Last week something happened here at the church that most of you were not aware of. Our Youth Minister, Chris Wood, met with a group of six people who are seeking to discern whether or not Chris has a call to the priesthood. Chris has felt a call for quite some time. Over a year ago he told me that he felt this call from God.
The process of discerning a call is intense. It starts with the rector of the parish. If the rector agrees that there may be a vocation, which is another word for a call, then the aspirant meets several times with the rector. He then meets with a committee of lay persons, mainly from the parish, but also including a priest and lay person from the diocese, but from other parishes, and the committee meets three times. This committee then sends its recommendation to the vestry, which in turn gives its recommendation to the Bishop. Then the process is carried on at the diocesan level, with similar meetings with the Bishop and diocesan committees. After that process is complete, the Bishop looks at all of the data accumulated from individuals and groups, and decides whether or not to let the aspirant become a postulant for holy orders. If that happens, then the person will most likely head off to seminary.
Everyone who is ordained went through a similar process. With all of that scrutiny I sometimes wonder how I slipped by! And then I remember the answer: By the grace of God! What we are talking about here is a call from God. It isn’t enough for a person to discern a call. That call must be validated by the Church. At no time is faith solely an individual concern. We are members of the Body of Christ. The Church’s process toward ordination is a strong sign of that reality.
It is really serendipitous that on this Sunday after Chris has first met with his discernment committee that the Old Testament reading and Gospel deal with the subject of vocation. God called Jeremiah to be a prophet. We often think of prophecy as being a foretelling of the future, but that is not what the scriptural understanding of what a prophet is. A prophet is a spokesman for God. The prophet is to pronounce God’s judgment on his people. Jeremiah felt that call from God and didn’t particularly care for it! He told God that he didn’t know how to speak. He was a young man. Wouldn’t God prefer to call someone older and wiser, someone with more life experience?
The Lord told Jeremiah not to be concerned about his shortcomings. He would tell Jeremiah what to say. Jeremiah’s call reminds us that the wisdom of God is wiser than the wisdom of man. God’s criteria are often different from ours, and he often chooses people we might not think have the proper qualifications to do his work. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul says that “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.”
We also heard today about Jesus’ call to be the Messiah. Just prior to where our reading begins, Jesus has read the messianic prophecy of Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” Then he sat down and began his sermon with these words: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, Jesus said clearly to all who were listening, “I am the Messiah.”
Now remember, this scene takes place in a synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus’ home town. He is among the people with whom he grew up, who knew his mother and Joseph. They were impressed by stories of healings and other miracles that he did at Capernaum, but they were still skeptical. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they asked.
Jesus knew their doubts and said, “No prophet is acceptable in his own country.” As Aesop had said some 500 years earlier, familiarity had bred contempt. A modern expression of the same phenomenon is an expert is someone who lives a hundred miles away! At any rate, Jesus knew that he was not to be accepted in his home town. He proceeded to remind the townspeople that God’s work often had to be accomplished through the Gentiles because of the hard-heartedness of the Israelites. The people of Nazareth were so angered at his words that they put him out of the city and would have hurled him from the brow of the hill to his death, but it wasn’t time for that death to occur. He walked straight through their midst and headed out of town.
The call of Jeremiah, the announcement of our Lord’s mission to the people of Nazareth, the call of Chris Wood: these calls by God remind us that we, too, have been called. We all are a part of the Church, the Body of Christ, not because we have chosen God, but because he has chosen us. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” Every member of the Body of Christ is called to live out that reality of Christ’s sacrificial, self-giving love. That is the calling we have in common. Yet each one of us also has a unique calling. One of the great beauties of the Church is the different gifts that each and every one of us brings into the family of faith. Some are teachers, some are reconcilers, some musicians, some are consciousness-raisers—the list is as varied as there are individuals in this room. But each gift is important, essential to Christ’s mission at this time and in this place.
One of the great dangers that we must always guard against is what happened to the people of Nazareth. They could not appreciate Jesus because they knew him too well, or so they thought, and so they discredited what he had to offer them. We must never take one another and one another’s gifts for granted. We must honor each other as fellow members of the Body of Christ.
I’m glad for this opportunity to celebrate the gifts and calling of Chris Wood, one of our own. For it reminds us of the reality that each of us has a calling and that we are called to support and encourage one another.