Scripture reading: Ephesians
4:1-16
A six-year-old boy was whining because his
three-year-old brother wanted him to play and wouldn’t leave him alone. Their
mom was watching and listening, and she told the older boy to play with his
brother. She said, “Always remember that God has put us here in this world for
others.” The boy’s answer was, “Then what are the others here for?”
Everyone has a purpose. Everyone has a calling.
Everyone has more than one calling.
At Desert Aire, WA: November 2014 |
These work on many levels. Sometimes we think these
callings have to do with work or a job. We may be drawn to a certain kind of
work so clearly that it is as if we were truly called. It is as if that work
called us by name, or God called us to it because he knew it would be good for
us and that we would be good to others through it. The word “vocation” comes
from the Latin word for calling.
God likes us to feel a calling to honest work. Paul
wrote about this in a surprising way: “He who has been stealing must steal no
longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may
have something to share with those in need.” (Ephesians 4:28) It’s almost funny. Imagine a congregation
wringing it hands over the fact that one of them was a professional thief. What
shall we do? Then Paul writes to this Christian thief, telling him that he
needs to stop stealing and get a job. What a way to correct a thief! And there
is the “we are here for others” idea again.
There is much more to a calling than work. There is a
wise saying that goes like this: “Don’t live to work; work to live.” Work is
good. God loves work because he loves life. Jesus says, “I came that they may
have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)
God, himself, became a carpenter in Jesus. (Mark 6:3)
Maybe God was a jack-of-all-trades carpenter in Jesus: houses, and plows, and
tables, and chairs, and wagons. God is a jack-of-all-trades, because he makes
everything.
The creation is God’s work. Our salvation is God’s
work, on the cross, and in the resurrection. Our growth in the image of Jesus
is God’s work by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our serving Jesus is God’s work.
(Ephesians 2:10) All the infinite preparations that have been going on in every
human being through the ages, and in every part of creation since the
beginning, getting ready for the new creation of the new heavens and the new
earth are God’s work.
The calling to work is more than being employed or
running a business. There are callings to the arts. There are callings to
serve: medicine, education, emergency response, law enforcement, the armed
forces, public service. Making a home, nurturing a marriage and family, being a
neighbor, and serving a community: these are all callings.
I hope no one feels left out. The longer I worked on
this list, the longer the list grew. These are just a few of the callings that
make God’s world go round. Paul calls callings gifts. God’s callings are gifts
from God to the people and to the world that he loves and cares for.
There are callings in the church. Paul especially
calls these gifts. He gives us the titles to five callings in Ephesians. He has
longer lists in other places. There is no reason to suppose that he ever tried,
or was able, to list them all.
I have to tell you something about Paul’s short list
of five gifts. I have to say that it is a strange list, a strange combination
because it leaves important gifts out. I also feel odd about the list because I
am on that list at least a couple of times.
The two gifts on the list that apply to me are pastor
and teacher. The people who will tell me to my face what they think of me have
told me that I am a good teacher and a good pastor.
I take nothing for granted. Being a pastor can be
very scary; but, sometimes, I like it. I like teaching, but even that can be
scary.
The two callings (pastor and teacher) go so much
together. Pastor means shepherd. The ultimate shepherd is God. We say: “The
Lord is my shepherd.” A shepherd is a guide, and protector, and healer. Any
teacher, wherever they teach, must feel some kind of great responsibility in
this way, to be a shepherd.
And
isn’t a family really just the same? I remember, when I was four, feeling a
responsibility for my parents, as well as for my sisters (I being the oldest
child).
In a
small church, the elders, the worship leaders, the musicians, the people who
lead classes and fellowship groups, the people who take care of the kitchen and
the rest of the buildings and grounds, the people who are the contacts with the
congregations and the groups that use our buildings, our treasurer, and the
recorder and keeper of our official records (whom we call the clerk) are all
pastors.
This
means that they are all shepherds. They are all guides, and protectors, and
healers. Even the so-called non-leaders of any group (whether in a family or a
small church) are the same. They are all pastors, shepherds. They are all
guides, protectors, and healers. Whenever we think seriously about our common
calling it is only right to feel amazed, and honored, and excited, and scared:
and maybe even burdened.
Think
of the responsibility. Also think of the question: exactly how many jobs do you
want?
This
may be one reason why the church is scary. The church sounds like a job and it
is so easy to be offered a job that you know you won’t enjoy.
Even in
the world of work and employment it is so easy to make a job into nothing more
than a job, and to take the blessing out of work. There are people who do this
to themselves. There are people who do this to others. It’s a terrible thing
when a job becomes a job; when the calling goes out of it.
A real
calling comes from a voice. Something, or someone, is speaking to you. A
calling is not an order but an invitation. It is meant to be encouragement. I
was first called to the ministry when I was a shy and bullied kid of twelve,
and the church was pretty strange to me.
It
scared me and I didn’t want to do it, and I avoided it as long as I could do it
without breaking my own heart. I have told you the childhood part of that story
and, in the telling of it, it was all I could do to keep from crying: not
because it made me sad, but because I still remember that it was a voice of
love that scared me. It was the work of God’s love that called me and scared
me. I knew the words of “Jesus loves me, this I know,” and the call came from
him.
Sometimes,
in our serving (even in the church), we have forgotten that voice. Or, maybe,
that voice didn’t call us to that thing at all. It’s possible that even the
church has work that it thinks must be a calling because it used to be a
calling and now it is simply a space to be filled. It’s a job that has been
made into nothing more that a mere job.
There
is no grace in it. Or the grace has gone out of it.
Big
churches may work in terms of programs and jobs. But a small church has to know
how to how to hear a calling. It needs to know how to take off the mask of our
costume. We think that being a church requires us to dress up in a costume that
makes us look like an organization, or even a club.
Churches
often go year after year dressed up as something they are not. It’s as if every
day was Halloween, and we wear a costume that makes us scary in a way that is
not holy.
In the
church we need to look deeper than the surface to see what God is truly calling
us to: what God wants us to do and to be. We need to hear the voice of God
calling to us: “Stop doing that. Stop doing that. Now try this instead. Try
this.”
There
is a calling. There is a voice talking to you about what to do and what to be.
It is the voice of God speaking in his Word; in his Son Jesus. The calling
comes from God’s own love calling. The calling is God’s own purpose for you,
and for his people, and for his mission.
Paul
wrote about this calling as a mystery, in his complicated way of putting
everything. Paul wrote: “And he made known to us the mystery of his will….to
bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.”
(Ephesians 1:9-10)
When
the first human beings sinned in the Garden of Eden if came from their desire
to be in charge of themselves. The Bible describes it as the sin of trying to
be “like God”. We have inherited this sin.
The
very nature of humanity seems to carry a hereditary spiritual genetics. Our spiritual
genetics makes us people who are all trying to be in charge, and we are not
very pretty about it, even at our best.
Each
one of us (no matter how sane we may be) has more than one set of voices
speaking inside of us: conflicting motives. It is often very hard (even at our
best) to be what those whom we love need us to be. It is much harder to be what
those whom we do not love need us to be.
There
is selfishness. There is pride. There is control. We see it in families,
communities, nations, and in the whole world. We see the good and the bad of it
working in every crisis. Sin has created a division of fear, anger, and
conflict.
We all
carry what Thomas Merton called “the seeds of destruction”. When God came to us
in Jesus we see what the seeds of destruction can do. They can reject the love
and forgiveness that God has for all people, and especially for those who are
different, and for those whom we don’t accept as our neighbors.
The
seeds of destruction came out of cover in order to hang Jesus on the cross. But
Jesus took what sin did and used it against the sin of the whole world. Jesus
defeated the seeds of destruction on the cross. He defeated the destructiveness
carried in our human nature through his defeat of death itself in the
resurrection.
By the
humility and self abandonment that comes from faith in Christ the destructive
seed is killed. The presence of Jesus in our lives, dealing with our sins and
failures, is like having a contract with someone to spray the weeds in our yard
with Roundup every week. His cross is the wholesome love and mercy that gives
us life; and his cross is the poison that withers sin.
The
calling of God is empowered by the cross, and the resurrection; and the Holy
Spirit brings this power to us. The Spirit removes the conflict. The Spirit
ties together, in peace and mercy, those who hear his call. This is the peace
of a new creation. This is what will sprout under God’s care. It will flower in
a new heaven and earth. But it begins with Jesus and us now.
Right
now we are babies, but the power of God’s calling will create a tiny new
creation in his people. If we nurture that new creation of God, we will grow up
to live in that new world: but it begins in us now, together, through Christ.
It
works if we nurture our calling in the way Paul tells us. “Be completely humble
and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to
keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:2-3)
The
other three gifts on Paul’s list of five are: apostles, prophets, and
evangelists. I am not going to be a thorough scholar here, but a brief one. The
word “apostle” (at its most basic) means someone who is sent: in this case sent
by the Lord. A prophet is someone who speaks for the Lord. The word “evangelist”
means a messenger bringing good news.
Some
people will make it more complicated, but you all can carry all three combined
into one. You can all be the people who are sent to speak and live God’s good
news in the world that he loves. You are all sent to speak and live the good
news for God.
This
world does not see Christians or the church as the bringers of good news. But
we are called to surprise them. Paul surprised people all the time, and his
friends had him as their model. Paul did what had never been done before in a
way that no one would ever have thought of.
The
Lord showed him how. Paul was a prisoner of the Romans, but he never called
himself that. He made it something new and surprising. He called himself a
prisoner for the Lord, and he was.
Paul
couldn’t do what he wanted to do, but he found a way to do what God wanted. He
found that, as huge as his limitations were, he had perfect freedom to answer
the call of Jesus to speak, and to do, and to be just as he was called. It was
Paul’s experience that God empowered his people to be able to do this. “Make
every effort,” Paul said.
There
is a calling. There is a voice talking to you about what to do and what to be.
It has nothing to do with you alone. You are not called alone, and the calling
can only be answered when people serve each other, and the world, together.
It was
never supposed to be the list of five special callings that got the work done.
They are only examples of what every part is called to do and to be; each in
their own way. The Holy Spirit is able to do this.
There’s
a story about a man telling some friends about a group he had come across. It
was actually a Bible study and it was surprisingly good. He said, “There was no
leader. None of us knew anything, and we all taught each other.” It’s funny,
but it can happen.
“From
him (from Jesus) the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting
ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”
(Ephesians 4:16)
God’s
word is not something that God inspires in order to tell us what other people
ought to do for us. God’s word speaks to us. It tells us what to do.
A lot
of churches want other people to come and to do things that will build them up.
Other people will see through this, no matter how that church tries to disguise
it. It will never work.
They
are not called to build us up. If anything, we are called to build them up. We
are called to be the seed of the new creation in miniature. We are called to be
Jesus to the world, and to save others under the real saving work of Jesus.
Others are not called to come and save us.
Joining
and membership make people think of clubs and organizations, but the church is
the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit. We get confused because a
body has members and we have transferred that idea to organizations. An eye, a
foot, or a hand, are members of a body, but they do not hold office or fill a
vacancy. So it is with our calling in Christ.
Let’s
learn to look past our jobs and hear God’s calling to us. Let us live as his
people because the voice of crucified and resurrected love has claimed us. He
is speaking to us every day.
Let us
be shepherds: guiding, protecting, and healing others. Then we will find
ourselves becoming what the world is looking for: a people of purpose who are
sent with God’s good news.
Surely this is a site well worth seeing.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jerry.
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