SUNDAY SERMON

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

Wednesday, January 31, 2010

"Did You Get the Call?"

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30

How many of you have your cell phones with you right now? We are amazingly connected aren't we? What I would want every one of you to know is that, even if you don't have a cell phone with you, there is a call for you this morning. It is not a text message. Even if you don't answer the call because you are sitting in church, it will be there when we are finished. If you, like me, know who the call is from and you don't want to answer the call, please know that the message sender is very persistent. It is not a call that goes away just because you don't answer and everyone has a call that is waiting. Everyone.

I bring you greetings this morning from several people. Lynn James, Caela Wood and I were participants in the Minister's Retreat for the Indiana Kentucky Conference of the United Church of Christ this past week. It an event held annually in Indianapolis at the Fatima Catholic retreat center. Lynn and I were co-chairs of this year's event.

I bring you very warm greetings from Geoffrey Black, the newly elected General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, who was one of our guest speakers. He was ordained, as I was, an American Baptist who found himself most clearly aligning his call from God within the structure of the UCC. He most recently has been serving as the Conference minister of New York State.

Geoffrey is a most delightful man who is touring the conferences of the UCC, actively listening to the clergy and laypeople as he prepares to serve the call of God from within our denomination. He wanted us to thank all of you who continue to work out your faith and serve as faithful witnesses from our position as members of the UCC.

I was very taken by this year's event as I listened to the clergy talk about our work and the movement of our churches. After the 2005 General Synod Meeting of the UCC where the denominational structure took an affirmative stance on the issue of being open and affirming to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, there has been a parting of the seas as many churches have left the fold of the UCC and many congregations lost significant membership. I heard repeated stories from pastors around the tables who are humble and somewhat superstitious about talking publicly about positive changes, successes within their congregations. But every pastor I queried said, “We have more than recovered what we lost in membership and we are growing because we are now the presence in our towns of a stillspeaking God, and reflective to a whole new audience a previously unheard of inclusivity and service from the hallways of Christianity.”

The call of God most often is never easy. Not really. In fact, if you are wondering if you sense the movement of God in your life, it may be safe to assume that the easiest path is not the one that God is luring you toward.

I watched, over the three days up in Indianapolis, as one particular pastor struggled so hard not to follow the call of God. This pastor is successful and serving a church that averages well over two hundred each Sunday. This person has risen like the best bread through the structures of church leadership. And this person is feeling that their well-paid and successful job is perhaps no longer a calling, but rather an excuse to keep from following the call of God to serve the poor and the earthquake ravaged persons in Haiti. This person's struggle was so visible, so powerful, that I felt as if I were watching Jacob and God wrestling each other. The person will be scarred, marked for a lifetime by the stillspeaking God, and I have little doubt that the world could well be one person closer to reality because of the struggle that I observed.

Every person in this room is here because we are willing to acknowledge that God has a call, God has a tug, and God has purpose and a reason that helps define our existence. The only difference between you and Caela and me is that the two of us have said that God's call is to work our lives out as professionals in the church. But, this job of ours is very narrow and it is only one of many calls and no one who knows God can deny for long that God is calling us to do and be God's eyes, God's hands, feet, love, care and challenge, wherever it is that you live your lives. God has a vision, God has a dream, and God has a reality picture of how the world could be if you and I were working out God's purpose for all of our lives in every vocation that we are in.

Those of you who join in acknowledging that God is calling, that God has a vision for our lives, often have moments of utter panic when we realize where God's lure forward may take us! There are many here this morning that could openly acknowledge that the call of God in your lives has taken you to places you would never have chosen to go, at least until you said yes to the call and all it entails. And there are those in this room that are fighting responding to the call of God.

The lure to go forward into the call of God always seems as if the demands of the call, the costs will be greater than we have, that the job will be greater than our perception of our gifts to produce. But the god who gives us a dream is always present as companion to bring God's vision to fullness. “You shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you, do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.” Jeremiah experiences God's faithfulness in terms of the prophetic and public adventure God has envisaged for his life.

From the beginning Jeremiah believes that God has been working within his life, aiming him toward a journey that would transform his nation. We are not talking about predestination. We are talking about following the natural inclinations of vocation and matching those alongside our choice of whether we follow what God would have us do with the skill set and opportunities that are ours.

With the complex interdependence of Jeremiah's family life, culture, political situation and DNA, God faithfully and gracefully called forth Jeremiah's inclinations toward spiritual and national leadership. Throughout the process, Jeremiah responded freely and creatively to God's call, but God kept calling within the context of Jeremiah's unique gifts, talents and context. God called and Jeremiah responded, thus beginning a journey that shapes even our lives this morning.

Jeremiah's protest of inadequacy is an essential aspect of all of us called to follow of the journey to being the servants of God's reign, whether we are lay people, pastors or professors. Humility is essential to healthy spirituality and justice seeking. Sadly, most of us, when we read Paul's 1 Corinthians 13, miss what Paul Eppley calls the “agnosticism of love.” It is because few of us, even at weddings, read beyond verse eight. But, the highly regarded virtues of love depend on a foundation of humility and agnostism. Paul says, “We know in part and we see in a mirror dimly.” When we claim to know another fully, we objectify the other person. They become an it, an object of knowledge and manipulation rather than a holy other where mystery always lies beyond our full comprehension. Who knows what another yet can do, who really knows what you can do, I can do, when responding more completely to the call of God? In the space of “not knowing,” adventure and appreciation emerge. God is not finished with you and humbly we must admit that more often than not it is we who would finish with God and choose the security of what we have, who we are, rather than risk what God might move in us to create anew.

Jesus announces this morning that in the pattern of Jeremiah, he believed he had been sent by God, was being called by God to bring about the transformation of the nation and the people of Israel into a society as God intended.

It is pretty heady stuff isn't it? Our faith, rather than being primarily individualistic and self focused, is calling us to save the world in the manner that a long line of faithful and prophetic women and men have been seeking to live out with their lives since some of the earliest years of Judaism.

Jesus got run out of this town, his town, for his vision of changing the world. He, the homeboy, the boy who had gone off to do something else with his life rather than live the repetitive routine of Nazareth, was threatened with being tossed off a cliff. It is not easily clear from the story what might have so incited the very people who invited him to read the Torah and then teach. You know something happened, because in a twinkling of an eye, after Jesus reminds them of some well known stories about the prophets Elijah and Elisha, they turn on him and he skips town quickly and ever after it is Capernaum, Peter's hometown, where Jesus has a new home base.

The Gospel of Luke has a rather singular purpose. Remember in our Bibles we have four gospels and each is a Gospel according to someone. None of them are entitled the Gospel According to Jesus. Each author has a particular bent on the mission and message of Jesus. Luke is very clear; Jesus is about being for the poor. There are more references to the poor in Luke than any other gospel. A concern for the poor and how the rich and powerful respond to the poor makes up the message of almost every parable in Luke and Luke has more parables than any other gospel. Luke's Jesus says that he has been anointed by God “to bring Good News to the poor” (not the rich and powerful).

Incidentally, who are the poor? In our culture we almost always define the poor as those who are economically bereft. A poor person is someone who lacks economic resources. We only have easily one word in our vocabulary to describe the poor and it is the poor. But in the Hebrew language there are nine words that are translated by one English word poor. Each Hebrew word nuances poverty differently, so that through these words one looks at poverty not simply as being economic, but also as being powerless, oppressed, exploited, vulnerable, weak, humble, afflicted, ill, even spiritually ill.

What Jesus said in that one paragraph that so exploded in the minds and hearts of those who reacted angrily, was that Jesus said, “Folks, if you close your ears and eyes to what God is about to do through me, then you will experience as a nation, as a community, as a town, as a faith community, what Israel experienced under Elijah and Elisha!” He said this to a people that knew and understood their Bible stories like many of you know IU Sports; extremely well.

He was telling his people, in his hometown, “Many of you people, especially those of you who have advantages, power, control, some wealth and education, a good regular diet, you don't want to hear that God is acting through me to return our nation, the lives of our people to the shalom, the Good News of political liberation, economic fairness and sharing of wealth and power and spiritual revival. If you are closed to all of this, then God will move in other people, like the Gentiles, like the immigrants, like whoever has ears to hear and eyes to see what is happening.”

So who got upset and ran Jesus to the edge of town and tried to throw him off the edge of a cliff just to quiet him? Why, they were all the fine, upstanding, church- and temple- and mosque-going people everywhere! They were the pillars of Jesus' hometown, the civic leaders and the best financial supporters of the synagogue. And the last thing they wanted was someone, even a homeboy, who would come along and turn everything upside down and proclaim a reversal of their society. And so, at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, they sought to eliminate him!

“But, he passed through the crowd and went on his way.” And there is a call waiting from Jesus to you and to me.

Amen