“Come away and follow me and I will give you something new to do.” (Paraphrase of Jesus speaking in today’s Gospel, Mark 1:14–20)
“Let each one remain in the conditon in which you were called.” (Paraphrase of Paul in today’s second reading, 1 Corinthians 7:17–23)
I don’t know if you enjoy gossip about in-fighting among church officials, but you really should relish the irony of what we have all just heard. You see, there was an international committee who chose the readings for Sundays. They were usually discreet enough to make the Bible appear to be offering a consistent message. But today’s second reading and Gospel were a victory for the minority on the committee who had the decency for once to show us the Bible as it so often seems: a patchwork of inconsistencies and opposing messages.
Both Paul and Jesus circle around the question of God’s calling in our life, the intersection of our lives with a larger dimension — what Friedrich Buechner calls “the place where your deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need”. How does God call you, or me? Is a calling something dropped on us — or must we consciously choose it, as Mary Oliver urges when she asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (3)
We may imagine calling to mean a special work, yet surveys show that most people discover their calling is to a special relationship or to a special style of doing whatever they do with intentional integrity, or care, or patience. Yet whatever way you imagine it, you come upon another inevitable question as you reach new stages in life — when your children leave home, when your spouse or partner dies, when you retire or lose your job, — whatever it is, when you have to move on — how do you hear God’s call after a major transition?
This morning’s readings capture two apparently contradictory images of how a calling is found. On the one hand, an imperious, impulsive Jesus says throw it all overboard (literally to these fisherfolk!), obey higher authority, and come away on a high and risky adventure. But wait a minute, Paul says, there’s another way. We might do best to stay put and make do with our uneventful routines. Calling may mean being stuck and mustering good grace and trust.
The call of Jesus, the call of Paul: we need both models to show us the grace in opposite directions and make sense of our lives and the lives around us. In fact, we probably shuttle between both callings over the course of our lifetimes. We may stride bravely into a bold new calling, but find that to carry it through means getting stuck in numbing routine. Conversely, being stuck for a long enough time may be what we need to summon the courage to throw it all overboard and follow a radical call from God.
Jesus’s calling to radical departure reminds me of a man I admire who has changed a lot of lives here in Boston. Dr. Jim O’Connell abandoned a promising career in oncology to found Boston Health Care for the Homeless. On the other hand, Paul’s call to stay put reveals the grace and depth of a woman I know, who saved herself from an abusive marriage when she took a fairly routine office job at Boston College to raise her child. But through a practice of prayer, attention to details of her work and people around her, and a pursuit of her college degree, she became a source of wisdom and strength well beyond her corner of our College.
Jesus and Paul. When Jesus issues a call, sometimes he, too, tells people to stay where they are, but often Jesus calls folks to get up and go, without telling them where. Many people dread this idea, as Jesus makes it look so uncertain, such a break with one’s own identity.
His call may feel like a casting call to a role in a drama (4): your call is to raise these children, yours is to pursue or abandon that career. But what if my calling does equal a task and then — they stop hiring, or you can’t get pregnant, or your health breaks down? Here at Emmanuel, with our demographic, the idea of a calling as a task takes on a more poignant note: what if I just finish the job and retire? What’s left of my calling at 60 or 70 or 85?
So Jesus’s model of calling may make you flee for strength to Paul, who says, “whatever your condition, God has called you there. Stay put and give God glory.”
Staying put may be just as hard as Jesus’s leap of faith. Paul speaks to lives of quiet desperation that seem to go nowhere. He finds grace in life’s cruel paradox: that those who seek their calling with integrity may search for years without finding it, while others carry off life’s trophies.
That’s why Paul points to calling as the inner spirit of how we do whatever external thing we do. His spirituality focuses more on a style of being, on qualities like patience, generosity, and firmness of character, whatever one does, whoever one is.
In this morning’s passage, he was speaking, after all, to people whose old social roles no longer suited their new calling as Christian converts, Gentiles and Jews with little in common save their curious new faith — people like himself, a convert and outcast improvising his way by the seat of his pants. Paul is a good one to ask, where is my calling when my social role falls apart — after the divorce, the layoff, the years of effort come to naught, the being-turned-down for the organ transplant?
Paul offers us the wisdom also distilled in the one single line of English poetry that has saved more souls than any other: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
“They also serve who only stand and wait.” (5)
God does not ask us to be successful, only faithful (6). For so often, our calling is so much simpler or humbler than we would have chosen. God calls us not to be Hamlet but the Second Gravedigger (7), not Dorothy but a Munchkin. God meets us not in some creative project or noble relationship. Rather, God meets us in a nagging need for us to become a more inquisitive listener, more forgiving and less driven, less ambitious and more honest. For some of us, the call boils down to the call to sobriety. How disappointingly undramatic. How holy!
Yes, Paul sheds light on our dried-up, stuck lives, without needing to change our outer routine. The point is: God wells up from within ourselves or someone else, and gives us a little courage. Maybe God even tells us that our mediocrity is just the thing God needs to work with. After all, the ongoing joke throughout the Bible is how God takes the most unpromising people and turns them to God’s glory — without waiting for their moral makeover. Those disciples who left their boats and nets on the beach — they became no stars of the spiritual life. They blundered to the end, but they blundered in a context of relationship and search. If they are role models, it is because they show how God can work with just about anyone.
Here is where both images of Christian calling converge, whether dry or dramatic. In Christian terms, a calling emerges within a relationship, between one who calls and one who responds. As the poet Alice Meynell spoke to Christ,
Thou art the Way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.
The God of the Bible, the Jesus of the New Testament, call their followers into a relationship. Jesus says, “Come, follow me,” not “Come, do this task.” Paul doesn’t speak like a Stoic about virtues worthwhile on their own; he speaks of “your condition in God”. Jesus and Paul show us that what we bring is not all that counts, but what God makes of us that completes our calling.
The final subtlety, the surprise, is that God so often remains anonymous, because God needs us to be ourselves. If we knew God were mucking about in our lives, we’d revert to our complexes rather than becoming the one God created us to be. Responding to God may look more like discovering relationship to one’s truest self, and then struggling to set aside one’s games of evasion.(8) God remains anonymous when some calls emerge as the demand to love others less selfishly, to struggle for reconciliation or a bit of justice in an aching world.
Whether we name the caller God, or whether God remains anonymous, our response is to become an unrepeatable image and likeness of God’s own self. That calling is so simple that it may take a lifetime to recognize it. That is why, perhaps, God may withhold both the knowledge of His name and the certainty of our calling until, near the end, we learn them by looking backward to discover a pattern of call and response that was there all along. We may look back over decades and discover we were living out a call we never dreamed of, a call to be no more and no less than our own selves. At the depth of all our days, we shall realize there was a voice, murmuring to us over and over, “You are my Beloved. You are my Beloved.”
On that day, we may respond to God with Alice Meynell (9),
Thou art the Way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.
I cannot see —
I, child of process — if there lies
An end for me,
Full of repose, full of replies.
I’ll not reproach
The road that winds, my feet that err.
Access, Approach
Art Thou: Time, Way, and Wayfarer.
(1) I dedicate this sermon with respect and affection to my lifelong friend Michael Kunich, who turns 60 tomorrow. He has known callings in both directions.
(2) The subject of calling and vocation is the topic of my long-term academic research. Here I distill some of my provisional positions. In preparation for this sermon, I was struck by some thoughts and phrases in Rowan Williams’s essay “Vocation (1)” (in his Ray of Darkness [Cambridge, MA, 1995], pp. 147-153). Where they influenced this sermon, I note them simply as “Williams”.
(3) From her poem “The Summer Day”. I thank Prof. John McDargh for this reference.
(4) Williams
(5) Last line of the “Sonnet XIX on His Blindness”, by John Milton
(6) This maxim is attributed to Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
(7) The phrase is from Williams.
(8) Williams
(9) See http://poetry.elcore.net/CatholicPoets/Meynell/Meynell049.html . For clarity, the original comma after “Thou” in the last line would appear today as a colon.