Considering our call
When I was signing up for classes for my first semester of seminary, I saw this neat class called “Women in Preaching.” I thought, oh boy, that will be fun, we will sit there and watch Barbara Brown Taylor videos and other famous women preachers too - maybe Heidi Neumark or Berniece King.
And read through the sermons from great women preachers from the past like Sojourner Truth, Aimee Semple McPherson. So I signed up.
On the first day of class, I took my seat in the first chair on the front row, all excited to be in seminary, and the professor came in and said, "Good morning class. Please turn in your Bibles to Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 1, verses 26 and 27. You have five minutes to read these verses, and then each of you will rise from your seat and preach for two minutes on the passage."
Which was: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
And I sat there, in the front row, thinking OH MY GOD what have I done? And why did I sit here in the first chair on the first row? Oh my God oh my God oh my God. That’s pretty much all that happened in my head for the whole five minutes.
And then God intervened. When the reading time was up and the bell rang, the professor pointed to the back row and asked the person in the last seat to begin.
What came next was a little bit like The Gong Show, if you remember that one. Someone would get up and start talking and soon the bell would ring while they were in mid-sentence, and they’d have to sit down. A few folks were able to speak a few sentences that sounded like they went together, but honestly I don’t know what they said. My mind was just going in circles.
When it was my turn, I rose and the Holy Spirit apparently gave me a few things to say that seemed to go together, which I don’t much remember now, and then class was over. I had to walk for about 20 minutes around the quadrangle to discharge the anxiety and then another 20 asking myself why on earth I was foolish enough to think the class would be about watching Barbara Brown Taylor videos.
In the almost 20 years since that day, I’ve had some time to reflect on this passage, which probably unsurprisingly has become important to me. Our teacher chose it to emphasize that God called women to preach even though there were still many folks who thought that women shouldn’t be preaching. God calls those who are not powerful but considered foolish by the world to call forth the Gospel in community.
That was her point, the way she wanted to begin our course.
In the end, that was one of my favorite classes and she was one of my favorite professors.
And this is one of my favorite verses too. Consider your own call! Not the call of other people! You all are called, we all are called by God, called to follow Jesus, called to live out the Gospel in our own lives. You don’t have to have a special pedigree or education or certain standing or any of that to follow that call. You don’t have to be particularly wise, either. God’s work often seems foolish, as St. Paul reminds us.
But you do have to recognize that you have a call.We all do. It’s not just for folks long ago or for folks with certain degrees.
But what is our call? How do we follow? What do we do?
As always Jesus has a suggestion for a starting point in considering our call, which we also hear today -from his first and most famous sermon - the sermon on the mount.
In particular, to prepare his listeners for what he’s going to say in the body of his sermon, Jesus calls attention to those who are called blessed by God - and the list is surprising, or at least it would have been to the folks who heard it then. We may have started to gloss over it ourselves, having heard it so often.
But this passage is so important we hear it in church at least twice a year. In the rest of the sermon Jesus will be telling us how to follow him more specifically, but in this overture if you will, he reminds us all that God has blessed all of us AND that God’s desire for all of us is transformation.
That’s the purpose of following him, transformation, always.
God has blessed those who need help (the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek - which means those who are subject to abuse because of their powerless - those who are persecuted, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness).
God has blessed those who are helpers (the merciful, peacemakers, the pure in heart).
But just as important as naming those who are blessed, Jesus also names the transformation God intends for each.
The poor in spirit will receive the kingdom, which surely is full of spiritual gifts. Those who mourn will be comforted. Those who are powerless shall receive all they could desire. Their brokenness, their lack, their frustrations will be transformed into fulfillment, joy, peace.
And those who help will be transformed as well, not because they have done something to earn God’s favor, but because they will show others what it means to follow Jesus.Others will recognize their blessedness, and that is the result of our witness and testimony.
Our call is simply to be human and to be ready for transformation, whatever our circumstances are at this time.
Sometimes we will need to be transformed from living in grief to experiencing joy. Sometimes we need to lend aid to someone else’s transformation, which in turn is witnessing to our faith.
Sometimes we need to transform our own vision of ourselves or of others, turning our vision away from only seeing brokenness and lack both in ourselves and in others toward seeing blessedness and the opportunity for fulfillment. That’s really the starting point.
Sometimes we just need to accept that we are blessed, or accept that someone else is blessed, not because of anyone’s actions but because of God’s nature to bless all of God’s creation.
And sometimes that acceptance of ourselves and of others can be the most profound transformation of all.
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