Text: I Samuel 3: 1-11
for Open Table on Sunday, January 15, 2012
(On 3rd Sundays of each month, I preach, if at all, a brief sermon in a prayer service of sung prayers, silence, and guided reflection.)
When I was in seminary, most of my cohorts were quick to share their “call stories": a story they could pull out when asked why they were preparing for ministry.
They told these stories to other seminarians, to the congregations they were serving during seminary years, to the ordination committees with whom they began to meet: one story about praying for a sign from God and then seeing a bumper sticker with a quote by Helen Keller that seemed to confirm his call to ministry . . . another about “running from God” until a grandfather put his hand on his grandson’s head and whispered he should give his life to God and become the next preacher in the family's long line of preachers. . . another about promising God to pursue ministry if her child recovered from a serious illness.
I often wanted to answer this way: “Well, after considering my aptitudes and abilities, and after weighing the worthiness and the demands of such a vocation, I’ve tentatively concluded both that Christian ministry is a worthy vocation and that I might make a half-way decent pastor.”
Not a very heart-felt or pious response. I knew not to answer quite so clinically. But I didn’t have a moving story about one pivotal event in my life. I had many undramatic situations and hunches and realizations and questions and conversations and readings that added up to a growing resolve to TRY seminary. I explained I was attending seminary not to heed a call but to try to hear a call upon my life. Some other time I will share more with you about what led up to my audacious decision to test that calling. But it’s not a great story. It’s really not. It’s a little of this and that, like the little things in your life that impel you to act upon an idea that is frightening and wonderful. I tell you this because the Samuel story can inspire us to listen for God’s voice in the darkness of our nighttime—or it can mislead us to think God’s voice is not only audible but dramatic and decisive. However, listening to God may be harder than Samuel’s story—and the story of some seminarians—suggest.
Which is why I love the story of Jayber Crow. Like you, perhaps, I have sometimes paused long enough in the midst of everyday thoughts and activities and strained to hear God’s call upon my life --and then wondered if I’ve heard anything at all. Jayber Crow is the narrator and title character in an exquisite novel by Wendell Berry. Growing up in the hills of Kentucky, Jayber thinks as a young boy that maybe God is calling him into ministry. The possibility of a religious calling even begins to keep him awake at nights. One night he actually says aloud, like Samuel, “Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth”—even though, unlike Samuel, he had heard nothing. But Jayber explains, “I could not dismiss the possibility that God had spoken and I had failed to hear him because of some deficiency in me or something wrong that I had done. My fearful uncertainty lasted for months. Finally I reasoned that in dealing with God you had better give Him the benefit of the doubt. I decided that I had better accept the call that had not come, just in case it had come and I had missed it!” So Jayber eventually enters seminary because, as he puts it, he’s “pretty sure he’s received the call” to preach.
But like some who go off to seminary, Jayber becomes less sure about this “call.” So Jayber visits his formidable New Testament professor and confesses that he has all these messy questions, which soon tumble forth:
“For instance,” Jayber rattles off, “If Jesus said for us to love our enemies—and He did say that, didn’t He? How can it ever be right to kill our enemies? And if he said not to pray in public, how come we’re all the time praying in public? And if Jesus’ own prayer in the garden wasn’t granted, what is there for us to pray, except ‘thy will be done’ which there’s no use in praying because it will be done anyhow?” Jayber jabbers on until he startles himself with the conclusion that he can’t preach with all these doubts and questions tumbling in his head and then sighs, “But I had this feeling maybe I had been called.”
The professor answers, “And you may have been called. But not to what you thought: Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time.”
“And how long is that going to take?”
“I don’t know. As long as you live, perhaps.”
“That could be a long time.” Jayber muses.
“I will tell you a further mystery,” the professor says. “It may take longer.”
Jayber leaves seminary. Was he faithless to the call of God upon his life when he eventually became the town barber? Did he forsake God’s claim upon his life when he failed to reach the right answers about the Christian faith and so failed to see how he could pass them along to others? If God calls ALL of us to “hold God’s people in our hearts,” then Jayber spent his whole life in quiet response to that call—as friend and stranger poured out their stories to him in his barber chair, as he quietly guarded each secret anguish confided, as he aided the down-and-outers with the little he had. He never took ordination vows. But in the words of our earlier song, I believe he said in effect, “I will go, Lord, where you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.” Maybe that is what God calls each of us to do. It is a vocation for all of us. It is the start and foundation of any worthy vocation.
May we listen to and live into the undramatic but ultimate call upon our lives.
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