(I will be traveling
this next month and will post as I am able.
I will try to stay faithful to those of you who have asked me to keep at
this. Blessings.)
Recently
I was reading a sermon preached by a young woman who is trail blazing the
ordination of women in the Church of Christ, a rather conservative branch of
Christian Protestantism. Reflecting on
her call she began, “I see calling as less of a Burning Bush or a Damascus Road
situation, and more like a matrix of personal skills and life situations that
make a particular path a good fit.” I
felt I knew her meaning from within. She
describes the slow ‘fit’ rather well.
One grows up in a place, perhaps you assume faith rather naturally,
within a family or by accompanying friends to a worship space. One day you realize faith has a hold, some
power in your life. You make choices
reflective of the core values of your faith.
Some are small. When and whom you
offer care to perhaps. Some are
large. What will I study in college that
will shape me? If I do this or that will
it be consistent with my faith? Perhaps
you step back and wonder, is my faith, is this notion that God has a claim on
my choices real? How do I know this?
In
my case it came to a moment when the only answer I could settle on was I need
to trust that God is, that Jesus is God’s reflection in my flesh. If this is true, then this following is of
great value. If it is not, I will at
least have lived a life worth the living.
That was the beginning of a deeper walk and unfolding.
Vocation
is not mostly the call of those who seek to be ordained. Vocation is the call on every life to live a
life worth living in relationship to God whom we can experience in our
flesh. The place of this encounter is in
Jesus Christ for Christians. My bias is
this is true for all, but I seek not to be too narrow. The same depth I know in Christ I have seen
in followers of a different way.
Today’s
lessons are all about vocation. What
sort of king will Saul be? Will he
accept the inconvenience of what Samuel tells him is God’s will? The people under his leadership and Samuel’s
guidance have taken over a people they were to slaughter. I can be very uncomfortable with this image
of slaughter but there it is. All they
are and own is to be destroyed utterly. But the people want to keep the best
bits for themselves. They justify it
with the notion they will go elsewhere and sacrifice it to God. Saul agrees while holding the notion that
because they have done most of the clean up, they have obeyed God. Samuel tells Saul, “No!” God is not in need
of your sacrifices but your obedience to perceived will.
"Has the LORD as
great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the
LORD? Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of
rams. For rebellion is no less a sin than divination, and stubbornness is like
iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected , he has also rejected you
from being king." 1 Samuel 15:22-23
I
may have difficulty with slaughter as God’s perceived will, but my difficulty
is not the subject of this early revelation of God.
In
Acts, Saul of Tarsus is finding his way as a new convert to Jesus. Nothing is easy at this point. The persecution he designed as responsive to
his perception of God’s will, to purify Judaism of Christians, is turning out
to be his new problem. The energy of
dislike of those who believe in the Resurrection is now resting on him. And yet by steps he follows, is saved from
capture and death. As he is shipped out
peace settles on the Jerusalem Church.
Is this because his conversion, the news of it undoes the energy of
persecution, the angry need for purification within Judaism? One can only wonder.
In
the Gospel Jesus dies on the cross. In
his dying the gentile, the centurion, proclaims Jesus innocent. Joseph asks to bury
the body. He wraps it in care and give
up his own tomb. The women sight the
burial and go home to Sabbath and begin the spice preparation to embalm him.
Here is a variable cascade of vocation.
Each person from his realm of experience, from his or her matrix of personal
skills and life situation find that particular path, set of actions, a good
fit. One event ripples out into the
next.
What
is extraordinary is how all are recorded; all are part of the final telling of
the Gospel. Look at your own life and
you will see it. Your faith, your struggle or gift of belief does not stand
isolated. Someone or many “someone’s” did their part. One may have said look here. Another may have loaned you their belief
until you had your own. Another in some unseen place prepared a curriculum, an
altar, a prayer, a welcome, a listening heart.
You happened on it. By whose
intention?
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