VOCATION and CALLING

Text: Mark 1:4-11

I started by asking you all this day: “What are you going to be when you grow up? What are you going to be if you grow up?” You have to keep listening and watching. You have to unlearn what didn’t work. You have to relearn what used to work. You have to remember what you forgot, and hope and imagine what you might yet be, and might yet do.

As I visit with our teenaged confirmation class I am reminded of my own. We spent the first ten weeks, in the fall, learning ‘Achievement Orientation’ from Professor Dick Hodgson of the UWO business school. Then from January to Maundy Thursday, we learned the catechism. The message was clear – we were to achieve, to succeed, and by the way, check off the religion box.

I had to unlearn my elders’ culture-bound 60’s message to us. We used to have a rude joke in those days of Henry Morgenthaler’s trials, about a Roman Catholic and a United Church mother discussing when viable human life began. The Catholic mother said: conception makes a sacred human life. The United Church mother said: as soon as he graduates from professional school and gets a job!

God forbid that in our suburban middling class suburban community and church, we convey that same message about vocation and calling to our children. Three years ago I pointed to a respect elder, Sam Gilmore, and a research scientist Samuel Chao, sitting in our pews, and bearing the name from the story. Today, I saw another visiting professor, and lots of successful professionals. I also saw a lot of beloved human beings, and remembered lots not present, seen or heard.

Not all of us, and not all our kids and parents, are middling aged, middling class successes, economically thriving and respected by our culture. We are also those devalued by our economy and culture, wee children of varying abilities, and aging seniors with less mobility, cognitive strength, and cash flow. But give me a child who can give or evoke a smile, or a beaming dementia sufferer, over any six-pack of lawyers in suits, to remind me of being human, being beloved, being called.

Part of the beginning of our Protestant Reformation movement, 500 years ago, was summed up by the slogan ‘priesthood of all believers’. Priests were not the only ones called by God. We all were. Max Weber in the 19th century wrote ‘Religion and the Spirit of Capitalism’. He accused our Calvinist subculture of confusing achievement and success and progress with signs of calling and providence. We narrowed ‘vocation’ to the jobs of bourgeois professions.

I encouraged you to watch, or watch again, Jack Nicholson in ‘About Schmidt’. He retires from his insurance company job in the Midwestern USA, with the rituals of retirement. He leaves a bankers’ box of files in the corner office, and offers to drop in to help if they need his wisdom. Then we watch him, bereft of his job vocation, trying to unlearn and relearn, to rediscover his human vocation. When he drops in to the office, his box is unopened, ignored, and unnecessary.

I confessed that for the first week that I had my ‘smarter-than-me’ phone, I couldn’t answer an incoming call. Picking it up wasn’t enough, like the old phones. Poking a button didn’t work, like my old cell phone. The kid at the kiosk explained to me that it was a heat-sensitive screen, and you slide your finger across it to answer a call, or stop an alarm. I had to unlearn, and relearn, how to receive a call. So do we all, eh?

With Ruth in California, I staffed ‘Our Tube’ sessions at 9am and 4pm this day. Again I confess that I’m slow to get the hang of this use of new media, of video clips and audio soundtracks. I like words and books and pages, and understand how God can call and communicate through print media. But I recognize that lots of folks are called by God, and hear and see and feel better through new media. I’m trying to unlearn a bit and relearn a bit, to imagine and hope – and remember.

You heard today’s story in Alydia’s focus time with children. You heard it in the choir’s singing of ‘Here I Am, Lord’. You heard it again as Lucina read the lesson. I just reminded you of a couple of elements that I connected with all this reflection on our vocations and calling, and the ways we unlearn and relearn, imagine and remember. Do you think a microphone would have picked up the ‘Samuel, Samuel’ call? Would a camera have filmed ‘God standing there?’ No!

Eli was old. He was so old his kids were grown-ups. They had left the temple, and traded on the status and power of being children of a successful man. But they used that privilege and power for themselves, not for other people or good ends. They reaped the benefits of what Eli in his prime had done for them. Imagine such a degenerate selfish generation, if you can!

Hannah wanted a baby, but could not conceive. She prayed to God, and visited Eli at the temple, to ask for help with her vocation and calling to be a mother. She promises if she is given a chance, she will dedicate that child to good and godly purposes, and offer him in service not to her but to God and others. When Samuel is born, she renews the promise, and when he is still a child, she delivers him to the temple the way other mothers deliver children to residential or day schools.

Samuel is sleeping in the holy of holies, by the altar. It’s early in the evening, and the oil lamps on the altar have not yet gone out. What a night light for a child! Something wakes him up, so he goes to Eli, saying ‘did you call me’? Eli, like any adult with a child waking up at night, tells Samuel to go back to sleep. Again Samuel wakes, again, Eli sends him back to bed. Many of you know that this can go on all night, repeating the same exchange hoping for a different outcome.

Finally, the elder has an epiphany, and helps the child enjoy his own epiphany. ‘Go back to bed, and if you wake again, assume an attitude of receptiveness, watching, listening: “Speak, Lord, for your servant listens.” It’s time again to unlearn, and relearn, to imagine and to remember how we open ourselves to all that communicates God to us. How do you watch, listen, and open yourself?

Can you recognize any of the characters in the story? Eli, or his sons? Hannah, or her baby? Can you resonate with the back and forth of a waking child and a care giver in the night? What does it mean to learn and to teach about the calling of God, and the vocation of being fully human, and fully alive?

Let’s not narrow vocation and calling to lawyers, doctors, or MBA’s. Our calling and vocation is to be human, in relation to other humans and God. A child offers or evokes a smile, and that’s a calling and a vocation that doesn’t need to wait. Remember, it beats a six-pack of lawyers in suits! Visiting an aged person can offer that exchange of smiles too, if a bit more rueful. It’s about opening your heart, and your eyes and ears, to much and many that our culture does not value.

Our dominant political economy claims a principle of meritocracy. It purports to base our system on what we earn or deserve. My bible doesn’t sell the same stuff. God forbid that we become culturally captive again, as we were warned by Weber in the 19th century, and as we unlearned in the 1960’s. God grant the we open our eyes and ears and hearts to celebrate the gifts of human vocations all around us, persons of every age who are beloved, called and calling, from infants to aged.

I started by asking you all this day: “What are you going to be when you grow up? What are you going to be if you grow up?” You have to keep listening and watching. You have to unlearn what didn’t work. You have to relearn what used to work. You have to remember what you forgot, and hope and imagine what you might yet be, and might yet do. I ended my remarks with the same challenge to a crowd that skews demographically toward seniors:

“What are you going to be when you grow up?
What are you going to be if you grow up?”
I’ve been closing services each week in this New Year or Epiphany season with the same quote from Martin Buber, and a closing affirmation of recognizing Christ in faces around us. There’s a great U2 video of there song “If God Sent His Angels”, with Bono sitting in a diner as regular customers come and go in fast forward. God does send angels to do the calling and to hear the call – you’re one – and so is the next person you meet, if you learn how to recognize it.

So I said, again, to send you out:

We cannot avoid.
Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion.
To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction,
And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully

May you see the face of Christ
In everyone you meet
And may everyone you meet
See the face of Christ in you.

What word do you have for our hearts,
O God, give us ears to hear
Amen