Answering God's Call: Proper 8, Year C


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Original Manuscript:

When I was 15 years old, so not much older than some of you here today, I received my call to ordained ministry.

And I let that sink in a bit because some of you will realize what a terrifying thing that is. To not even be an adult yet and to hear God asking you to serve Him.

At the time, I was fortunate enough to be traveling on a pilgrimage sponsored by the Diocese. And as I was reflecting on what had just happened to me, we were in Taizé, a small monastic community in France. For those of you who have never experienced a Taizé style of worship, it is a very contemplative form of worship. There is a great deal of music, but also a lot of silence in which to be with God. It was a good time to stop and reflect on what had just happened. What this call meant.

Taizé is also blessed with having workshops led by the brothers for visitors. One of these while I was there happened to be about discernment. Which is exactly what I needed. So I went.
The brother who led the workshop was not much older than I am now. And he told us about the time he took to discern his own call to serve at Taizé.
Because at the time he was working on becoming a brother at Taizé, he was coaching a team he soon learned had Olympic prospects.

And then, at the same time, he was told he could become a brother at Taizé. The catch was he had to decide now. He had a hard choice to make in accepting this call. He had to give something up. Leave something behind. He had give up the dream of coaching an Olympic team.

And then this Taizé brother told us that the choice to do ministry is never an easy one for any of us. Because it always means giving something up.

Now, don’t be fooled into thinking that those who have taken religious vows, be they monastic or through ordination, are the only ones called to ministry. It isn’t just those who are called, even for a short time, to minister to others, as those who are getting ready to work at Sawyerville Day Camp are. We are all called, in our baptism, to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.”

But this is not always an easy task. As the brother in Taizé told me, it means giving something up when we answer God’s call. And that is what our readings say to us today.

In I Kings, Elijah tells Elisha to “go back again” to his family, one last time, before embarking on ministry with him. He knows that this path of serving God requires sacrifice. He knows, from his own experience, that this path will not be an easy one.

And while Jesus seems to respond differently to His would-be followers this morning, He, like Elijah, is trying to prepare those who would minister in His name for what that truly entails. It means giving up having the stability of a place to call home, as He tells the first would-be follower. It means letting go of the rituals of life we knew before, as he shows the second. And to the last, Jesus reveals that ministry in His name can only be done by putting the life we knew before behind and never looking back.

This is the life we are all called to in our Baptism. To put behind the old and to look forward to serve Christ Jesus in all that we do. With all that we have. With all that we are.

And it’s never easy to give up those things. Those things that we thought defined us. Those things we thought made us what we are.

As I said before, the brother from Taizé told us that to answer God’s call means giving something up. And in his case, it meant giving up the dream of coaching an Olympic team. The chance many of us would kill for. But he wasn’t bitter. The hardness of that choice didn’t make him angry. Instead, he smiled one of the most serene smiles I have ever seen and said that in the end what we get back is so much more. And that he wouldn’t have changed his choice for anything.

Because when we leave behind what we were, we are really becoming who God always intended us to be. And we see that in the reading from Galatians. Because it is by embracing the Spirit that we are built up. The fruits of the Spirit: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-Control. These things bind us together. They lead us away from those things which tear us down. They make us whole.

Answering God’s call is never easy. It means leaving something of ourselves behind. It means abandoning the comfortable for the unknown. It’s a complete shake-up of what we thought we knew.

But in the end, like the Brother from Taizé, what we get back is so much more. What we get back is who we were always meant to be. What we get back is ourselves.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be hardships on our path. As we see with Elijah and Jesus today, there always are. And we should know that. But whatever your ministry is, whether it’s coming to a new place to serve children you’ve never met or if its just waving at a neighbor as we cross the street, we become closer to God in whatever we are doing. And so we become more fully ourselves.

And, we have the hope that no matter what hard times we face, that God is with us in the midst of them. Because this is the God who chose to come down and dwell among us. To die so that we might live.


So go forth, knowing that our baptismal ministry in the world is often filled with hardships, tough choices, and even putting our former ways aside. But in the end, we have the hope that God is with us, making us stronger and helping us to be the ones we truly are. The ones we truly were meant to be.