A sermon preached by The Reverend Scott Dennis Nowack on January 15, 2012

at The First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas.

God Is Calling You

I Samuel 3: 1-20

John 1:43-51

            “Out with the old and in with the new!”  That’s what is happening in Israel at the time of Samuel.  The old ways of chaos and conflict under the rule of judges will end.  The new ways of the monarchy with rulers ordained by God will become the new reality.  And it is the small boy prophet Samuel who will be God’s messenger and anointer for this new thing.   

What new thing is God calling you to do as His disciple?

            Our passage today does not emphasize the end of Eli and the old leadership of Israel.  Rather the emphasis is on “the new beginning now to be made by an obedient Samuel”[1].  God claimed Samuel from birth and gave him a specific calling, a specific vocation, to serve God and God’s people.  God called Samuel to be a fresh influence and to help foster a new reality for Israel.  He was a voice coming from outside the conventional  political structure of his time.  God is calling Samuel to minister to the people of Israel to bring a freshness and a newness of life to a stale society.

            Just as Samuel was called by God to be a prophet to Israel, so this same God calls each of us to a particular calling.  Author Frederick Buechner describes our calling as the place “where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”

What does it mean to be called?  What is God calling you to do as His disciple?

            In his book, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, Os Guinness reviews the theology of call and just what is involved when one is called of God.   Guinness describes the call of God as the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do and everything we have is ... lived out as a response to his summons and service. There are two dimensions to the call of God, the first being our essential role as a disciple of Jesus, and the second being the call to function in the church and the world using the gifts God has given us. When we are faithful to these two callings, God is glorified.

            How do I know what my calling is? 

            When I was living in Syracuse, NY, while others were listening to the local radio stations that played popular music, I listened to a station in New York City with the call letters of WCBS, 880 AM with John Sterling and Michael Kay.  This was the station where you could catch every New York Yankees baseball game.  Now Syracuse is nowhere close to New York City, so the station signal drifted in and out on my little radio. But I learned to listen well and discern the distinct sound on that station from all the other sounds on the radio dial. Even when there were tremendous amounts of static, I could discern the voice of WCBS Yankees broadcasters because I knew the sound and listened hard. I learned how to tune in the station even in the dark. I knew generally where to turn the dial and then to fine tune to separate out the station from all the other competing stations.  We need to learn to listen in such a way that we can discern God's voice in the midst of the myriad of messages coming at us in our society. We can do this by immersing ourselves in the places God has provided for us to hear his word: scripture, prayer, meditation, study, worship, fellowship with other Christians. Down through the years these have been called the means of grace. They prepare us to hear the Word of God that comes directly to us, so we can more easily discern the Voice of God from all the voices that call to us. 

What is God calling you to do as His disciple?  I remember asking myself this question many years ago as I was pondering what my calling was.  I had recently graduated from college and had gotten a job in Chicago.  I joined the Fourth Presbyterian Church located in downtown Chicago.  Fourth Church is a very large church that offers numerous opportunities for service and study.  I wanted to get involved in some way in the life of the church because of my growing dissatisfaction with my work.  Amid all the possible ways to get involved, I felt drawn, or maybe the better word is “pushed & shoved”, to volunteer in the tutoring program.  They were looking for adults to tutor grade school kids from the nearby Cabrini-Green housing projects.  As a tutor, you were assigned one student for the whole year and you met with him or her once a week for two hours at the church.  Although I was a bit intimidated by the idea, I signed up anyway.

            I remember the first night.  I was assigned a 6^th grade boy named Alvin.  As I walked into the church that night, I was terrified!  I had never done anything like this before.  I didn’t know what to expect.  Would I be good enough?  Would I be knowledgeable enough to help him with his studies? 

That first night was awesome!  We found a quiet place to do his homework.  We finished early and played Math Blaster in the computer lab.  In the remaining time we played Scrabble with some other kids.  After I said good-bye to him that night, I was overcome by true joy.  It overwhelmed my senses.  I hadn’t felt that joyous in a long time.  I felt I did something positive for once in my life.  I wrote about this experience that evening.  I wrote, “This is definitely something I want to keep doing.  I want to keep giving of myself and my time.  For the first time, I have felt true tears of joy.  For the first time, I feel the Holy Spirit within me.”

In that moment, God had lifted away all my fears and concerns and anxieties and I felt like a whole person.  God called me to do something new with my life, to minister to one of his flock.  I took a leap of faith, followed God’s call, and it paid tremendous dividends.  For that first night of tutoring was the beginning of my new vocation as a Christian: to reach out and touch people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ through bible study, fellowship and eventually as an ordained minister.

Our calling is about more than what we do for a living; it’s about more than our career aspirations.  In his book entitled, “The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives” Brennan Manning writes, “Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus.”

Many of us have a career, a certain vocation, to which we have given a great deal of our time and energy.  These careers of ours have blessed us immensely with roofs over our heads, food on the table for our families, and clothes on our backs.  And this is all great.  God does grant us various gifts and has called us to different types of work.  But God also calls us to go one step further, to do more than just work.  God calls us to minister in His name as His disciples.  God calls us to serve and love one another, friend and stranger alike.  God calls us to love the unloved, to care for the needy, and to humbly walk with Him.

Before co-founding Habitat for Humanity, Millard Fuller was a successful businessman who followed his estranged wife Linda to New York to try to convince her to come back to him. She was not easily convinced that he could turn back from his headlong rush for material wealth. Millard recalls: We were in a taxi right after Linda and I had a very tearful session. We'd gone to Radio City Music Hall and they showed the movie Never Too Late. It was about a woman's getting pregnant after she thought it was too late. The message was that it's never too late to change anything. I had a sensation of light in that taxi. It was not anything spooky. All I can say is it just came into my head: Give your money away, make yourself poor again and throw yourself on God's mercy. I turned to Linda and said, 'I believe that God just gave me the idea to give all our money away; give everything away.'  She said, 'I agree. Let's do it.'  And the rest is history.

All of us are called to some form of ministry.  We are all called to be ministers to the world and one another.  God has a plan for each of us.  A plan that is bigger than ourselves, our friends, our jobs, and our families.

There is one calling that we all have: to shift the focus of our faith from being passive church members to active disciples of Christ by inviting others to church. The oft-repeated phrase for calling disciples in the gospel of John is stunningly simple: Come and see. Most of us can manage that. (Something wonderful is happening, come and see!) It is not up to us to make people come. It is only our responsibility to extend an invitation, to provide hospitality when the invitation is accepted, and allow God to do what he wants to do.

The journey of those who follow Jesus Christ begins not with our decision, but with his decision to call us.[2]  This calling, this invitation, can be daunting and intimidating.  It can be dangerous and uncomfortable, but following God’s call will produce fresh fruit for you personally, the people of God and for our society as a whole. 

This is what we are called to do as disciples of Jesus Christ.  I pray that each of us may have the ears to hear and the eyes to see what God is calling us to do in the name of Jesus the Christ.  Amen.

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[1] Walter Brueggemann. First and Second Samuel. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990) p.26.

[2] Sermon at National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C. Contents reprinted with permission of Craig Barnes, Senior Pastor. February 25, 2001, quoted in The Presbyterian Layman, May-June 2001, 4.