January 14, 2024
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51
Called
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
Our scriptural texts today center on being called. We meet the young boy Samuel who is awakened in the middle of the night. And we meet the two friends from Bethsaida, Philip and Nathanael.
How is God calling you? What are you being called into? These questions are especially relevant to us when we’re in our youth and young adult years. What am I to do with my life? But no matter how old we become, the questions remain with us.
Some people just know what their calling is. It’s very plain to them. They’re closer to Philip. Jesus simply says to Philip, “Follow me.” And suddenly, Philip knows that he has found the fulfillment of all scriptures in Jesus!
But I think more often, the discernment process involves considerably more struggle. We need some time to figure this out! We’re more hesitant, like Nathanael, before we reach a conclusion. Or we’re confused, like Samuel.
How have you been called? Too often, we limit our notions about who is called to religious vocations. We’re pretty sure that God calls ministers and other church workers. But God’s calling is much, much broader than that. God calls each and every one of us!
Theologically speaking, our calling is our vocation. The word vocation actually comes from the Latin word for calling! All of us are called into the world. Each of us can serve our neighbor through our abilities. As my seminary professor, Michael Rogness said, every job that works to build up and maintain society is a calling. Imagine a world of only ministers but no plumbers or electricians! Goodness, we’d be in trouble!
Martin Luther said it very plainly, “A Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”
And we are called within the circle of family, too: mother, father, uncle, grandmother, child. We serve and build up one another in our families, too.
St. Teresa of Avila is well known for her saying:
Christ has no body on earth but yours;
no hands but yours;
no feet but yours.
Yours are the eye through which
the compassion of Christ looks out to the world.
Yours are the feet with which
he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which
he is to bless others now.
This is our vocation, our blessed privilege, that we should be Christ to one another! In our words and actions, we go into the world as servants of Christ.
What we are called into changes over time and circumstance. When dire sickness strikes a family, your vocation can change instantaneously. After a lifetime career, newly retired people consider what their vocation will be in the next chapter of their lives. We can juggle several vocations at the same time, between work and family and community pursuits.
The story about young Samuel sheds light on the discernment process. Samuel is a young boy. His mother, Hannah, dedicated him to the Lord’s service after he was weaned. Samuel went to live with the prophet Eli.
One night, a voice calls Samuel by name and wakes him up. Samuel assumes that Eli has called to him, so he goes to Eli and asks him what he wants. “Nothing, boy! Go lie down again!” But the voice persists, and gradually, Eli realizes that the voice calling to Samuel is the Lord’s. “Go back to bed,” he says, “and the next time this happens, tell the voice, ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’”
It's a small detail in the story, but it’s critical in discerning our call. Discernment requires that we listen to the voice calling us. In order for us to perceive how God is calling us, we need to have an open heart, an open spirit. Calling requires us to listen.
Nathanael did this, too. Although he was initially rather skeptical about Jesus, Philip invited him to keep an open mind. “Come and see,” Philip said. And Nathanael did. He trusted his friend Philip and so he was receptive to learning more. And when he encountered Jesus face to face, something inside shifted.
A call story that I find very moving is that of Mother Teresa. Although Mother Teresa aligned herself with a religious order, and you might think of her as following a religious vocation, her actions were directed in love for her neighbor. She didn’t fill her days in prayer and singing psalms. She dedicated herself to aiding the poorest of the poor, to ease their earthly suffering. That was her calling.
Mother Teresa was born in what is now North Macedonia. But in the year of her birth, 1910, it was still part of the old Ottoman Empire. At the young age of 12, Agnes, as she was known then, knew she wanted to enter some kind of religious order. She continued to listen to the voice within.
A while later, when young Agnes heard some missionaries describe the poverty in India, she made up her mind to serve in that impoverished land. That knowledge led her to join the Irish Loreto order when she was 18. The Loreto sisters ran a mission station in Calcutta. So at age 19, Agnes, now named Sister Teresa, moved to Calcutta where she taught in the Loreto’s school for girls.
She remained in this position for 17 years. Walking through the streets of Calcutta, Teresa encountered poverty on a scale she’d never seen. There were so many people literally dying on the streets, with no one to care for them. Thousands of orphaned children wandered the streets, with no one to love them or provide for them. It weighed on Teresa.
And then, in 1946, Teresa traveled to the Loreto Sisters’ convent in the city of Darjeeling, high in the Himalayan mountains. The final leg of the journey took her on a train ride. The way up the mountain is so steep that the railroad’s gauge is quite narrow. The train is almost toy-like in dimensions.
As Teresa made her journey up to Darjeeling, she considered her future. What did the Lord have in store for her? Much later, reflecting on the moment, Mother Teresa said that the words of Jesus’ mother, Mary, came to her. At the wedding in Cana, Mary told the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
The words of Mary spoke to her, just as old Eli did to Samuel. And in that moment, Teresa received a call within her call. Of that moment, she said,
“It was a call within my vocation. It was a second calling. It was a vocation to give up even Loreto where I was very happy and to go out in the streets to serve the poorest of the poor. It was in that train, I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums – to serve Him in the poorest of the poor … I knew it was His will and that I had to follow Him. There was no doubt that it was going to be His work.”
Vocation. How is God calling you into the world? Discernment requires an open heart and thoughtful consideration. I do believe that in that emptiness, God calls. God provides the presence of others to guide us into understanding, and in the silence of the journey, the call does come.
Soren Kierkegaard wisely noted: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
In our present tense, we muddle through. But on the occasions when we’re permitted to look back at where we’ve come, in those moments we are granted the ability to see how God has been able to use us. May we say as Samuel did, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
