I Kings 19:1-13
Isaiah 55:1-3a
Matthew 9:35-38
Before I begin this morning, I want to give you a little context for today’s sermon.
It’s customary, before one is installed as a pastor in a UCC church, for the minister to
give what is called a “candidating sermon,” which offers the congregation an opportunity
to get to know their potential new pastor a bit and to see if this person would be a good fit
for their church—to put it another way, it’s an opportunity for both pastor and
congregation alike to discern whether or not they are being called into a covenant
relationship with one. Now by this time, I think we’ve accomplished that! But since I
came to you through an unorthodox search process, I never had the opportunity to give
you a candidating sermon. But there’s still almost 5 hours to go before my installation,
so I figure, I’ve still got time! And what I want to do with my sermon on this day—when
we recognize and affirm my call to serve you as your pastor—is to offer you a meditation
upon the meaning of Christian vocation. Reflecting some upon my own experience of
call, and drawing upon today’s Scriptures, I want to offer you some food for thought
about the importance of listening for and recognizing your own vocation, as a path
towards authentic selfhood and a deeper relationship with God.
Let’s pray: O God, through the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our
hearts, may we hear your stillspeaking voice offering us a word which will nourish our
spirits this morning, and inspire us to greater love for you and for one another. Amen.
Today, after three years of serving as your pastor, I am going to be installed, in a
ritual of worship that makes our relationship “official,” so to speak, in the eyes of the
United Church of Christ. It’s almost as though we’re backtracking to take care of
unfinished business. Granted, there were good reasons that the business was unfinished,
and it was essential for the congregation to take the time it needed to come to clarity and
consensus over the need for the position I inhabit to be a permanent one. And yet, there
is a certain irony about having an installation nearly three years into my time of service
here. But if it’s ironic that we are only now having the service of celebration that usually
accompanies the arrival of a new pastor, it’s fairly consistent with the general trajectory
of my vocational life, which rarely seems content to travel in a straight line.
After all, I first felt called to ordained pastoral ministry at the age of 16, but hit a
serious snag in early adulthood when I discovered that my apparently unwavering
propensity to fall in love with people of the “wrong” gender rendered me unfit for
ordination in the Presbyterian Church. Well, I soldiered on through this crisis, kept all
the right secrets that I was told to keep, (the Presbyterians invented don’t ask, don’t tell,
you know), and managed to get ordained by the Presbyterians in 1989. But my
vocational journey hit another bump in the road when depression over serving as a
closeted minister in an extremely homophobic church forced me to reconsider my
vocational plan. Clearly, a detour was required in order to preserve the success of the
entire endeavor, that is, maintaining enough sanity and health to keep serving the God I
felt called and determined to serve, and so I found a comfortable, familiar and safe
sanctuary in academia for quite a while. After all, teaching is also a form of ministry.
And so twelve years went by while I immersed myself in Ph.D. work, kept my
hand in pastoral ministry with some part-time work in local Presbyterian churches, and
then went on to teach at Chicago Theological Seminary. These were good years as well
as hard years. But at some point, a still, small voice began whispering in my ear, saying
things like, “why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor
for that which does not satisfy?” and, echoing our text from First Kings, “what are you
doing here, Janet?”
I take some comfort in the fact that biblical characters also found that their lives
did not always move forward in a straight line, and in fact, quite a few of them
meandered a lot as they strived to follow the voice of God. We have wonderful stories in
the Bible of people who struggled to find, accept or understand their vocation—people
like Moses (please don’t send me, God, I have a great fear of public speaking!) or
Jonah—whose own particular vocational detour landed him in the belly of a whale. And
then there is Elijah. I love this story of Elijah in I Kings. It’s so wonderfully and
maddeningly human. After just achieving astronomical success in his role as a prophet of
Yahweh by defeating Jezebel’s prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, Elijah allows his fear
of Jezebel’s wrath to send him running. He’s scared, and he’s depressed, and quite
frankly, a bit melodramatic.
He winds up journeying for forty days and forty nights to Mount Horeb, which is
none other than the famous Mount Sinai, and in doing so literally retraces the wilderness
route taken by the Israelites under Moses’ leadership and ends up back at the sacred site
where Moses received the ten commandments. And yet, God is with him as he wanders
in the wilderness, giving him nourishment, and the strength to keep going. And this also,
this detour from his prophetic duties, serves a purpose in the larger scheme of his
vocation, for it brings him into the presence of God, where he finds himself addressed by
a Voice.
According to John Neafsey, in his book, A Sacred Voice is Calling: Personal
Vocation and Social Conscience, “the Latin roots of the word vocation (vocare, “to call”
and vox, “voice”) center around the experience of hearing a call or voice. ‘The original
meaning of ‘to have a vocation,’’ wrote Carl Jung, ‘is to be addressed by a voice.’ But
who, or what, is calling?”1
Parker Palmer, in his wonderful little book, Let Your Life Speak, explains, lest you
worry that that discovering one’s vocation requires either mystical experiences or
psychotic breaks, that “vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to
become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I
was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”2 Or as a
Quaker writer put it, “Deep within us all, there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul,
a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continually return.”3
About four years ago, I began to hear an inner voice warning me that I was not
quite on the right path. A sense of dis-ease, discontentment, and even some unsettling
dreams all pointed towards an inevitable conclusion—the vocation of an academic
theologian was not turning out to be the right “fit” for my own personality and
temperament, or the best use of my gifts. I was “laboring for that which did not satisfy.”
Though doing well in academia, I was not doing well spiritually. I was trying to be
someone I was not.
As Parker Palmer relates, “There is a Hasidic tale that reveals… the universal tendency to want to be someone else and the ultimate importance of becoming one’s self: Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”4 Or as God asked Elijah, not through the violent earthquake or the loud wind or the blazing fire, but in a still, small voice, “what are you doing here, Elijah?” Have you ever had the experience, of waking up one day and realizing you are not who, or where, you were meant to be? Or conversely, have you had the experience of knowing that you are exactly who, and where, you are supposed to be, and felt the joy and intense satisfaction that comes with that realization?
Isaiah urges us to “listen, so that we may live.” To become the person we are
meant to be, to find our true vocation, we have to learn to listen for that still, small voice,
that inner compass, that lets us know whether we’re on course. But how do we know?
How do we discern our true vocation or our authentic selves? In closing, I offer some
clues.
Many of you may have heard Frederick Buechner’s famous saying that “the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”5 This is a beautiful way of saying that an authentic calling integrates three things—what we most enjoy doing, what we are talented at, and what the world most needs from us. Any one of these factors, in isolation from the others, is not sufficient.
The world is full of crying needs, and we can exhaust ourselves in trying to meet them. We may have many gifts, but if we use them only to serve ourselves, we fail to live into Christ’s calling to love our neighbor as ourselves. We may have great talent that can be put to use serving others in important ways, but if we derive no joy from our service, our well will run dry and we’ll end up with shriveled souls and bitter hearts. And such is not God’s intention for us. No, our God is the God of Isaiah, who shouts, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price! Our God is the God known in Jesus, who said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Where do your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet? A little less
than three years ago, I found myself at a crossroads. After listening to that insistent,
inner voice, I found myself weighing two job offers—one from the Natural Resources
Defense Council to be a project manager in their climate change program, and one from
Rock Spring—a position that would bring me back into parish ministry. It was a hard
choice at the time. I could find compelling reasons to accept either job. Both would
serve deep needs. And so I prayed, and I meditated, and I listened. And one day,
wrestling with these questions, I happened to hear the song, “You Raise Me Up,” which
the choir will sing this afternoon at my installation. And I felt moved by a force deep
within me that literally brought me down onto my knees, for as I listened to that song, I
realized that the place where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet is in
serving as a pastor, to help raise people up—to raise their spirits, to equip them for their
own—for your own—unique vocations in the world—to help you connect to the God
who raises us all up, and to accompany you on your journeys, through your wilderness
times and your feast times.
Such is the calling that I have discerned at this time and this place in my life, and
that call has been affirmed time and time again in my three years of service with you. As
we mark this transition today in our relationship as pastor and parish, I pray that this will
be a day not only to affirm my call to serve you, but also a day for you to reflect upon
your own calling, and how, together, we can harness our vocations to minister side by
side to the needs of this community, and the world around us.
Amen.
1 John Neafsey, A Sacred Voice Is Calling: Personal Vocation and Social Conscience (Maryknoll: Orbis
Books, 2006), 5-6.
2 Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2000), 10.
3 The quote is by Thomas Kelly, cited in Neafsey, A Sacred Voice Is Calling,6
4 Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 11.
5 Quoted in Neafsey, A Sacred Voice Is Calling, 1.