On this morning in May, when we baptize Kathryn Castle Van Blarcom, not knowing what God has in mind for her life, save that she know herself as loved by a great and gracious God...on this day when our sanctuary will host a gaggle of graduating seminarians, presumably well aware of the life God now has in mind for them...in this season when flesh of our flesh will soon flip the tassel and take wing to an institution of higher education or, that accomplished, be launched in a career or land a job...and on this day in the middle of our lives, when the thing for which we were born still seems to elude us...on this day I want us to consider the work of our hands."Not all of us can say (of anything)," writes Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, "what Saint Joan of Arc, burned for her troubles, said of her unique calling: 'I was born to do this.' But for those of us who can, those blessed with a vocation," she goes on, "there is no way to escape the vocation that does not lead to a slow dying or to despair, or perversion. 'The glory of God is a person fully alive,' wrote Saint Irenaeus, the father of Christian theology; a person fully alive, fully human (it cannot be said too often), is a person with work in the world."
Which is why the first verse of the fourth chapter of Ephesians holds so much for us on this morning, in this season, in the midst of life's middles. For in that verse, the author makes a turn from proclamation to exhortation, from gospel to law, from dogmatics to ethics, from indicative to imperative (Markus Barth). Whereas, in the first three chapters of the letter, he wrote, "that you may," now he writes "that you must." When he says we are to "lead" a life, he does not intend that we casually promenade, but the word "lead" in Greek implies that we follow a proscribed way. By the beginning of the fourth chapter, this follower of Paul has already proclaimed grace and salvation: now the time has come to talk about obedience to God's call.
To be sure, the shift from indicative to imperative...the journey from may to must...is a movement absolutely central to our faith and utterly unfathomable in our culture! We are a people who have been raised to treasure our options, long before we dare hold fast to any given commitment. And, in part, that is cause for gratitude. That we live in a country where we may or may not get married, may or may not have children, may or may not go to college, may or may not move or leave the country or change jobs or buy cars or agree with the President or attend worship: all of these options are marks of our freedom to be treasured.
Yet our life of options treasured too quickly turns into a tyranny, of sorts, that will possess us long before it will set us free. A friend of mine--on his 50th birthday--said that for him the most frightening thing about approaching middle age was the realization that your options began to close in on you. The choices you had made--be they children or career or marriage--begin to negate other choices and, as he put it, "You see your life going down one unalterable track." For my friend, there seemed to be only the sound of doors closing in his yet open future. Though I suspect his fear was not so much that he lacked choices. Rather he feared the choices he had made. From a multitude of possibilities, for the most part, he had chosen out of desire rather than having been chosen by any abiding sense of duty...he had emerged from a culture full of "mays," rather than having been embraced by a faith arising from one "must." And now, in the middle of his life, those choices no longer had the power to lend meaning. They had ceased to be reason enough to get out of bed in the morning. Over the years, he had mistaken what the world required of him in order to make a living, for what God required of him in order to lead a life worthy of God's calling.
Into the midst of such confusion and fear--whether it strikes us on our 50th birthday or on graduation day as everyone's uncle is asking us what we're going to do with our lives or as we sit with time to kill before it kills us or as we lie to die--into our fragmented, fragile existence, comes a God who knows our frame...a God, according to John Calvin, who "knows with what great restlessness human nature flames, with what fickleness it is borne hither and thither, how its ambition longs to embrace various things at once." This God who know us, calls us--not for purposes of control, not for purposes of power and authority--but in the words of Ephesians, "so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles," or in Calvin's marvelous prose, "lest through stupidity and rashness everything be turned topsy-turvy (God calls us)...so that we may not heedlessly wander throughout life."
God calls and yet, my friends, the precarious nature of our life is this: that in those moments when we are most open to God's call and God's imperative, we are also most vulnerable to "every wind of doctrine, to the cunning of men and women, their craftiness and deceitful wiles." In those moments when sometimes, without our knowing, we let go and always without our intending, are anxious to be held by something stronger, the call of God's still small voice is lost on us now anxiously lost in our heedless wanderings.
How, then, are we to distinguish between the divine imperative, the "must" that arises in response to God's call, and all other voices which would claim our days?
First and most paradoxically, the divine imperative, God's call, if it is God's and not another's, can never be imposed upon our days. "The call to discipleship," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who knew the delicate balance between God's call and human conniving, "gives us no intelligible programme for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after. It is not a cause which human calculation might deem worthy of our devotion."
To be sure there are voices calling you in this culture, voices that may even sound religious and of God, who come bearing a program, who offer five steps to salvation, who invite you to a weekend which will maximize your potential. There are companies ready to promise the world for the price of your soul, and careers that appear as the answer to your long search for meaning, and positions that will surely confer upon you an assurance of worth.
But the divine imperative, the nature of God's call in Christ, is that it comes "not by an authoritarian decree, [says Karl Barth] but with inner necessity." Not by a program to join or a goal to achieve or a career to enter, but as a person you must follow.
So it is that the author of Ephesians, when he could have used images of kingdoms, of rulers and ruled, of masters and servant, chooses to use the image of the body. When he begins to speak of what we must do and be if we are to lead lives worthy of the calling to which we are called, he says we are to be part and parcel of one body, with Christ as the head. God's call is thus not over us like a despot, or outside us like an emperor, but is that to which we belong...is the body wherein we find our true being, our inner necessity, where we discover the person we were born to be and the work we must do.
But more. For while God's call does not come from an authoritarian voice imposed from beyond, neither does it come from a private voice nurtured within. God's call, if it is God's and not another's, cannot be discerned within the confines of our individual lives. If that were the case, the apostle would have written about individual bodies who are called to do one thing or another. But instead, he speaks only of one body and one call.
God calls us in the context of this one interconnected, interdependent body, in the context of time and of history, in the context of human relationships. It is a call that sends us into the world rather than into ourselves. It is a call that frees us from this mad search for self-fulfillment, and frees us for radical obedience to Him who bids us leave self behind and follow. "For God's sake, do something brave," cried the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli to his contemporaries. "Not feel or think or consider or meditate: not turn it over in your heart and mind! But do something brave. If it is to this that Jesus calls us in His discipleship," says Barth, "there can be no avoiding self denial." There can also be no avoiding the divine imperative that thrusts us out of our selves, and into the world where peoples cry out for justice and babies are not fed and bombs are tested to try human souls. It is here that we are called, as one body, to do something brave because we must for God's sake.
Which brings us finally to discover, if we truly listen to these words written from a prison cell, that the calling to which we are called has everything to do with who we are called to be with each other, and so with Christ. Or as Eduard Schweizer put it, "To be called is simply to be with him." It is a call that takes our part-times and binds them into one time...that takes our scattered professions and draws them under one hope...that takes our meagre talents and transforms them, by way of grace, into a gift that upbuilds the body in love. The call is a call to be with and for one another because we must...because there was One who was born to be with and for us.
There is a story told by a cantankerous Southern preacher named Will Campbell, which has always, for me, held in solution, the heart of God's call rightly discerned, its inner necessity and its inter-dependence: "Long before the process of my vocational self-examination began," he writes, "I once cornered and talked to a high wire artist in a small travelling circus. I asked him why he chose that particular way of making a living. The first few minutes were filled with circus romance--the thrill of hurling through space, feeling at the last instant that pasty flesh of two always welcome hands pressing around the wrists...the joy of laughter and approval and applause in the eyes of 'children of all ages'...the clanking of train wheels moving you to the next city. But finally he said what I had not expected him to say. 'Now you really want to know why I go up there on that damned thing night after night after night?' I said I did. 'Man, I would have quit it long ago. But my sister is up there. And my wife and my father are up there. My sister has more troubles than Job. My wife is a devil-make-care nut and my old man is getting older. If I wasn't up there, some bad night, man....smash!' He started to walk away but I had one more question to ask, and ran after him. 'But why do they stay up there?' He looked like he didn't want to answer, wasn't going to answer. But then he did. Turning from the door of the boys' locker room, he looked me up and down and then, as he disappeared, blurted out: 'Because I drink too much.'"
To be worthy of the calling to which we are called is simply to be with and for each other--full-time--just as God in Christ was and is and will be with us and for us. It is to dare a high wire not for reasons of acrobatic skill or inner drive or authoritarian dictate, but because our sister is up there with troubles and our spouse has ceased to care and our father is a little unsteady and we must. It is by the same token to know that they are there because we drink too much and so they must.
And it is to believe and live in the belief that somewhere, in all the murkiness of the human condition, and the messiness of the human community, God's hand is upon us because God must: catching us before we fall, looking before we leap, loving us just as we are, and shaping us again and again and again, like crumbled clay, into One body worthy (maybe, though I doubt it), blessed (perhaps at long last) by the calling to which we are called. Thanks be. Amen.