The Call, Epiphany 3b, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, January 21, 2024
Some may remember the 1982 academy-award-winning movie “Chariots of Fire,” the story of Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, and the 1924 Olympics. Liddell, a minister’s son and theology student at the University of Edinburgh, trains to be a missionary.
A scene in the film is branded on our hearts. To keep up with the Olympic training, Liddell must discontinue theological studies. He and his sister walk the rugged hills around Edinburgh as she argues he should stop running and stay with God’s call to missions. Liddell lovingly responds, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. When I run, I feel God’s pleasure. To give it up would be to hold him in contempt;/ to win is to honor him.”//
Liddell runs and, later, makes a hard decision to follow his church’s teachings against running on the Sabbath. Eventually, he finds a race,/ setting a world record in the 400-yard dash,/ lasting over a decade. (He becomes a missionary to China, ultimately dying in 1945 in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp/ four months before liberation.), as all of Scotland mourned.
“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” // Sam Lloyd, former dean of the National Cathedral,1 writes that these words are the most important questions we ever face: What is our life’s purpose? What is our calling? These questions are frustrating, because answers aren’t always clear.
A young college graduate says, “My friends are in law or medical school. That doesn’t seem right for me.”
“I don’t like my job,” another says, “but it puts food on the table. My boss is a jerk. The pressure is terrible. But do I have a choice—especially in today’s economy?”
“I’m burned out,” a woman says. “Between caring for my children and keeping up at work, I’m exhausted. But I don’t see a way out.”
“I’m sixty-eight and ready to retire. What will I do?”///
Over 2,000 years ago, an itinerate rabbi walks by four rugged, hardworking fishermen—Simon, Andrew, James, and John—and simply says, “Follow me.” According to today’s story, they follow. “Immediately,” it says./
Most call stories in the Bible, like this one, are somewhat intimidating. A voice comes from a burning bush, from heaven, or echoing from the smoke and incense of the Temple. God speaks, and heroic prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah proclaim with authority./ We feel challenged if those stories are our models for God calling us.
Thank God for Jonah, whose story we partly hear today. There is nothing impressive about this back-pedaling, stubborn complainer. A Prophet is the last thing Jonah wants to be. He wants to be left alone. But God won’t do that.
God calls Jonah to Nineveh, demanding they repent and turn to God. Instead, Jonah sails as far away as possible. Nineveh was the hated capital of the Assyrian Empire, now known as Iraq, and was as hostile to Israel then as now. Jonah wasn’t about to help his enemies escape doom.
A storm at sea threatens to kill everyone on board. The crew decides God is punishing them for Jonah’s presence, and they toss him over. He lands inside the belly of a big fish for three days. Jonah composes a beautiful prayer there and is finally spewed out on dry land.
In today’s story, God tells Jonah again to go to Nineveh. This time, he goes. To everyone’s shock, especially Jonah, the people of Nineveh, from the king on down, repent, and God forgives them. The story concludes with Jonah whining and unhappy because those terrible Assyrians escaped God’s wrath.
How is that for hearing God’s call? Not too inspirational. We identify with Jonah. He’s not confident he wants to hear God’s call, immediately doesn’t like God’s answer, and flees from God’s voice. /Jonah’s story cuts to the depth of our souls: we often don’t want God to call us because we fear what God might ask us to do.
We long to feel connected to God, but what if God asks us to deal with people we don’t like/ or forgive those we don’t want to forgive? What if God asks us to help families struggling in Arkansas with food and housing insecurity, or those facing death and poverty in Guatemala or Gaza? What if God asks us to make time to grow our faith in our already oh-so-important, overloaded lives? ///
Recognizing a call can be elusive. We may not actually hear a voice; there may not be a specific event or earthshaking experience. Hearing a call means listening to our lives, sorting through our gifts and passions, talking to advisors and friends, trying to imagine this or that possibility,/ asking God to guide and inspire our seeking. Listening for God’s call means refusing to ask what we want for our lives/ and focusing on what God wants from the lives we have been given.
We look at our skills, our abilities, our passions. We watch for moments when we are ENERGIZED. It often takes looking backward at our lives to begin tracing a call within us. We start to see connections, hints, surprising turns that led us to where we are.//
People ask about my call to medicine and ministry. The calls were often Epiphanies, a sudden, profound understanding of something that had been bubbling up all my life.
As a girl growing up in small town 1950s Virginia, medicine was never considered an option for women. I loved science and heard a call to the healing profession as a medical technologist. When I worked as one a summer, I realized a desire to care more directly for patients. I had the identical training, so I modified that call my senior year in college to go to medical school. I soon knew I wanted to be a pediatrician, but a crippling car accident led me to become a pediatric radiologist, which brought us to Arkansas Children’s and Saint Mark’s.
Much later, we discerned a call with two friends, Hap and Barbara Hoffman, to leave Saint Mark’s in 1990 to be founding missionary members to start St. Margaret’s Church. By then, I was also a functioning alcoholic and had only been in recovery a few months. I met with Chris Keller, who spearheaded the mission. I remember uncomfortably telling him that I was only recently in recovery and did not know if I was the person he wanted to start a church. His words still ring in my ears. “You are exactly the kind of person I am looking for.”//
The call to become a deacon happened suddenly, even though something was brewing for years. I felt a desire to offer more than physical healing for children and their parents. I overheard Cindy Fribourgh tell someone at Saint Margaret’s about the new deacon program Bishop Maze was starting in our diocese. Immediately, I knew that was a call, and I have never regretted it these 23 years.
The issue isn’t whether we hear a clear call. It isn’t whether we are confident that we are doing precisely the right thing every day. It’s whether we sense that ours is a called life, a life accountable to God, a life that has a mission and purpose, even if it takes years to articulate it.
But our calling is not our job. Writer Studs Terkel says, “Jobs are not big enough for people.” We are more than our occupations. We are friends, spouses, parents, members of our neighborhoods, local organizations, and this community. All of this is part of our vocation.
Many take unrewarding jobs to support their families. This is also a noble calling. Remember, not one person in the entire New Testament does God call into a money-making job. While following Christ and being disciples, they always do other things to pay the bills, like tent-making, making purple cloth, or catching fish.////
So,/ what is your calling? What irreplaceable gifts do you have to offer the world today, whether you are 18 or 80?
Remember God never gives up calling Jonah, and God never gives up on those Assyrians, either. That’s the kind of God we’re dealing with—one who won’t stop calling us,/ ever.//
Even if you didn’t realize it/ when you came here this morning, God is calling you. God wants all of us—because there are things to do today and tomorrow, right in the midst of our lives and our world, that only we can do. Maybe a paycheck will be attached. Often, the pay will be the work itself.///
Today, /God calls us to help each other say “Yes, we will follow, /even when we don’t know the way. Help us to listen, learn, and trust you, God, to show the way.”////
Do you hear a call bubbling up inside of you? Today?/ Right Now?
1The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, “What Is Your Calling?” January 25, 2009, 11:15 AM • Epiphany III, Washington National Cathedral. © 2009
Washington National Cathedral
Joanna Seibert https://www.joannaseibert.com/