Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 15, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This last week I experienced a sort of convergence around the question of divine calling. Several things came together to raise that question anew in my mind. The first thing happened last Sunday after I got home from church. I was channel surfing, looking for something mindless that I could stare at while I unwound from the day’s activities here. I happened upon a televised service of something called The City Church. I was going to say that I’d found that mindless thing I was looking for, but that would be unkind. The pastor to the City Church-as near as I can tell its founder, inspiration, and only reason for existing-was telling how once he was traveling somewhere on an airplane when God came to him and told him to start a new church in Washington, D.C. I had thought there already were Christian churches in D.C., although given what our government’s doing these days they don’t seem to have much truly Christian influence. But never mind. This pastor, whose name I don’t recall, was sure God had all of a sudden decided that God needed this man to start his own church in our nation’s capital and had come to him in a flash of inspiration to call him to do it.

Then that night I read the lectionary readings for this morning, and it turns out that they’re mostly about God calling people. We heard two of them just now, the famous story of God calling Samuel from 1 Samuel and Jesus calling Phillip and Nathanael from John. The next day, last Monday, I was talking to a former seminary classmate and now professional colleague of mine-not Jane, although she too fits that description-who said that she believes God is calling her to leave the church she now serves and move to a different, larger church of her denomination that is struggling with numerous divisions of various sorts within the congregation. She clearly believes that she is having a genuine call experience. So with all of these things about divine call converging around me, I decided maybe I was being called to preach once more on call, that experience that is so common in the Christian tradition of people believing that there is something quite specific that God wants them to do and is directly asking them to do.

Now there are lots of things that need to be said about the notion of call, and I can’t possibly say them all in one sermon. So I’ll just try to highlight some of the more important ones here this morning, and the first thing that needs to be said about the doctrine of divine call is that it has a solid Biblical foundation. The Bible is full of call stories. In the Old Testament, almost every prophet has a dramatic call story, often involving heavenly visions of God. In the New Testament, Jesus calls the twelve Disciples. Those stories are often quite dramatic in their own way. In the best known of them, Jesus encounters Peter and others beside the Sea of Galilee, calls them to follow him, and they drop everything immediately and rush off to follow this man who, as far as we’re told, is a perfect stranger to them. The Gospels don’t have a specific call story for Jesus, but in a way the entire Gospel is Jesus’ call story. We don’t have to take all of these stories literally, but if we take the Bible seriously as we claim to do, we can have no doubt that God does indeed call individual men and women to do God’s work in the world as prophets, Disciples of Christ, and otherwise. As Christians, we have to take the notion of call seriously, for it has a solid Biblical pedigree.

That being said, we must also recognize that the notion of call is highly problematic. It is indeed highly dangerous. People claim to do things all the time at the call of God that most of us are mortally certain God never has called anyone to do. The best examples are the cases where people engage in acts of violence because they think God has called them to do it. The most dramatic example in our recent history is of course September 11, 2001. We know that God did not call those men to fly those loaded airliners into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and wherever the one that crashed in Pennsylvania was going. Yet the men who hijacked them apparently thought that God had called them to do it, that they were in fact doing the will of God. We don’t have to look to other faith traditions for more examples. Western Christianity conducted rank cultural imperialism for centuries under the guise of responding to the call of God to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Some elements of Christianity still do. American Christians have murdered doctors and innocent gay and lesbian people, supposedly at the call of God. The examples could go on and on, but the point is made. Divine call is a very, very dangerous thing.

One way to understand that danger is to see that we fallible humans so often mistake as the call of God something that really is nothing more than our own psyches talking. Our psyches talk more often than not out of fear, anger, and a hatred that arises in our own psychological processes but that gets directed against other people, especially people who are different from us or who do things we don’t like. We so often think that what is really only a human voice, our own or someone else’s, is really the voice of God. Our reading from 1 Samuel this morning contains an interesting twist on that problem. There, the voice Samuel hears really is the voice of God; but he thinks it is a human voice, the voice of his mentor Eli. Still the story makes the point. It is often extremely difficult to tell who’s voice we’re hearing when we think we hear someone calling to us. Maybe it’s God, but we don’t hear it as God because we can’t believe God would really call the likes of us. More likely, it’s a human voice to which we ascribe divine identity in order to sanctify our own selfish wishes and ego drives. The point is: When we think we’re receiving a call from outside ourselves we need to stop and say: May I ask who’s calling?

All of which begs the next question: How do we answer the first question of who it is that’s really calling? I have struggled with that question for a long time. You see, most of us in professional ministry believe that we’re there because God called us to it. We believe-I believe-that if the only reason we’re in professional ministry is our own ego desires, we’ve got no business being in it. So we have to ask: How do we know who’s calling? My many years of struggling with that question has led me to one central conclusion: There’s no foolproof way to know. Absolute certainty that a perceived call from God really is from God, or that something we think is merely human is not actually from God, cannot be had. We must accept the fact that we will always live with some uncertainty about the origin of any call that we think we perceive. In this as in all matters of faith, absolute certainty is not given to us limited, finite, mortal human beings. That’s the first and most important thing to say about the question of who’s calling.

That being said, however, there are certain safeguards to which we can resort not to answer the question definitively but at least to reduce the level of our uncertainty. I’ll mention a couple of them briefly. The first is that an authentic call from God will always be consistent with the best, not the worst elements of our faith tradition and of our holy scriptures. Leviticus 22 says men guilty of a homosexual act must be put to death. That’s one of the worst things our tradition has to offer. It is radically inconsistent with the best thing our tradition has to offer, Jesus’ ethic of love for all people. Therefore, hate-filled bigots who kill innocent men like Andrew Shepherd are not and cannot be acting in response to a genuine call from God, no matter how much they claim that they are.

The next safeguard is to try to make sure that what you think is a call from God isn’t just your own ego talking, and the way to do that is to submit your sense of call to a community of faith. The UCC, like most denominations, has a built-in mechanism for doing that when a person believes he or she is called to ordained ministry; but the process shouldn’t be limited to that specific call. Anyone who perceives that God is calling her to some action should submit that call to the community for affirmation or negation. Communities of faith are far from infallible, Catholic and Orthodox teaching about their faith communities to the contrary notwithstanding. Still, affirmation of a call by a faith community can at least make sure that someone’s sense of call is not merely idiosyncratic.

The real check on a sense of call, however, lies I believe in the inherent uncertainty of all calls itself. The most dangerous thing in the world is the belief that we have the absolute truth. The most dangerous thing in the life of faith is to forget that in all matters of faith there resides an inherent uncertainty. We can think. We can believe. But we can never know with absolute certainty. This unavoidable element of uncertainty rules out any act of violence as an authentic call from God. Once we engage in violence, we can’t take it back. Once we’ve killed someone, whether we call it murder or whether we call it war, we can’t undo what we’ve done. If we turn out to have been wrong, we can’t give life back to those we’ve killed. Therefore, even if you don’t believe as I do that violence is never morally justified, you must nonetheless rule out a resort to violence as being a response to a call from God. You, like some of our current political leaders, may think that God is calling you to war, but you cannot know that with certainty. Therefore, you can’t act on it. You can’t justify your resort to violence by claiming a call from God. You just can’t be that certain; and if you think you are that certain, you have become a very dangerous person indeed. The unavoidable uncertainty in any sense of call rules out any resort to violence as a legitimate response to a call from God.

Now maybe you think none of this applies to you. Some of us claim to have experienced calls from God, but perhaps others of us have not. Nonetheless, God does call all of us. God calls all of us who call ourselves Christians to follow the example of Jesus in the way we live our lives. I can’t tell you what that means for you in any specific situation that you face. Still, we’re all called to be Christ’s disciples. At any time, for any one of us, our internal telephone may go off; and we may hear a voice calling us to some course of action. If you do, please stop for a minute and say: May I ask who’s calling? And don’t be surprised if it really does turn out to be God. Amen.