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....
So how can Paul say that the Corinthians were called to be saints??? If you read just a little further into the book you’ll see that they’re fighting among each other about who is the holiest. A little bit farther along you’ll hear him castigating them for sexual immorality. They are dragging each other into courts. God has called them to be saints and they’re behaving like this???
The key to what being a saint means - and the key to what had led the Corinthians down the wrong path - lies in the last verse of our passage. “You were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” [1Cor 1:9]
The Celtic church - that is the church in Ireland and Scotland founded by St. Patrick in about the 6th century - had a very different view of what a saint was. In the Celtic church, anyone who abandoned paganism and followed Jesus was a saint. Saints got up in the morning and lit their fires and milked their cows, fished and farmed, baked and mended, married and had children, just like everybody else. The difference was, everything they did was to the glory of God. They lived their lives around Jesus.
If you read some of the Celtic prayers from that time you’ll see what I mean. They didn’t divide their lives between the sacred and the secular; instead they saw everything as sacred - if they offered it to God and asked for his blessing on it. They prayed over absolutely everything. Here’s a sample. It begins, “I will kindle my fire this morning In presence of the holy angels of heaven,” ... and then goes on “God, kindle Thou in my heart within A flame of love to my neighbor.” Here’s another: “Even as I clothe my body with wool, Cover Thou my soul with the shadow of Thy wing.” Or “I will go out to sow the seed, In name of Him who gave it growth.” There are prayers for milking, for gathering eggs, for weaving.
How many of us do that? Do you pray when you turn on the car? “Bless to me, O God, the power in my car. Help it to take me where I need to go. Keep me safe, help me remember to be patient with other drivers. May my driving honor you. And as you give my car the power to move, so give me also the power and will to move into the world.” Write a quarterly report? “Bless to me, O God, the writing of this report. I thank you that I can think, and write, and communicate. Help me to honor you in my words and numbers, remembering that you created both.” What kind of prayer could you write for folding the laundry? Phoning a client? Putting away the groceries?
Too many of us have separated our lives into two pieces. We’ve divorced our occupations from our vocation. And yet our occupation is the field in which we exercise our vocation.
What on earth am I talking about, I hear some of you thinking. We are called to be in fellowship with Christ all the time - not just on Sundays at church. Most of us know that. Most of us know that our relationships, particularly, are arenas where our relationship with Christ has to be lived out. But too often we forget to take that relationship out into the world with us, whether to work or to play or just to check off the seemingly endless “to-do” list we all carry around with us.
Paul was called to be an apostle. Most of us haven’t gotten a call as powerful and as distinct as Paul’s. And some of us think that, because we haven’t heard a similar explicit call to a particular ministry, that our work isn’t as important to God, as holy, as those who have heard such a call. But remember: even after his commissioning by the church in Antioch, some 4-5 years before the writing of this letter, Paul continued to make tents for a living. Do think that he saw the time he spent making tents to be a waste of time? As he himself might have said, “May it never be!” He met two of his best teachers, Priscilla and Acquila, at their day job.
One of the most important contributions of the Reformation was the recognition that God doesn’t call people into a two-tiered hierarchy of service, with ordained clergy being a higher order than the laity. On the contrary: Martin Luther declared that anyone who is baptized is already pope, bishop and priest, and that no matter what our work, our occupation, might be, each one of us has received exactly the same call. To be called to be saints is to be called to love God and our neighbor - 24 hours a day. Our daily work, whatever it may be, however noble or however menial, is to be done out of the one common calling of God’s love. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that it must be done in - as well as out of - the love of God.
Whatever our work may be, parent or teacher, day laborer or corporate executive, scientist, secretary, bus driver or scholar, it takes its meaning from the fellowship we have with Jesus Christ. We cannot receive either our identity, our life’s meaning, or our justification before God from anything except that relationship.
And the extraordinary thing is that if we live our lives to the glory of God, as we do so, God’s glory begins to shine through us, Jesus’ love begins to show through us, and our work becomes transformed. Not that the work itself changes, it may not. But we change. We learn to see God at work it what used to be ordinary, mundane, even boring tasks. We hear him more clearly. He speaks to us as we sharpen our pencils and boot our computers and take out the trash.
It’s possible that you may be working in the wrong place, and God is just waiting for the time to be right - perhaps for you to be listening in a new way - to move you to where you belong. But it might also be that you are exactly where God wants you to be, and - even if you can’t see it right now - God is working something in you or through you that is more important, more lasting, more awesome than you can imagine.
These words of Isaiah’s were written of the suffering servant, in this case the soon to be martyred prophet, although they also foreshadow the coming of the Messiah. Hear him lament: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with YHWH, and my reward with my God.” [Is 49: 4] And indeed God says to this disheartened servant of his, “Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of YHWH, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” [Is 49: 4]
Well, God has chosen us, too, and he is still faithful, as he was to Isaiah, as Paul reminded to the Corinthians, as sometimes we ourselves need to be reminded. No matter where we labor, the Most High himself has called each one of us to the highest calling of all: to be saints living in fellowship with Jesus Christ. We can choose to ignore the implications of that calling, and thus miss out on what God has planned for us, or we can dive in head first, trusting God to be with us, with all the power and love and wisdom and grace he has promised us.
