Sermons

Called

Today, in the Gospel of John, we get the call stories of Philip and Nathanael. This is particularly relevant because we are in the season of Epiphany, a season that follows Advent and Christmas. Yesterday, I was ordained a transitional deacon at the Washington National Cathedral. At the ordination, Dr. Lisa Kimball explained that Epiphany is a season in which we take the light we were awaiting in Advent, which we received in the Incarnation at Christmas, and we decide what to do about it. She asked, “What will we do with what we have seen and experienced?” In light of the gospel and the season of Epiphany, I want to talk about call in three ways.

The first is that in this passage of John, we see that people are called differently and respond differently. Philip seems to immediately accept Jesus’s call to follow. There’s no back and forth or questioning. He accepts the call and acts. If only the Christian life were always that easy. My own call story spans 25 years from when I first felt called to priesthood to yesterday when I was ordained a deacon, and beyond to this summer when, God-willing, I will be ordained a priest. And it took God working through others to knock on the door of my life again and again for me to be ready to answer the call, to put aside much of a life that I had built, and pursue the discernment and formation necessary for a priest, spanning nearly six years of time. 

Not everyone is called to ordained ministry. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a call or a call story. In some ways, my new position as clergy is the easier one to be in. I will now wear a clergy collar and be a visible sign of Christ in the world. But the 37 years I spent as a layperson were much harder to navigate. I was once at a company happy hour discussing a sociological phenomenon with a colleague who was also a friend when he turned to me and said, “It’s kind of like why people go to church.” I looked at him and said, “Before you finish that thought, I just need you to know that I am one of those people.” He was flabbergasted! We had been colleagues for months, and I suppose it had just never come up. When I announced at my job that I was going to seminary, several people stopped by for coffee just because they were also people of faith and wanted to share that with me now that I had become a very public Christian in a new way. In fact, these interactions made me question how open I was about my religious convictions if people interested in having these conversations didn’t even know that about me.

“What happens on Sunday morning is not half so important as what happens on Monday morning. In fact, what happens on Sunday morning is judged by what happens on Monday morning.” – Verna Dozier

Lay theologian and St. Mark’s legend Verna Dozier, in her critical work The Calling of the Laity, which is, as it sounds, all about the calling of the laity, said that “What happens on Sunday morning is not half so important as what happens on Monday morning. In fact, what happens on Sunday morning is judged by what happens on Monday morning. If the people who gather for word and sacrament go back to that world unchanged and unchanging, they have participated in empty ritual.” It’s the laity who are in the office buildings, the cafes, on the metro. You are poised to embody Christ in the world because you are in the world. The work of God cannot be left to the clergy. Dozier bristled when people said she only started her ministry when she left her teaching career and began full-time church work. “No, I continued my ministry!” she would say. And so each of you is doing ministry in your own way every day. 

The second point I want to make about call has to do with the second apostle in this story, Nathanael. He, like me, needs a little bit more than an invitation to call. He does not follow as simply or as easily as Philip. His own biases against Nazareth are blinding him to the Messiah before his eyes. So we see here also that our prejudices get in the way of pursuing the call of Christ. This weekend, when we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems especially important to reflect on. The passage from Dr. King that we read today talks about love of enemies because only love can build up. I wonder how this story would have played out differently if Nathanael had chosen to love the people of Nazareth, rather than his derision of them. Only when Jesus himself bridges that divide is Nathanael able to see what is right before his eyes: the call on his life. Love of enemies is at the very heart of Christian life, and indeed, one of the General Ordination exams, which I took two weeks ago, centered on this very idea. If you are looking to protect only your small community, if you are ready to write off whole parts of our divided country, if you are only committed to the “us” in an us vs them world, then you should hate your enemies. But what I believe we are called into as Christians is to expand the “us” so that everyone is an “us” and there is no them. That’s what we do at this table every week when we make the circle a little bigger to include everyone. That’s what Jesus calls Nathaniel into in this passage and what Dr. King called us into just 66 years ago.

Finally, the third point I want to make is about the type of people who are called. Earlier this week, as I was preparing for my ordination, I had a to-do list a mile long. I wanted to pray all four of the daily prayer services in the Book of Common Prayer. I wanted to exercise every day, drink 3 huge bottles of water, get my hair and nails done, buy all the food, make all the reservations to host my friends, and make sure I had all the right products and tutorials lined up. The list goes on and on. Anyone who hosted family for the holidays is probably familiar with this list. But by about Wednesday morning,  I was exhausted. I was hardly even enjoying this special time of my life, but rather holding everything so tightly that there was no room for me to breathe.  That’s when I realized I  was trying to perfect myself so I would be worthy of God’s call of this ordination. I wanted to pray perfectly, look perfectly, have a perfectly clean home, and be perfectly organized. But the problem with that is God didn’t call a perfect Caitlin, she called this one and I am a glorious mix of excellence and failure, brilliance and blockheadedness, transcendence and tripping over my own feet. Philip and Nathanael clearly weren’t perfect either. But that’s okay because God is calling us as we are, these finite and limited creatures who are capable of extraordinary things. 

So today or tomorrow, if you’re off work, take some time to think about God’s call on your life. Think about what you will do with the light that is given to you. Think about what your Monday morning says about what you did Sunday morning.