January 19, 2014 GOD CALLING: 2. “Don’t Hang Up, Hang On!”

Preface to the Word

Last week, I introduced a sermon series called “God Calling” with a sermon based on Matthew’s version of the baptism of Jesus. It gave us a chance to consider our own baptism, along with the notion that through our baptism God’s hand is laid upon us as it was with Jesus and we are sent to be Jesus’ people in the world. We are to witness in our words and our deeds to what has happened and what is happening to the world in Jesus Christ. We are to be salt and light.

Each of us has a calling from God.

I also mentioned that this “God Calling” sermon series would build on stories from the early chapters of Matthew. But I was wrong! I looked at the scripture passages assigned by the church’s lectionary to this 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany and there wasn’t a passage from Matthew to be found among them! There was a reading from John 1 (which retells the story of Jesus’ baptism) and a reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And then there’s a reading from the prophet Isaiah, which you’ll hear in just a moment. I think the prophet provides us another powerful opportunity to consider the idea of Christian vocation… that you and I are here today because we have been called.

But the reading from Isaiah 49 is not an easy passage to understand, so let me quickly give you what I hope will be helpful background information.

  1. The book called Isaiah actually covers a huge chunk of time – more time than one person’s lifespan – so most scholars agree that there are the voices of at least two Isaiahs and probably three. The original Isaiah, son of Amoz, proclaimed his message to the people of Judah and Jerusalem from 742 to 701 B.C. and his share of the book runs from chapters 1 to 39.

Chapters 40 -66 belong to a second (or deutero) Isaiah that takes on the mantel and spirit of Isaiah, but much later in history – the time preceding and during the fall of Babylon to the armies of Cyrus of Persia in 539 B.C.

There are many Bible scholars that believe there was a third Isaiah whose material starts at chapter 48, the chapter immediately preceding our reading today.

  1. With King Cyrus of Persia now in control, the Jews in exile are allowed to return to their homeland, but that will take some time. And not everyone wants to go back. Many Jews made a good life in Babylon and weren’t eager to relocate to a home that has fallen into ruins and will require a lot of work to restore. This is the situation that this Isaiah (2nd or 3rd) is addressing.
  2. And we’re not always sure who the pronouns are referring to in the passage you’re about to hear. Someone is being identified as God’s servant. In some cases, it sounds like the nation of Israel itself is the servant and at other times it sounds like an individual is being called by God to step up to leadership. In fact, it’s likely both. From the very beginning of their story, the people of Israel were chosen by God to be God’s servant people. Their God-given purpose was to be God’s light to the nations, to make God known to the people of earth. But the servant Israel is now dragging its feet. So the prophet-servant, the second Isaiah, is charged by God with the difficult task of persuading a reluctant and obstinate people to embrace their mission, even though it may be difficult and dangerous.

The equivalent today would be God calling a leader of the church to call the church back to faithfulness to God’s purposes for the church, even though it may be risky and hard.

Does this make sense?

Well, with this brief explanation, let’s listen to what is today known as the second “Servant Song” from Isaiah 49.

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 49:1-7

Sermon:I.

  1. The first thing I see in the passage from Isaiah is a reaffirmation of the message from last week; that we are called by into service.
  2. In an article appearing in the Christian Ministry magazine a few years back, Richard Carlson wrote this:

A few years ago, while our family was on vacation in Florida, my son Andrew and I had a conversation about vocation. We were having a good time, enjoying fresh sights, sand, surf, and Disney World. Andrew wondered why our family just couldn’t pick up and move to Florida. “Mom could find a church here to pastor and you could teach at some school,” he argued. It was a long conversation: 13 year-olds don’t like to hear no, accompanied by theological discourse. But we stuck at it and understanding began to take root in his young mind. “I think I get it, Dad,” Andrew said. “You take a vacation; but a vocation takes you.”

Because vocation has always been linked, if not identified, with one’s work, and work is often measured by one’s productive activity, it is important to underscore the passive nature of calling. “A vocation takes you.” A vocation, or call, involves asking “what God wants me to do” and “who God wants me to be.” A call consists not of choosing, but of being chosen. It requires submission, service and sacrifice. The active voice in vocation is God’s, not ours. It is God who calls, claims and sets the course. The calling may not be identified with what one does to earn a living..., but for the majority of those who have been called, the claim has been so strong as to mean life and work commitment.

  1. This is what the prophet Isaiah was saying. “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me... He said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.” Vocation takes you. We are here because we have been “summoned”… we have been called.

II.

  1. The second thing I see in this reading from Isaiah is that living out our calling from God can be challenging!
  2. Over the years I’ve become aware of a particular need I have to work with my hands. It was really apparent in my first church, which was a small suburban church and often I would be the only one working in the building. There I was in my little office working on a sermon or a program plan and I’d have this tremendous urge to pick up a dust mop or broom and clean the tile floors in the church. So I did. It was a good break from my mental work. Every now and then someone would catch me cleaning floors and they’d wonder why in the world I was doing it. I said it was because I wanted to see something completed, a task finished, a job well done.

I still have that need to break away occasionally to work with my hands. Recently I enjoyed doing some “honest work” around here. I helped the facilities manager, Gary, install the video projectors and move screens around. Earlier in the year, I enjoyed taking a day away from my desk and spray painting the shed in the community garden. What a sense of satisfaction when jobs like this are successfully completed. You can step back and look at what you’ve done. The improvements are clearly visible. It feels good to see the fruit of our labor, to see something fixed and working properly.

  1. When you work with people, however, it’s rare that anything ever gets finished, done, completed. You think you’ve made progress working with someone, there’s a change in behavior or attitude or thinking... and then wham, the old ways come back. You wonder why you’ve bothered!

It’s like the church that rallied around a fellow member who was an alcoholic. She and her family suffered for years until finally she got up the courage to do something about it. She agreed to go to an alcohol treatment center if she could find the money to take care of her family for the month she was away for treatment. The church mobilized. Sunday school classes pulled together and meals were arranged for the family every evening. Three generous people in the church donated every cent of the cost of her treatment. For one month the whole church rallied together for her.

It really was a miracle….

Well, not exactly. For the first two or three months after returning, the woman’s recovery did seem miraculous. But then she stopped going to her AA meetings. In another month she was drinking again.

  1. The despair the church felt was undoubtedly like the despair Isaiah felt working with an obstinate people. After acting on his call from God with poor results, the prophet lets out this honest and despairing complaint: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity...”

If we are going to talk with the prophet about being called by God then we had also better talk with the prophet about feeling like a failure. The higher the calling, the greater the fall if there’s failure.

  1. If you have ever really tried to be a faithful disciple…

tried to teach a class so well that everyone in the class seriously engaged the Bible, got the point, and was changed by the experience;

attempted to reach out to someone who was going through a particularly rough time in life and help them, I mean really stretch yourself to help them with your time, your talents, your wisdom and resources;

sought to live your faith in your daily work, witness to the truth and standards of Christ no matter what the opinions were of the others in the office…

…if you have ever really tried to be that disciple called by God into God’s service, then somewhere in your heart of hearts you have sighed at some point and uttered with the prophet: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing….”

  1. Surely this is what the soldiers for civil rights thought or said to themselves when they saw the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. taken by a sniper’s bullet. King had been to the mountaintop and brought many people with him. He had seen a new world and was driven by a dream; a dream planted in his heart by God. And even though many were captured by the dream, still he was hated and misunderstood by many. And they tried to kill the dream by killing him.

“We have labored in vain, we have spent my strength for nothing...”

  1. I once read of a young new pastor in the South who attempted years ago to measure the effect of preaching on people’s racial attitudes. He designed a questionnaire meant to gage people’s opinions on race. He administered the questionnaire to his little congregation. Then he preached a series of six sermons in which, in some way, attempted to apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the issue of racism in America. And he gave them the questionnaire once again to measure what had happened. The result: His congregation was 2.5% more racist after his sermons than before!

“I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing...”

  1. If we have never felt that in our heart, then perhaps we have never really experienced God’s vocation – the Lord calling us and saying to us, ‘You are my servant.’”

III.

  1. It’s absolutely frustrating not to see the fruit of your faithful witness, your sacrifices.

This is one of the big conversations we’re having right now as a denomination. How do we measure the success or failure of discipleship? What kind of fruit or results should we expect in the church when we are faithful to God’s call? Some say that we should be able to see some tangible results. And they’re trying to define the measurable, visible, irrefutable results of faithfulness, trying to determine what we should be paying attention to that tells us we are doing it right.

  1. But we can’t always see the results of our faithfulness to God’s calling. Sometimes we can, but not always… maybe not even most of the time. The point is, like the servant described in this chapter from Isaiah, we are called to be faithful, not successful.
  2. This is one of the key teachings of the Stephen Ministry lay care-giving program that churches all over the world are using, including this church at one time. As Stephen Ministers are trained they are told that their job as a Stephen Minister is not to fix people, but to be with them in their time of need.

“You are the care-giver,” they are reminded. “God is the cure-giver. Don’t focus on the results; focus on the process of care-giving. That’s your job.”

  1. Teachers have to learn this lesson as well. “Good teachers,” someone said, “must be in love with the task of sowing seed, not reaping the harvest.” If there are to be results for a teacher’s efforts, that harvest may not come until years later.
  2. I once read about a man who remembered a fantastic Sunday school teacher he had when he was a teenager. His class was great. The teacher treated the kids like adults, he talked to them about problems he faced in his own life and how he approached them in faith. The teenager-now-adult remembered loving that class. He learned so much.

He happened to see that Sunday school teacher at a gathering years later. He went up to him and gratefully mentioned his memories of his Sunday school class. “Yeah,” the older gentleman replied, “I remember that class, too. Worst class I ever taught. Dull students, surly, behavior problems. Yeah, I remember that class. I told the Sunday school superintendent after two years of that class never to ask me to teach again. The whole thing was a failure as far as I was concerned!”

How wrong he was!

  1. Pastors, parents, Sunday school teachers, health care givers, counselors, just about any disciple really, must be in love with something more significant than immediate, visible results because the aims of love are so high, the gracious work of God so mysterious, the plans of a compassionate God for this world so grand, that the harvest often does not occur until years after the sowing.

The temptation is to begin settling for less, to whittle down our ideals, our hopes to those things that can be measured.

It used to be that the local church dared to define its mission as “the maintenance of worship, the edification of believers, and the redemption of the world.” But sometimes it seems that that has become too big for us. And because it’s so big, we tend to settle for things like meeting our budget and restructuring our organization and trying to increase our average worship attendance and figuring out how to maintain the facilities.

The disciple who has never said by the end of the Sunday school class, or on the way home after volunteering at a food bank having to deal with ungrateful or rude people, or working to change an unjust law or a societal attitude –

“I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing...”

…well, that’s a disciple with very low expectations.

IV.

  1. The third thing we should notice in our reading from Isaiah is how the prophet’s lament gives way to affirmation.

Yet surely my cause is with the Lord and my reward with my God.

Immediately after the voice of frustration vents… “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity,” there is the declaration of faith, “Yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”

  1. Friends, above everything else, may we know that it is God who called us here. The work we are called to is God’s work, not ours. We are not to seek validation for what we do in our timeframe, demand results as we measure results. The harvest, after our sowing, is God’s harvest, in God’s own good time.

We keep sowing, watering cultivating and weeding.

The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthian Christians who were dividing themselves into cliques around various personalities, asked them, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth... we are God’s servants working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.” (1 Corinthians 3:5-9) We do our part. God does God’s part. We are not called to be successful, but faithful.

When the calling gets tough, don’t hang up, hang on! “Our cause is with the Lord, and our reward with God.”

VI.

  1. I’m convinced it is this kind of thinking that gave the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, the audacity to gather his Methodists together at the beginning of each New Year and recommend that they make a new covenant with God. This covenant service was intended to remind these Christians that their calling from God was central to their lives and that the work to be done was God’s work, not theirs. They were not laboring in vain. Their cause was with the Lord and their reward was with their God.

So they gathered at the beginning of every New Year to worship and to pray. They recited a covenant prayer together. A modern version of that prayer can be found on a card in your bulletin. I invite you to pull out that card now and place it before you. Let’s take a moment or two to read the Covenant Prayer quietly to ourselves and consider what it is saying to each of us personally….