Epiphany 2 January 18, 2009

1 Samuel 3:1-20                                                                 

1 Corinthians 6:12-20                                                       

John 1:43-51

 

One Sunday, after I’d left St. Matthew’s in Evanston, Anne and I went to the Quaker meeting. Quaker meetings aren’t large. Some, like the Weare-Henniker one, are very small. The Evanston meeting was about the size of Holy Cross, but in a smaller room, simple, beautiful, full of light. The meeting lasted one hour and during that hour not a single word was spoken; no music; no movement. For the first half hour the children were with us, even the youngest ones, and they too were silent and still.

 

There is something profoundly holy about being in a group like that. The hour didn’t seem to drag. My mind slowed and opened, as it does when I go to the monastery on retreat. I thought about how wonderful it would be to do this by myself every day, if even for just half an hour. I thought about how there should be more silence in our Episcopal services. I fantasized about what would happen if the whole country, America, took a day off for absolute silence and stillness. In the early days of our nation, Presidents would decree days of fasting and prayer. Why not a day of silence, listening and waiting? Perhaps I will propose it to President Obama—as part of his “stimulus package.”

 

Vocation: that’s our subject this morning. Being called. The boy Samuel, called by God as he lay silent in the temple. “Samuel! Samuel!” “Here I am. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And then the call of the first disciples by Jesus, “Come and see.”

 

I’ve been wondering whether there would be a group of us interested this Lent in a weekly gathering for silent meditation. That, and perhaps reading together a book I came upon, by a theologian, now deceased, A.J. Conyers, who taught at Baylor University. Its title is Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture. Conyers contrasts the ancient and biblical idea of vocation, of listening for God’s call to us, of community shaped by vocation, with the modern idea of life as choice, of individuals free to maximize their choices of who to be, what to do, competing and achieving.

 

Conyers’ died in 2004, before the current crisis in our economy and self-understanding as Americans, and his words read now as a prophetic warning of what has since come to pass. We are not in fact, Conyers says, free atoms, able to seek self-fulfillment as a matter of our choice. We are shaped and formed by the history and communities of which we are a part: family, church, culture, nation. The modern distortion of individual freedom, he argues, has been sold to us by commercial interests, who want to turn us into producers and consumers, and by governments, who want to use their power to replace true community. Yielding to these forces, we have ended up selling our souls, left lonely and bereft of meaning and value.

 

The ancient, and Christian, idea of life as vocation, Conyers says, is profoundly opposite to this. It begins with the assumption that we are created by God, called by God to a lifelong pilgrimage, “drawn toward some purpose that is greater than the individual, one that stands above national interests, that invests life with nobility and beauty, and that creates ‘room’ for the common life,” that is, for true community. At the heart of this view of life as vocation is the conviction that love, not power, is the fundamental motivating force. The modern loss of vocation and community therefore lies at the heart of the violence of modern societies, the prevalence of anxiety and stress and fear in our lives.

 

There is much more. If you would be interested in exploring these ideas during Lent, and spending time together in silent prayer, please speak to me. The book is not an easy one, and it challenges many of our liberal assumptions about freedom, individualism and self-determination. But I think it speaks a word we may need to hear at this time in our history.

 

It is well to note the historical context in which the Lord called Samuel. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” It was a time of corruption in Israel. The priests of the temple had become self-seeking; moral standards had grown lax, religious observance weakened. The vision that had held the tribes of Israel together following their pilgrimage to the Promised Land had faded and been forgotten. The People of God had lost their way. No one was listening. And much the same, of course, was true at the time of Jesus. Just as today, people were confused, demoralized, seeking a Savior. And both with Samuel and with Jesus, in this confusion, in this din of voices, one person was still and quiet, one person listened, and that person heard the Lord call his name.

 

It is important to note that in neither case was the call, the vocation, to individual fulfillment. That is not what vocation is about. Vocation, as with Samuel and with Jesus, is always a call to service in and for the community, for the building up of the People of God. More than that, vocation always has within it the element of sacrifice, of death to self—sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. Jesus’s “come and see” was—and is—a call to the Cross.

 

I do not pretend to know where America or the world is headed in our current crisis. But I do suspect, if experience and biblical witness count for anything, that our way forward will involve profound sacrifices, not least of the assumptions we have been living out of, the ways we are accustomed to seeing things. We will have to let go of a lot, I suspect, before we can hear the call of God that will lead us forward. But if we learn again to listen, and to obey that call, we will again, I believe, as in ancient time “see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”