The Park Road Pulpit
Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church
Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors
Minding Your Call
Mark 1:14-20
Amy Jacks Dean, January 26, 2003
It’s a phrase that we preacher types have heard a million times. It’s a question I’ve answered more times than I care to remember. It’s an expression that has become practically cliché. Most often asked in ministerial job interviews, it’s a good opener to get the conversation going: “So, tell us about your `Call’ into the ministry.” I’ve got the answer neatly packaged by now. There’s the story I tell of a lump in my throat when missionaries spoke at my home church about thatched huts in Zimbabwe. There’s the story of volunteering to preach for Youth Sunday when I was in high school – only to be graciously thanked and told “no” – girls couldn’t preach. There’s the story of meeting the son of the Baptist preacher in town and being completely smitten by him so as to start going to his church with him every time the doors were open because my strict father would let me go to church as a safe date. There’s the story about David and Jane Hull, both of whom participated in our installation service here, who mentored us on our way to seminary. There’s the story of “The Commune” – that group of friends that lived beside and above us in our seminary ghetto apartment complex who became family to us and changed my whole life. There’s the story of Dr. Glen Stassen, who I attribute to changing my theology, my politics, my belief system, my life in one class entitled “Biblical Ethics on Christian Peacemaking.” There’s the story of Dr. Andy Lester who opened a door into my soul that let me know that Pastoral Care was my passion – listening to people, caring for people, offering a word of grace to people who feel there is no hope. That, in a nutshell, is pretty much my “Call” story for interviews and small group discussions. Some of you have heard it more than once already. It is all as clear to me as if I had heard voices – even the very voice of God – within my story at every turn. I can take you back to certain seats in certain pews, I can recall specific conversations and specific lectures, I can remember exactly where I was sitting in class – the very seat. I can remember the tone of the preacher’s voice and the expression on the professor’s face. I can remember the taste of the meal and the heart-to-heart conversation that followed. It is all as clear as a bell to me. If you heard me tell it enough, you would believe, just as I do, that I had heard a voice from heaven/a word from God – it is that real to me. But the truth is it’s just my “Call” story. I tell it to answer the call into ministry question, but the truth is that I came into this vocation much the same way you probably came into yours. A turn here, a fork in the road there. Who I knew, and who knew my family. A few doors shut, a few doors flew open and boom here I am. But I could be doing many different jobs today, and my “call” story would be the same. For in those moments that I just described, I felt God’s presence in my life in real, tangible ways, and I was always changed – but it had nothing to do with my vocational choice. It had to do with the fact that the presence of God has been found for me in a call to follow Jesus. And everyone should have those stories to tell.
And so Simon and his brother Andrew, and James the son of Zebedee and his brother John had a “call” story. They had all been fishing by the Sea of Galilee, as this was their vocation, when Jesus happened by – calling them to leave it all and follow him for now they would be fishing for people. And they bought it – hook, line, and sinker, if you will – and nothing was ever the same. I bet they told that story over and over and over again to anyone with ears to hear. And throughout time, the church has told their story as the “Calling of the First Disciples,” and we have been amazed at their readiness and willingness to follow Jesus.
And so Jonah had a “call” story. It is vivid in detail and imagination. It is about the best story in all of Scripture if you like good stories to tell. That story has been told and retold and then told again to illustrate the lengths to which God will go to call us out of our own prejudice and selfish ways to bring the Good News of Grace to those we think don’t deserve it.
But as great a story as Jonah’s call is and as important as the calling of the first disciples is and as much as I enjoy remembering my own call story – none of that interests me much today. I’m interested in your “call” story. Not about your calling to be a teacher (as vitally important as that is), not about your calling to be an accountant, a builder, an architect, a doctor, a lawyer, a nurse, or a stay-home mom (as important as all of those are). All of these things are vocations – they are what you do. I want to know if you know your own “call” story unrelated to what you chose as a vocation. And I am interested in the “call” story of this church.
You see, I know my story well, because I have been forced to tell it, I’ve been asked to tell it based on my vocational choice (it is part of my job to tell my call story), but I would guess that most of you have never been asked the question. You see, we have all been “called” by God – called to be “who we are created to be. We need only be human, a simple matter of being in relationship with God and other human beings.” (The Christian Century, Byron L. Rohrig, February 25, 1987, page 180) But it is a shame that you are never asked to tell your “call” story. I’m confident that your story is as important as Jonah’s story, and Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John’s story, and my story. But if you are not minding your call – if you are not paying attention, if you’re not nurturing the God-given moments of your life, if you’re not careful – you’ll miss your own story, and that would be a tragedy.
Barbara Brown Taylor tells her call story and she traces it back to when she was 7 years old and her pastor became her friend. One Sunday, she said, “he asked me to sit up close to the pulpit. He wanted me to hear his sermon, and as I listened to him talk about the beauty of God’s creation and our duty to be awed by it, all of a sudden I heard him telling the congregation about a little girl who kept tadpoles in a birdbath so that she could watch over them as they turned into frogs, and how her care for those creatures was part of God’s care for the whole world. It was as if someone had turned on all the lights – not only to hear myself spoken of in church, but to hear that my life was part of God’s life, and that something as ordinary as a tadpole connected the two. My friend’s words changed everything for me. I could no longer see myself or the least detail of my life in the same way again. When the service was over that day I walked out of it into a God-enchanted world, where I could not wait to find further clues to heaven on earth. Every leaf, every ant, every shiny rock called out to me – begging to be watched, to be listened to, to be handled and examined. I became a detective of divinity, collecting evidence of God’s genius and admiring the tracks left for me to follow: locust shedding their hard bodies for soft, new winged ones; prickly pods of milkweed spilling silky white hair; lightning spinning webs of cold fire in the sky, as intricate as the veins in my own wrist. My friend taught me to believe that these were all words in the language of God.” (The Preaching Life, page 14-15)
How far back can you trace your call? Please know that I am NOT talking about a conversion story, a salvation story, a come-to-meet-Jesus story, a one-moment-in-time story. I am talking about your story of the constant calling of God in your life. Who in this room has had a word from God? Who has served as God’s voice in your life and what does she sound like? How and when have you made the small connections that became aha moments that the divine is not disconnected from you but most assuredly within you? Or have you never given any of this any thought? Are you too busy, to self-indulged, too tired, too detached to even notice that you have been called in the first place? Let me offer a strong word of encouragement for us all: unclutter some of the unnecessary busyness of your life and listen for the call from God; stop the rat-race and the madness and watch for the call from God; slow down and retrace the steps of your life and remember the calls from God thus far; stop the mundane, the ordinary, the boredom and live the call from God. If you’ve been looking for permission, I offer it today, as a Minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ but more importantly I offer it as a follower of Jesus who sometimes needs to be reminded of it herself. Your story is too necessary, too significant to God’s story for you to miss it all together.
But let me hasten to say that your call is best understood and lived out in the context of community. It is in the gathering of our individual callings that this church will find its calling. That is essentially the purpose of the12 representatives of the Vision Team: to help Park Road Baptist Church find its calling in this community and in this world. And they need your stories to help find their way.
In her book The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor moves from her call at the age of 7 to be a “detective of divinity” to the various other calls in her life and she summarizes it all this way: “If my own experience can be trusted, then God does not call us once but many times. There are calls to faith and calls to ordination, but in between there are calls to particular communities and calls to particular tasks within them . . . calls to seek God wherever God may be found. Sometimes those calls ring clear as bells and sometimes they are barely audible, but in any case we are not meant to hear them all by ourselves. [That may be the best news for today!] It was part of God’s genius to incorporate us as one body, so that our ears have other ears, other eyes, minds, hearts, and voices to help us interpret what we have heard. Together we can hear our calls, and together we can answer them.” (pages 23-24)
It is an irony that the group of 12 people facilitating the process at hand is called the “Vision Team.” Because, thus far in my own life, I have only understood my “call” story in hindsight. I have only understood God’s presence after the fact. I have only recognized God’s voice, for sure, as a part of the past. I’ve only truly heard the call in the telling of the story.
So I guess the task before us today is that we best be minding our call diligently, attentively, prayerfully, respectfully. I hope that our memories will be vivid of the calling on and in our lives. We should be telling our stories – our stories of how God comes among us and how we are changed – forever. For our calling is simple: it is to live up to who God created us to be and it is to follow in the Way of Jesus. It is a calling to offer God’s unconditional love to even those people who are the most unlovely. It is a calling to offer words of hope and grace. It is a calling to preach peace in a world bent on destruction and injustice and war. It is a calling feed the hungry and clothe the naked and shelter the homeless. It is so simple. It is a calling to minister to those imprisoned. It is a calling live out of the divine within each one of us so that God’s presence will be known for others in the tangibility of our very own lives. It is so plain and it is so simple and it is so difficult. And we should be able to tell those stories of our calling just as surely as the first disciples told theirs. And maybe, just maybe, if this church is lucky, 2000 years from now The Church will still be telling Park Road Baptist Church’s story because it might just change the whole wide world. Could you handle it? I sure would like to give it a try. So mind your calling – even today. May it be so.