, or martyrs like or Ignatius or Catherine or Agnes, or founders of monastic orders like Benedict or Francis or Clare. Some saints are great scholars like Augustine or missionaries like Patrick or Cyril or healers like Bernadette. The Roman Catholic church has a very specific and careful process for determining who is or isn’t a saint, involving among other things evidence of miracles.

The title of saint isn’t tossed around lightly. To call someone a saint means that they are sanctified, holy, special, different from ordinary mortals. Some of us think that saints can’t sin! Old pictures always place haloes above the heads of saints....