This afternoon, I was sending my resume to several churches and dioceses as part of my on-going search for a ministry position post-seminary when I suddenly noticed that the title of my email was nearly identical with the title of this blog: "Sewanee seminarian seeking a call."
"Seeking a call." In the church, we talk about "calls" to minister in a particular parish rather than "jobs." I've been careful not to use "employment" language as I write and speak about my desire for a place to go after graduation that will pay me and give me health insurance, but to instead talk about looking for or searching for where God is calling me to minister. And it hadn't even occurred to me until today that the very title of my blog is "seeking the call!"
Of course, I meant something very different when I coined that term for my blog six years ago. I began this blog as a place to record and share my reflections on my experience in the Resurrection House program in Omaha, a vocational discernment internship for young adults sponsored by the Episcopal Church. (Now part of the Episcopal Service Corps.) At that point, I was "seeking the call" in the sense of trying to figure out "what to do with my life" -- looking at the "bigger picture" of vocational discernment -- am I called to work in a homeless shelter? To be a deacon? To be a priest? "The call" I was seeking -- and eventually found -- was the call to the priesthood.
But even after I discerned that call clearly, I decided not to change the blog's title, because, I figured, we're always seeking God's call on our lives -- we never really have it all figured out. Even if I'd discerned a call to a particular vocation, there would always be ways in which, throughout my vocation as a priest, I would be seeking God's call -- where is God calling this particular parish to go at this time? How is God moving in this parishioner's life? To think that I had found that which I sought when I discerned a vocational call to the priesthood and that there was no more need to "seek the call" would have been extremely naive.
So I kept it. And six years later, here I am, "seeking the call" in a different way -- seeking a particular parish and particular people with whom I can be in relationship and ministry, with whom I can listen for the ways in which the Holy Spirit is moving in their midst and jump on Her bandwagon. (Because, I've found, the best ideas in the world won't come to fruition if the Spirit is not already active in that area. "Success" in ministry, I believe, comes from listening to and discerning where the Spirit is already active and then joining forces with that work, rather than trying to create something entirely of our own devising or our own ideas.)
So, the suspense is building. Where is the call I am so ardently seeking now? How is God about to move in my life to bring me to new experiences and opportunities in ministry that I have not yet known? I must have faith that it is out there somewhere, that call that I seek, and I pray regularly for the parishioners of that congregation, even though I do not know who they are yet.
And even after it is revealed to me, even after I find "a call," I will continue "seeking the call"... in that never-ending process of discernment that is relationship with the living God.
God grant me the patience, perseverance, and openness to remain,
faithfully,
Seeking the Call...
always.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Superfluous miracles and community-building
Today I preached in my Advanced Homiletics class. The assignment was to preach on a miracle text, and I chose the Gospel passage for Proper 13, Year A -- Matthew's account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (Matthew 14:13-21).
This was a text I'd preached on before, at my sending parish, and I took that sermon and edited and re-shaped it for a slightly different and more focused approach. (You can compare the original sermon here.) It was an interesting exercise to re-visit a sermon text (even though that wasn't part of the assignment) and attempt to tighten it up for what I hope was a more effective presentation. We've been reading David Buttrick's Homiletic in class, with his emphasis on "moves" rather than "points" in a sermon. I realized that the original sermon had too many "moves" -- it tried to do too much with its dual focus of the community-building of the miracle and the Eucharistic foreshadowing. (This is a common mistake I made in my earliest sermons, I'm realizing.) I also realized that I'd put way too many personal details in that Eucharist section (in the original sermon) about how I got to the quotation that I used. Ultimately I decided to cut the entire Eucharist section and just more fully develop the concept of the "deeper miracle" in the feeding of the five thousand being about creating community.
Our professor says the goal is to get to where we go through this kind of editing process on our sermons before we ever deliver them the first time... and I hope this exercise has helped me to think more clearly about what the "end goal" is for a sermon as I'm writing it the first time. I've also noticed (from watching the video) that the manuscript is a real hindrance to eye contact, even when I've practiced the sermon aloud multiple times before delivery. I think for my next sermon for this class, I'll try preaching without notes and see how that goes!!
Here's a video and the text of the sermon from today:
It sounded like a reasonable request:
"This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves."
I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.
After all, Jesus has already been somewhat “put out” by these people. When the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, “they followed him on foot from the towns.” Although Jesus often invites people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, “Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town.”
An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. “They need not go away,” he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. “You give them something to eat,” he says. In other words, “we will take care of them here.” And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.
So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples’ comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering for years from physical maladies that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus doesn’t have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?
Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power, that the reason Jesus performs miracles is to prove that he is God. Other religious leaders may have been inspiring teachers, but they didn’t break the “laws of physics” by magically multiplying food, this argument goes. Only God himself could do that, so Jesus must have been God.
The only problem is that this argument would not have made much sense to the first-century people who wrote this story and preserved it for subsequent generations. Miracles were common among religious leaders and holy men in Jesus’s day, and things we would consider to be “supernatural occurrences” showed up in stories from many different traditions. The early Christian community who preserved this story would not have seen it as evidence of Jesus’s uniqueness.
They also did not tell and re-tell this story to communities of faithful Christians simply because it showed Jesus performing a magic trick. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles for miracles’ sake – and there were plenty of them out there. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they disagree with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. But the church rejected these depictions of Jesus as a reckless superhero.
In the stories they did include in our scriptures, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus often tells the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the New Testament is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.
So what is the significance of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle story that appears in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this “unnecessary” miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where your place in society determined who you could eat with, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such a disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say, “let them go off and buy food for themselves” and insisting instead, “They need not go away. We will take care of them here.”
Who are the people our church serves that we might invite into community with us instead of assuming they will go away and take care of themselves after we meet their immediate needs? Who is Jesus calling us to feed, both physically and spiritually?
Imagine something with me, if you will. You’re standing in the food pantry downstairs, sorting and labeling piles of donations. Canned goods on this shelf, cereal on that one. You and the other volunteers brush past one another as you hurry around, getting things ready for the morning’s guests to arrive. At 9 a.m. you open the door to a long line of people, some pushy, some with that end-of-the-month desperation in their eyes. As you begin to hand out bags of groceries, you look each person in the eye. You ask them about how they’re doing and listen to a small part of their story. Instead of just nodding sympathetically, you let them know that there is a community of faith here who will support them in their journey. You promise to pray for them, and invite them to join us for worship on Sunday mornings.
A few weeks later, one of the people from the food pantry shows up on Sunday morning. She attends the 10:30 service and finds you afterwards to let you know how much your invitation meant to her. “The other food pantries in town see me as a number,” she says, “and they assume once I’ve gotten what I need, I’ll go away and deal with the rest of my life myself. But you saw me as a person and you cared about my struggles. So I thought, ok, I’ll see what your church is all about.”
Like Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, your invitation to this woman to come to church wasn’t necessary. It didn’t meet a physical need that she had. It was, in all practical terms, a bit superfluous. But like that first century Galilean miracle, it saw past practicality and meeting immediate needs to address a deeper need – a need for belonging and spiritual nurture. Your invitation went the extra mile to create a space for community, a community that says unreservedly to all, “You need not go away. We will take care of you here.”
This was a text I'd preached on before, at my sending parish, and I took that sermon and edited and re-shaped it for a slightly different and more focused approach. (You can compare the original sermon here.) It was an interesting exercise to re-visit a sermon text (even though that wasn't part of the assignment) and attempt to tighten it up for what I hope was a more effective presentation. We've been reading David Buttrick's Homiletic in class, with his emphasis on "moves" rather than "points" in a sermon. I realized that the original sermon had too many "moves" -- it tried to do too much with its dual focus of the community-building of the miracle and the Eucharistic foreshadowing. (This is a common mistake I made in my earliest sermons, I'm realizing.) I also realized that I'd put way too many personal details in that Eucharist section (in the original sermon) about how I got to the quotation that I used. Ultimately I decided to cut the entire Eucharist section and just more fully develop the concept of the "deeper miracle" in the feeding of the five thousand being about creating community.
Our professor says the goal is to get to where we go through this kind of editing process on our sermons before we ever deliver them the first time... and I hope this exercise has helped me to think more clearly about what the "end goal" is for a sermon as I'm writing it the first time. I've also noticed (from watching the video) that the manuscript is a real hindrance to eye contact, even when I've practiced the sermon aloud multiple times before delivery. I think for my next sermon for this class, I'll try preaching without notes and see how that goes!!
Here's a video and the text of the sermon from today:
It sounded like a reasonable request:
"This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves."
I mean, wouldn't you have said the same thing? You're standing there looking at a crowd of over five thousand people, realizing that they're going to be getting hungry pretty soon... and all you have is five loaves of bread and two fish... so you figure it's time to wrap up this healing ministry and let them go on their way.
After all, Jesus has already been somewhat “put out” by these people. When the crowds heard that Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, “they followed him on foot from the towns.” Although Jesus often invites people to follow him, in this case, he is followed without invitation! Despite his desire for stillness and contemplation, he graciously responds to the crowds and heals their sick. So the disciples must have figured, “Ok, the show's over. We've tended to these people's needs, it's late, Jesus wants to pray already, so let's send these people on back to town.”
An entirely reasonable request, right? But Jesus wasn't done yet. “They need not go away,” he says. Jesus resists the natural human impulse to leave people to tend to their own needs. “You give them something to eat,” he says. In other words, “we will take care of them here.” And then he proceeds to take the disciples' small ration of food and somehow make it more than enough to feed the entire crowd.
So why did Jesus do it? The scripture doesn't say that the crowds were starving or unable to afford their own food - in fact, the disciples’ comments seem to assume that the people are perfectly capable of going back into town and providing for their own needs. Unlike the stories of Jesus healing people who have been suffering for years from physical maladies that no one else has been able to heal, this miracle is, in practical terms, a bit superfluous. Jesus doesn’t have to provide food for the entire crowd. So why does he do it?
Some may say that Jesus multiplies the loaves and fishes merely as a show of his divine power, that the reason Jesus performs miracles is to prove that he is God. Other religious leaders may have been inspiring teachers, but they didn’t break the “laws of physics” by magically multiplying food, this argument goes. Only God himself could do that, so Jesus must have been God.
The only problem is that this argument would not have made much sense to the first-century people who wrote this story and preserved it for subsequent generations. Miracles were common among religious leaders and holy men in Jesus’s day, and things we would consider to be “supernatural occurrences” showed up in stories from many different traditions. The early Christian community who preserved this story would not have seen it as evidence of Jesus’s uniqueness.
They also did not tell and re-tell this story to communities of faithful Christians simply because it showed Jesus performing a magic trick. In discerning which of the many stories circulating about Jesus's life would be included in what became our sacred scriptures, the early church always rejected stories about Jesus performing miracles for miracles’ sake – and there were plenty of them out there. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for instance, includes stories of Jesus as a child, zapping his friends with lightning when they disagree with him, or making birds out of clay and then bringing them to life, just for fun. But the church rejected these depictions of Jesus as a reckless superhero.
In the stories they did include in our scriptures, Jesus's miracles are always more than just showy displays of power. In fact, Jesus often tells the disciples not to tell anyone about the miracles he performs, especially in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus of the New Testament is not an exhibitionist, performing miracles and squealing, "Woooo, look what I can do!!!" Jesus's miracles always have a deeper significance, a meaning and implication for how we are to live our lives in faith.
So what is the significance of the story of the feeding of the five thousand, the only miracle story that appears in all four Gospels in the New Testament? What is the meaning of this “unnecessary” miracle, if not just to show Jesus's power?
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand says something deeply profound about the way we are to approach others in our Christian ministry. We are called not just to respond to immediate needs, but to go the extra mile in creating a space for community. In a culture where your place in society determined who you could eat with, Jesus resists what would have been the natural inclination of the people to go about their separate ways, eating only with those who were considered socially appropriate, and instead creates a space for community between unlikely parties, right there on the hillside. Before the disciples knew what was happening, strangers were breaking bread with strangers, probably sharing stories about how grateful they were that their friend or relative had finally been healed of such-and-such a disease, and beginning to form a community together over a shared meal.
The deeper miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is in Jesus's rejection of the patterns of disconnection in society that say, “let them go off and buy food for themselves” and insisting instead, “They need not go away. We will take care of them here.”
Who are the people our church serves that we might invite into community with us instead of assuming they will go away and take care of themselves after we meet their immediate needs? Who is Jesus calling us to feed, both physically and spiritually?
Imagine something with me, if you will. You’re standing in the food pantry downstairs, sorting and labeling piles of donations. Canned goods on this shelf, cereal on that one. You and the other volunteers brush past one another as you hurry around, getting things ready for the morning’s guests to arrive. At 9 a.m. you open the door to a long line of people, some pushy, some with that end-of-the-month desperation in their eyes. As you begin to hand out bags of groceries, you look each person in the eye. You ask them about how they’re doing and listen to a small part of their story. Instead of just nodding sympathetically, you let them know that there is a community of faith here who will support them in their journey. You promise to pray for them, and invite them to join us for worship on Sunday mornings.
A few weeks later, one of the people from the food pantry shows up on Sunday morning. She attends the 10:30 service and finds you afterwards to let you know how much your invitation meant to her. “The other food pantries in town see me as a number,” she says, “and they assume once I’ve gotten what I need, I’ll go away and deal with the rest of my life myself. But you saw me as a person and you cared about my struggles. So I thought, ok, I’ll see what your church is all about.”
Like Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, your invitation to this woman to come to church wasn’t necessary. It didn’t meet a physical need that she had. It was, in all practical terms, a bit superfluous. But like that first century Galilean miracle, it saw past practicality and meeting immediate needs to address a deeper need – a need for belonging and spiritual nurture. Your invitation went the extra mile to create a space for community, a community that says unreservedly to all, “You need not go away. We will take care of you here.”
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