Call and Response

Pathways Church          07/01/2007

Rob Moore

     We heard a lot about call last week. As our Senior Minister led his final service with us, we heard readings tell us of deeper questions that knock at the door of the soul and refuse to go away. We heard about a seemingly innocuous bush that bursts into flame that interrupts our stable life with a summons to leadership. We offered our own calls to Rev. David as he begins his new ministry in Atlanta. He called us to a few things as well. He called us to the extraordinary, to feed what is healthy, to kiss joy as it flies, and to faith. Now all these are well and good, but I kept thinking to myself: How exactly do I do all that? If I actually received a call from God or from my church or from my still, small voice within or even from a hurting world, how would I respond in real life? As Pathways Church enters into yet another time of transition, I know we will all be called to new or different service within the church. In our lives, we are always called to one thing or another; some grand and exciting like to kiss joy as it flies; some more mundane like filling the salt and pepper shakers for potlucks. Not very glamorous, but quite necessary for a potluck table and somebody has to do it, right? That is our task this morning, to figure out how to respond to a call when or if we get one. We will start by turning to three Biblical stories of call and response.

     First up, Moses, excerpted from various parts of the book of Exodus:

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush. God then called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then God said to Moses, “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” God then said, “I will be with you.”

Now, Isaiah, from Isaiah 6:8:

          Then I heard the voice of the saying, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here I am, send me.”

Finally, Jonah, from Jonah 1:1-3:

          Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah saying, “go at once to Ninevah, that great

city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah set to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tashish, away from the presence of the Lord.

     So, there you are - three different biblical stories of call and three very different responses to those calls. One prophet, Isaiah, immediately steps forward and says, “Here I am, send me!” Another, Moses, steps forward, but with great reservations. He goes on for pages trying to come up with excuse after excuse as to why he is not worthy of this call and this responsibility. And then we have poor Jonah, who not only does not step forward, he runs completely in the opposite direction. Tarshish, the city Jonah is fleeing to, is in the exact opposite direction, in the area we now know as the Riviera no less, as Ninevah, the city God calls Jonah to.

     These three stories give a full picture of the difficulty of responding to a call as well as the varied ways these responses are played out. I must admit that every time I read the verse from Isaiah, I get a bit testy. It is like all those times when you compare yourself to that person in the next office or who lives down the street, who just does everything so perfectly. No matter how hard you try to live up to that standard, you know you never will. And you just want to throttle that person. When you were a kid, you called them “a goody-two-shoes.” That is the way I feel sometimes when reading this verse of Isaiah. Not a very ministerial response I know, but genuine nonetheless.

     I can hear Jonah grumbling now, there goes Mister “Here I am, send me. What makes him so hot?” Jonah, of course, has no such illusions to step forward and go where he is called. I sympathize with Jonah all too much. As a ministerial student, I was required to do a three month internship as a hospital chaplain. After a brief week of orientation, I was faced with actually going to visit patients. Like Jonah, when the call came to walk into that room, I turned in the opposite direction and went back to the office for comfort and consolation. There is a lot of Jonah in me and I suppose in all of us, when we are called to action.

     But perhaps the one we can most identify with is Moses. He falls somewhere in between the two extremes of Isaiah and Jonah. He answers the call initially, but then proceeds to offer so many excuses as to why he can’t possibly be the one God wants. His body is willing, but his mind is weak. Once he begins to think about the responsibility involved in this call from God, his mind begins to think of ways to shirk this responsibility. I think this is a common response. We know we should answer the call, but we just aren’t sure that we are worthy enough to do so.

          This brings us to our scene from Akeelah and the Bee and the quote which is from Marianne Williamson. Do you think Moses thought of himself as brilliant or fabulous, much less a deliverer of people out of Egypt? Moses was scared to death of his own power. As Akeelah, put it, scared of himself. He could not think of himself as worthy in any way to what he was being called. In the story God listens patiently as Moses goes on and on about how unbrilliant he is, how unfabulous he is. How many of us here can relate in some way to Moses and his excuses. But this quote through our little movie scene chides us by asking, who are we NOT to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous? Part of the quote not in the movie is this, “You are a child of God, your playing small doesn’t serve the world.” Moses finally realized this, after much comforting by God, and lived into his call and led his people out of Egypt.

     Now to add my own story to the mix: As a new Unitarian Universalist coming out of a mainstream Protestant tradition over 10 years ago, I decided to become a member of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship to ease the transition. With this membership, I received the UU Christian Journal, which publishes essays and articles on various aspects of the Christian tradition from a UU perspective. In October 1995, as I was reading an article about Luke’s call to the ministry in this Journal, I got my own call to the ministry. I describe it now as a ping that went off inside me. Not exactly a burning bush, but just as noticeable. As much grief as I give Isaiah now, I mostly reacted the same way as he did and said, “Here I am, send me!” I thought: I can do this, I must do this. So I began to look into the idea. I talked to my ministers at the time. I became more involved in Sunday Service preparation and delivery and they invited me to be on the Committee on Ministry.

     I thought that was it. I was on my way to becoming a UU minister and all I needed was some more theologically specific education. So after a year or two of conversation and planning, my family and I moved to Chicago to continue the process.

     What I didn’t realize was that there was this other step in the process known as discernment that has proven to be the most difficult of all. Discernment involves trying to figure out what specifically your call is about. What forms will your ministry take, who are you ministering to, even who or what is your call from. Perhaps more importantly, discernment is figuring out who you are and what your very identity is as a minister. This made the process of ministerial formation more genuine for me and brought me face to face with what it would be like to actually be a minister and not just some mental image of what a minister is and does. Like Moses, the more I learned what was expected of me, the more my mind took over and told me how unworthy I was for ministry and made up excuses for me to get out of it. In my first term at Meadville/Lombard, a professor told the class that all ministers, at some point or another, think they are unworthy of the job. This is some comfort to me, but it does not absolve me of the responsibility to continue the work required to realize my own worth as a person and as a Minister.

     So, I guess then that I fall somewhere between Moses and Isaiah in my response to my call, but I have behaved like Jonah, as well from time to time. I feel honored to be called and step forward to answer that call. But then my insecurities take over and I feel the need to argue with God to make it easier for me. One interesting thing in all of the biblical stories is that God does not let any of the three off the hook. Moses is given a slight concession with his brother Aaron being allowed to speak for Moses. But Moses is still expected to fulfill his responsibilities to his people and confront the Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Jonah is, of course, a little more difficult to rein in. God has to use a big fish to slow Jonah down. As Jonah dwells in the belly of the fish for three days, he comes to realize his own power and offers his prayer of thanksgiving to God for the time in the belly of the fish to discern his call.

     I have not been let off the hook, either. As you may have experienced in your own life, things change. I pursued my call to professional ministry for about 8-9 years. Since leaving the ministerial staff here at Pathways, I have been in another long period of discernment. I have been forced to reconsider yet again what my call is and how do I respond to it. I am no longer in professional ministry, but I am still in ministry. I am still called to offer my gifts and talents of ministry to the world, just perhaps in a different setting and in a different way. I am called now more toward equipping ministries. I am pursuing a career in training and development in the corporate world and I am actively working on continuing and creating equipping ministries here at Pathways. I haven’t gotten very far with it yet, but it is brewing. My response continues to evolve and change, to grow and deepen. I still argue with God frequently and even seek to run away to Tarshish from time to time, but I still here Marianne Williamson in my head asking me, “Who are you NOT to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?!

     I believe my story and the stories of Moses, Isaiah, and Jonah give a spectrum of responses that all or most of us can relate to. I feel safe in saying that my responses to my call are not all that different from some of the responses you may have had to your calls. Of course, the degree may be different one way or another, but the concerns are near universal.

     We can back up now and speak more about the initial call. I got a call to ministry. There are of course many different kinds of call. Paul, in one of his letters of the Bible, lists many of the different calls within the church: pastor, preacher, prophet, teacher, elder, and others. We would add a few more inside and outside the church. All of us are called to do something unique in the church or we wouldn’t be here now. The very existence of this and every UU congregation bears testament to call and response. A small group of religious seekers called to come together to offer their gifts to one another and to the world. A group of people created a growing, thriving church out of nothing. In Latin circles we call that Creation Ex Nihilo, makes it sound a lot more impressive than it already is. Here at Pathways, we talk a lot about people finding their “heartburst,” finding that ministry or service that calls them into action, that feeds their soul as they go about doing it. So, now we have folks who lead worship and song, who greet guests, who set up for potlucks, who preach and teach, who are now on the search committee, and on and on. There is always room for more people to become involved in making this church into a strong and viable religious community. We all have unique gifts to offer, if only we are able to step forward and say, “Here I am, send me!”

     But still in the back of our minds, to some degree or another, we continue to come up with excuses to stay out of the fray. I can’t speak in public, especially from the pulpit.  I am not good at numbers, no finance team for me. I am not worthy enough to be a lay-minister; no one would want to talk to me about their problems. I know nothing about education, for children or adults. What would I have to offer a hurting world? Like Moses, we offer excuses as to why we can’t do something instead of realizing our own personal worth and trying to discern what our call is about and discovering what it is we can do or what we like to do.

     This not to say however, that our doubts are necessarily bad things. The doubts allow us to constantly question ourselves; to make discernment a constant process throughout our lives. Calls can and do change. I was once called to be a parish minister and now I am called to be a different kind of minister. In a more recent example, I felt called to be on the search committee I just mentioned. I thought that all my experience being in conversation with search committees over the years would be a great asset to our search committee that is just being formed as we speak. I thought and thought about it. All the while something kept nagging at me about it. After much discernment yet again, I realized that as a minister myself, it was a conflict of interest and a violation of the Code of Conduct between ministers for me to be so directly involved in selecting our next minister. So, I took a step back and offered to be on the Nominating Committee instead. It was the right decision for me and I think it turned out quite well. Discernment of call is very important and sometimes very difficult to navigate through. One poet says you must live long in the question before you can get to an answer. Our doubts can serve to strengthen us as well as sometimes to stall us.

     I have avoided up until now exploring the question of whom or what does the calling. This is because this particular question still stumps me from time to time. When I first felt that ping over ten years ago, I immediately thought it was from God. I definitely felt that it came from somewhere outside of me, even though I felt it inside. Having come from the religious tradition I did, it was natural to think this way since all the calls spoken about in that tradition do in fact come from God. But my idea about God has changed since I came from that tradition. Only my idea about my call had not changed. I now think of God as that transcending mystery that envelops all things, as that spark of divinity that resides in all persons, as that special divinity that is released from each person involved in a genuine relationship with another. So how can this thing called God call me? Since I believe that there is a spark of divinity in all of us, I can think of my call as coming from that spark within me, as coming from my better self; the self that needs to be in relationship with other selves; the self that wants to offer that relationship to others. A colleague and I were talking about this one day as the question of who or what called him came up. He gave this response of his better self and that response touched me deeply and I have folded it in to my own call story.

     In UU circles, the caller comes in a wide variety of forms. It is God, it is your better self, it is an in-dwelling joy of life, it is the call of a hurting world. The form is less important than is awareness of the form. Your response to a call is helped a great deal by knowing the identity of your caller.

     But no matter the identity of the caller, the task remains of how to respond. We can succumb to fear and run in the opposite direction like Jonah. We can answer the call initially, only to later have the fear and doubt creep in and stall our efforts. Or we can take the higher standard set by Isaiah and say, “Here I am, send me!” The key is to never underestimate yourself. You can and do make a difference. Your words, your expression, your touch, your eyes, your very presence can move forward our ongoing story of human liberation, of justice, of love: all works of our church and our association. The self doubt in all of us does not have to be the last word. There is no place in us too broken, too inadequate that we cannot accept the responsibility of our call. You are enough. I am enough. We must trust ourselves. We can step forward and say “yes” to ourselves and to our calls.

     Here we are flawed and imperfect, with much to offer. The world needs us and the church needs us. There is no one but us, and the promised land that can be will not come until each of us says, one last time, say it with me “Here I am, send me!” Amen.