God’s Call

Who is God calling you to be? What is God calling you to do?

How often do you ask yourself those questions?

It can feel presumptuous. Who am I to be called by God? Who are you? The God who created all that is and all that will ever be cares what I do with my life? Cares what I do with my time and my talents? Really?

But here’s the thing. The professionally religious among us sometimes seem to have a monopoly on language of vocation and calling. People ask me all the time about my call to the priesthood. No one ever asked me about my call to be a computer programmer or a lawyer. No one ever asks me about my call to be a friend, a neighbor, a daughter, a citizen. But they should.

Because the truth is that God calls us all.

But how do you know what God is calling you to do?

Frederick Buechner wrote that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” I’ve always liked that way of framing it. “The place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

I personally tend to think of calling as situational – at least most of the time –as more of a nudge than a booming voice from the heavens. God might have called you into the job you have, the community you’re a part of. I don’t know. But I’m quite certain that wherever we find ourselves, God’s call is there—to, as the prophet Micah said, do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. What that looks like will be different for each of us.

In the letter to the church in Corinth that we read this morning, St. Paul wrote, “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.”

In everyone. In you, in me, in every one of us. We all have gifts, and God calls us to use them.

The poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That’s another good way of framing the question of God’s calling.

It’s not just a question for children, for teenagers, for those starting out in life. It’s a question for all of us. It’s a question that demands an answer just as much on the last day of our life as on the first. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

This weekend we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Dr. King was a man with a profound sense of calling. He kept going in the face of hatred and imprisonment and death threats, confident that he was doing God’s will, certain that God’s justice would one day prevail.

Following God’s call requires courage. It requires trust and faith. As it did in Dr. King’s case, it often requires sacrifice.

But the curious thing is that that sacrifice itself becomes a joy—sometimes a poignant, painful joy—but a joy nonetheless.

Think of a time when you acted with integrity, when you did a hard thing because it was right. I think that’s what it feels like to answer God’s call, to use the gifts God has given you to use.

For Christians, of course, there are two pieces to vocation. There’s what we’re called to do as individuals. And there’s what we’re called to do as a church.

St. Paul wrote that the various gifts we have are given by the Spirit for the common good. We aren’t simply free agents, each doing our own thing. We have different tasks, but each one of us is a part of a whole. No one of us has to do it all, but each of us needs to do something.

The church is much more than just a beautiful building. The church is the body of Christ in the world. And we are members of that body, called each in our own way to do the work of God, to use our gifts, as St. Paul said, for the common good.

The opportunity to be a part of the mission of God in the world is itself a gift.

We live in a time of anxiety, a time filled with fears of scarcity of all sorts. But we follow a God of abundance—absurd, ridiculous, outrageous abundance.

Today’s Gospel tells us that Jesus’s first miracle wasn’t to heal the sick or raise the dead. It was to turn water into wine for a wedding festival. And not just a bottle or two. At least 120 gallons worth. It must have been quite a party.

There’s no scarcity in God’s kingdom. And imagine what we could accomplish together if we lived our lives with trust in God’s abundance. Imagine much we could do together, how many mouths we could feed, how many suffering people we could comfort and shelter, how many other dreams still undreamt we could fulfill.

Together, we could, quite literally, change the world.

The place God calls you, the place God calls us all, is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

It is a place of courage, and not of fear. A place of plenty, not scarcity. A place of joy, even in the face of hardship.

Listen for that call. Trust it when it comes.