The Call Epiphany 3A
Holy Spirit, Gulf Shores, January 26, 2020
Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew 4:12-23
The Call. /Your cell phone rings late one night around three am. You jump out of your skin. You sit up in bed terrified in a cold sweat. You try to pretend it is not ringing, but you know you must answer your phone because it could be a friend in trouble, one of your children, a grandchild, a sick parent. You pick up the phone, giving a sleepy, “hello.” A voice at the other end says, “Listen,/ something has happened, I need your help. Can you come! Please hurry.”//
Or.. there is another call./ It is a gray windy day at dusk on the gulf coast. The constant rhythm of the waves slows your frantically racing heart and life. You look out from your deck at the deserted beach. The brown pelicans sweep over the sea in their distinctive parade patterns in pairs and groups. They fly so closely to the water that their wing tips certainly must get wet. They flap their large wings for several strokes/ and then glide./ You are on beach time; a time to glide/ after days of flapping. You watch the laughing gulls stick by the pelicans, as if they were best friends. They follow the brown pelicans in their spectacular plunging headfirst high dive for their last supper. Then the gulls shamelessly and expertly try to snatch the fish directly out of the pelican’s enormous bill before he can swallow it. So reminiscent of the life you have left behind. Are you a laughing gull or a brown pelican? Some days a gull, some days a pelican./ Without warning, a flock of pelicans silently fly right by your head on their way home for the night. Their silent majestic flight leaves you speechless as well. The adults do not have a voice. Only their young nestlings speak with loud grunts and screams. / There is something so wild and brave and beautiful about the silence of nature you have just witnessed. You want to write it into a poem or paint it into a picture or sing it into a song,/ but there are no proper words or colors or notes to express it, and you have to live out the rest of that night in a way that is somehow true to the little piece of wonder that you have been a part of, the call to a different life that silently reaches out to you.//
And then, comes a third call. You are aware that you have become overwhelmed by the difficulties of your own life: your addictive life style, problems at work, conflicts at home. A friend asks you to go with her to visit a treatment center for women where the mothers keep their children with them. Suddenly you see young women just like you, with the same addictions, same problems, same family and work difficulties, same children,/ but they never had any of the advantages you are given. You watch their lives change, lights go on in eyes dulled by abuse and drugs… and it is like the phone ringing in the night again/ or the silent pelicans soaring by your head so close that your hair rustles. It is a summons for you to answer a call to something greater than yourself and your own small world. Answers to your own problems are right there in front of you.//
Today’s gospel is about that call to ministry: the call by Jesus to Simon Peter and his brother, Andrew. Buechner says that the word, “vocation,” has a dull ring to it, but in terms of what it means, it is not dull at all. Vocare, vocation means our calling, the work we are called to do in this world, what we are summoned to spend our lives doing./ We can speak of our choosing our own vocations, but more than likely our vocations choose us. A call is given; our lives hear it/ or do not hear it.
How do we listen and hear the call? Our lives are full of a great multitude of voices calling us in all directions. Some are voices from inside, some are outside voices. The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives. What kind of voice do we listen for?/
There is a sad and dangerous game we play when we get to a certain age. It is a form of solitaire. We get out our yearbook, look at the pictures of the classmates we knew best. We remember all the exciting wonderfully characteristic things we were interested in and our dreams about what we were going to do after we graduated. We think about what these classmates and ourselves are actually doing with our lives now. If we have kept in touch we know that many are spending their lives at work where few of their gifts are used, at work with neither much pleasure nor any sense of accomplishment/… and what about ourselves?/
When we were young like Peter and Andrew and Jesus, perhaps our hearing is better. When we are young, before we accumulate responsibilities, we are freer to choose among all the voices, and to answer the voice that is our deep gladness, as Buechner1 describes the call,/ when “our deep gladness intersects with the world’s deep need.” The danger is that there are so many voices, so many needs, every voice, every need, in its’s own way promising “gladness.” The danger is when we do not listen to the voice that speaks to us through the silent pelican, or the voice we hear in the synagogue of our inner soul, or the voice of the prophet that speaks from outside specifically to us out of the specific events in our life. Instead we listen to the great blaring boring banal voice of our mass culture which threatens to deafen us by blasting forth that the only thing that really matters about our work is how much it will bring us in salary and status,/ and if it is gladness we are after, we can save that for the weekends./ One of the grimmer notions we inherited from our Puritan forebears is that work is not even supposed to be glad, but, rather is a kind of penance, repenting for the sins we do during the hours we are not working.
There is also one more spoiler alert. Sometimes our call is not the message we were hoping for. Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, or sometimes even Jesus question their calls. And yet,/ with each call is a promise/ that God’s strength/ will be present in our weakness.2 /
All this means that we must be vigilant about what we hear as our call. We have only one life, and the choice of how we are going to live it must be our own choice, not the choice we let another or the world call us to. We must never mistake success for victory/ or failure for defeat. We must learn that all people are one, and that there can only be joy for one person when there is joy for all./
All of us, no matter how old we are, are still at the place in our lives where we continue to think about our call. Maybe we think it is too late in life to hear our call. I learned that this is not true from another young boy, in his early teens./ Events in my life told me that I had become blind and deaf by the cacophony of the world, and I was using substances to ease the pain. I wanted to find a new life, answer another call. My teenaged son, looked across the luncheon table at our favorite restaurant and responded,/ “Mom, it is never too late to change.”//(repeat) That has been my experience and I offer his wisdom to you./
So,/ what is your call? Buechner says it is where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need./ Deep gladness. What we do that leaves us with an overwhelming sense of peace, something we do which energizes us and other people./
The world’s great need./ In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness, fear, and pain, if we keep our eyes and ears and heart open, we do not have to go far to find that place of need./ The phone will ring/ and we will jump /not so much out of your skin/ as into our skin. /If we keep our eyes, ears, and heart open, the right place of need will call us… and in that day/ “all people, including ourselves, who have sat in darkness will now begin to see a great light.”
1Frederick, Buechner, “ The Calling of Voices,” Secrets in the Dark, pp. 35-41.
2-Br. David Vryhof, Society of Saint John the Evangelist ssje.org.
Joanna . joannaseibert.com