Texts: Jonah 3:1-10, Mark 1:14-20
This morning, we completed 3 weeks of reflection on ‘call’ and ‘vocation’. The first week, I resisted ‘finding yourself’ or ‘expressing yourself’ in favour of being grounded and authentic and rooted, but also aspiring, resisting and reaching, in a ‘surfing with the spirit' posture. The second week, I resisted ‘professions’ or ‘winners’ as the measure of vocation, with due respect to Barack Obama the Harvard lawyer, This week, my resistance was directed at aptitude and achievement, to complete the set.
A huge industry was spawned in the last century, beginning with the management and demobilization of the armed forces of two world wars. My own father, returning from service overseas, was tested for aptitude as well as intelligence. ‘What did you do in the war, and before?’ ‘I was a mechanic in the war, and tried dental school like my father and brother, before the war.’ ‘But you don’t have the dexterity, and three-dimensional visualization, or math or science aptitudes, for that work – how about selling insurance?’
In my generation, the industry located in school guidance offices, and college admissions processes. My suburban peers and I always partied before taking LSAT, or MCAT, or GMAT tests provided by the Princeton testing company. Somehow, we got into our professional schools anyhow, pursuing the ‘highest and best’ values of our culture. Later, critics identified the sociological bias in the tests, favouring middle class WASPs. Perhaps I should have stayed the course to tax law – but vocation defies standard tests.
These days, children as young as 10 years old are tutored for SSAT tests, part of the process of admission to intermediate and high schools on the way to Ivy League futures. It’s clearly harder to get into grade 7 these days than it was to get into law school when I was a girl. Standardized testing measures the American ‘no child left behind’ initiatives, and encourages us all the ‘teach to the test’, and score children’s humanity by the results.
Do you remember Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel of our future? Privileged elite ‘Alpha’ people dress differently than Beta, Gamma, or janitorial ‘Delta’ humans, with correlations of status, perquisites, income and opportunity. How fair would such a world really be? We all know, more or less consciously, that it’s unfair.
I have less dexterity and visualization aptitude than my father, am too introverted for sales, failed to pursue my strong suits of mathematics and logic. How did I end up here? Nora, our church administrator, said to me in my first month: ‘You’re not a people person, are you?’ It’s my ‘displacement theory of ordination’: a church decides that the alternatives to me are worse, and there I am, saving you from something even worse.
So I asked you to reflect with me this morning on your own aptitudes, and expectations, and how your vocation has worked out, at work and at home. How has you spouse, and how have your children, surprised and challenged your expectations and your script? How did you end up their partner – and their parent? Who’d have thunk it, eh, when you first began to wonder what you’d be, what you’d do, with whom, when you grew up?
We heard from Jonah today. It’s Jonah’s second call. The first time God said ‘Go tell Nineveh’, Jonah ran the opposite way, and ended up in the belly of the whale. Jonah is a proven failure, a screw-up. But God says again: ‘Go tell Nineveh.’ Go tell them they are 'doing it all wrong', and have to change to do as their creator intended. Tell them, even though they are the imperial center –the 'best and the brightest', the 'powers that be'.
Nineveh was capital of Babylon, the city we now know as Mosul in Iraq on the Tigris. By the time Jonah was written, though, it was like Shakespeare setting a play in Venice and Illyria – it’s not about Italy. Nineveh stands for empire, for power and privilege. It’s like telling Jonah to take a placard to the Capitol, or Parliament Hill, or Queen’s Park, as a rube from the countryside and colonies. It’s a Beverley Hillbillies slapstick satire.
So Jonah, a proven failure, demonstrated screw-up marches 3 days across a massive imperial capital, without radio or TV coverage, saying ‘you got it all wrong.’ They all say ‘oops, he’s right’. They change their ways. As if! This is not about Jonah’s success or skills, but about providence and God, and how people either cooperate or resist. It’s a lot like Brave New World – when a Bernard or John Savage says ‘no’ to what is normal, to business as usual – and refuses to be judged sane by an insane world.
The other story today came from Mark’s gospel. It’s only a few verses into the gospel, and begins ‘after John was arrested’. Who said John was arrested? Mark’s gospel rampages ahead like that a lot. Jesus says ‘it’s time, God’s imperial rule is at hand to replace Rome’s empire – pick a side’! He’s up at the Sea of Galilee, and says to Simon and Andrew, ‘come follow me and you can fish for people’, then to James and John, ‘leave your nets and your father Zebedee’ – and they do.
These are not guys chosen for aptitude or achievement. These are fishermen, illiterate, necessary for their family’s livelihood, being asked to do things for which they are not fit, and certainly not qualified! They are not competent to start a new religion – but then, that is not their job, but God’s. they have only to cooperate or resist. Make a choice!
It was Robbie Burns day today, the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth. Burns was the voice of a people, my people, displaced by the English to Ulster plantations, turned against one another as Campbells and McDonalds at Glencoe, or at Culloden. An exiled people got a poet, a generation later, who carried our grudges as we nursed our wounds, and remembered ‘Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn’:
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led
Welcome to you gory bed
Or to victorie
Lay the proud usurpers low
Tyrants fall in every fore
Liberty’s in every blow
Let us do or die.
This is not simply an ethnic sectarianism. In the hands of Sir Walter Scott in Victorian days, Robbie Burns was one of the voices harmonized into a new chorus of an ascendant WASP hegemony of Victorian ‘United Kingdom’. This was a vision of a new greater union, more perfect, as the Americans would have it and Obama would quote it from the American constitution, and our people cite Burns’ ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’:
As come it will for a that
That sense and worth o’er a’ the earth
May beat the gree and a’ that
For a’ that and a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that
That man to man, the warld o’er
Shall brothers be for a’ that.
This perspective transcends the aptitudes or achievements of individuals in a competitive market. It challenges the myth of meritocracy, the Myth of Ability, as John Mighton’s book puts it. There’s a sense of providence that the most partisan and ambitious can acknowledge, that in the end, every competition and division runs its course, and conflicts break in new ways in new circumstance, and we could all use more friends to face the future. We’re all temporarily able, and competent, but we were and will be again, dependant on mercy, and so as Burns writes in his ‘Address to the Unco Guid’:
Still gentler sister woman
Tho many ganga a kenning wrang
To step aside is human
One of my favorite aphorisms, challenging social Darwinism is ‘if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly’. The corollary, which I learned from reading a biography of the Canadian poet and constitutional scholar F.R.Scott this year, is ‘if a thing’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing with excellence.’ We are a driven people, too often seeking perfection, and cowed by the high thresholds of being the 'best and the brightest'. We might do better to remember Jonah, and two pairs of brothers, whose job it was to cooperate, but hardly to do it themselves, or with their own aptitudes and achievements.
So maybe you, like me, and Jonah, have flinched and failed before. Maybe you, like me, and those fishermen, do not have the right aptitudes to achieve greatness. But maybe it’s not all about us. Our Calvinist heritage has already addressed this issue, and concluded that sometimes God uses incompetents to fulfill missions despite and not because of their abilities, that God’s glory might be made more clear. Take my 'displacement theory' to heart – you might be less bad than the alternatives, or than nothing! That too, might be a call.
Our first hymn this morning was ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God’: seek, knock, ask. Our prayers reflected our more ambiguous experience of that promise:
For a God of many manifestations
You sure seem hidden to us,
A sentimental wish, concealed in shadows.
Why is it that turning to you like this
Feels like a game of hide and seek?
For allour anxious casting about for you,
For all our patient pewsitting for you,
We confess that we are watching out for ourselves,
For what we ought, and what we should
Careful of the rules of the game,
We go through the motions of searching….
Motionless.
If it’s to be hide and seek in the shadows
Release us from the rules that aren’t yours
Free us from rulers that aren’t ours
To laugh, run and cry for you, and with you
Release and free us now
‘ready or not’ – here we are!
If this game of hide and seek is dragging on
Perhaps it is us who are hiding from you,
If you were to judge us fairly, who could stand?
Our defenses and our fronts
Won’t work with you
You see the way we cover ourselves.
We fear to play, lest we be caught
Making more of ourselves than you made us
Making less of ourselves than you made us
Refusing to celebrate our mortal limits
If we’ve been watching out for ourselves,
Hiding away from you, declining to join the game
Assure us again of your grace and favour towards us
Of your invitation to us to come and play
Draw us out and in to this mortal sport
And meet us again in Christ
Who shared our mortal condition
And represented you to us, and us to you,
Gave us hope of reconciliation
That we in turn might reconcile our ways with yours
And show you forth – ready or not!
Amen
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