Epiphany 3: The Struggle Is Real

I have lived most of my adult life in a house full of athletes. More than once, I’ve helped Will limp off a marathon finish line after a PR or revived a teen who raced so hard he’d passed out with sips of Gatorade. I had long discussions with my high school rower about what he might eat before an erg test to keep him from throwing up quite as much into the trash container next to each erg machine—because throwing up is just what happens during an erg test if you’re pushing your limits. Most recently, I watch astonished as my daughter comes home after a long workout with her team and launches into an hour of core exercises that I might be able to sustain for two minutes.

My favorite exercise is a walk or ski chatting with a friend, followed by tea and a good book on the couch. Honestly, I don’t understand what drives any of them, but they are athletes, each of them following the inner urge to compete, to push their bodies to the limit, to always do better the next time. I see that discipline reflected in their studies, their work, their relationships, and I know that they would not be where or who they are without the pain.

Last week, I spent my time here reflecting on the importance of finding a call that is true to God speaking within us, rather than to outside voices telling us what we should do. But I didn’t say that that inner call, should we accept it, would be free from difficulty, struggle, or pain. No one living in a household of athletes, and no one who follows Jesus’ way of love, could promise that.

Seeing how quickly the first disciples leave their boats behind when Jesus calls in today’s Gospel might suggest otherwise—that what they see ahead of them is the pure, immediate excitement of following the Messiah, the promised one, the Savior of the world. That that rush drives them to leave their family and their work behind.

I suspect their vision was much clearer than that, though. For one thing, they had to be aware that John—the first to recognize Jesus as Messiah—has just been arrested. Following Jesus was a dangerous choice from the start.

On the other hand, fishers on the Sea of Gallilee in a land occupied by the Romans existed at the bottom of the economic ladder, more medieval peasants who worked for a wealthy landowner than modern small business owners. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy and taxation ensured that they and their families would live out their lives in poverty and deprivation no matter how hard they worked.

When one day, Jesus calls them to be fishers of men, they must have heard the echo of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them.” Jeremiah is prophesying a time when God will restore Israel, gathering God’s scattered people and punishing those who have oppressed and polluted Israel with idols. Where we hear a call to save souls, it’s more likely that Andrew and Simon, James and John heard a call to change, to upending the corrupt social and religious structures of Rome and Jerusalem that kept them firmly and painfully in their place. Despite the risks and dangers, I suspect they heard his invitation to follow, deeply and immediately, as a call to rise and make life better for themselves and the people they loved. Then, though Jesus doesn’t lead exactly where they expected, they continue to follow that call through all confusion, pain, and despair that follows into the mystery, wonder, and joy of Resurrection.

In contrast, in today’s first lesson, Jonah tries to run from God’s call to save the people of Nineveh. Jonah is not running from his vocation—he is a respected prophet to Jeroboam II, the king of the people of Israel. But God is sending him off to the Assyrian infidels, who, in Jonah’s opinion, are totally NOT worth saving. Not even being vomited onshore after three days in the belly of a fish is enough to convince him. Grudgingly, he does what God tells him to do, but then immediately goes off to pout under a shade tree. I like to imagine that before his story is over, Jonah finally gets it, understanding that his call isn’t only to the easy stuff—calling God’s people to repentance when they stumble; that it’s also the painful work of calling those he considers least worthy into God’s circle of forgiveness and love.

Just under fifty years ago, Martin Luther King was imprisoned in Birmingham County Jail for organizing protests in Birmingham against the racial injustice in that city, including the uninvestigated bombings of black homes and churches. Despite his deep calling to his work, the conditions in the jail were harsh. He was particularly hard hit when someone delivered a newspaper with a letter signed by eight white clergy (including the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, just saying), calling for the end of protests that they claimed incited violence–though the protesters themselves were uniformly peaceful and nonviolent. They asked the protesters to exercise patience instead and work through the justice system that had repeatedly failed them to achieve their goals. Out of an enormously discouraging and painful time, in the margins of that same newspaper, Dr. King began writing one of the most important documents in American history, the Letter from Birmingham Jail. In his response to the clergymen’s letter, he patiently, carefully uses biblical, classical, and personal examples to lay out the reasons why nonviolent protest is necessary in the face of unjust laws. Then, prophetically, he calls them to turn and do what is right:

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

And here we are, fifty years, 2000 years, 6000 years later, still following the call of God into dangerous territory. I’m not going to tell any one of you where or what God is calling you to. I’ve got enough of my own listening to do! But I can guarantee that if the call is real, at some point, it’s going to be a struggle. It’s going to exhaust us. It’s going to hurt. We’re going to want to run in the other direction or settle down on the couch with a good book and shut out that voice in our heads.

Still, as my family of athletes show me every day, rising up from that pain to do what’s needed is an inevitable and essential part of committing yourself to something, heart and soul. It’s part of what the prophets, the disciples, the heroes of our faith, and Jesus himself show us is the sure, unsteady path to the Light. In the words of our Junior Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman:

For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Epiphany 2: Here I am, but where am I?

Lord, you have searched me out and known me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar. Psalm 139

When I was growing up, once or twice a year, the priest would round up all of the Sunday School classes, bring us into the church and give us a talk about listening to God to see if we had a vocation to the priesthood (boys) or to become nuns (girls). We were told to listen quietly and to pray and if we had a calling, it would come to us. Usually, he reminded us of the young boy Samuel’s response when God called him. I think he also told us or had a guest priest or nun tell us the story of their vocation, but I can’t remember because every time, at that point, I was too stricken with fear to listen.

There was nothing terrifying about my priest, and his words weren’t meant to scare us. But from a very young age, I knew that I wanted to be married and have children, and having spent my childhood in fractious relationship with my two sisters, I was also certain that I did NOT want to spend my entire life with a conventful. So if some time in the night, God suddenly woke me up, a voice said, “Mary, I want you to live your life as a nun,” what would I do? Like Samuel, I’d have to say, “Here I am,” right?

It’s not like Samuel was given a choice. His mother turned him over to Eli, the high priest, when he was barely weaned; when Eli told him what to say the next time God talked to him, what else was he going to do? And then, God tells Samuel to tell Eli that he and all of his descendants would be punished because he hadn’t controlled his wicked sons. What a burden for a small boy to carry back to the man who he probably loved as a father!

The story of Samuel is important to our faith tradition in all sorts of ways that I am not dismissing. But I think that maybe we should stop using it as a model for how we listen to God’s call, how we find our vocation and life’s work.

When my priest told us to listen for God’s call, my younger self imagined that that call would come like a disembodied voice in the night, and that what I felt inside was irrelevant. To the Quaker writer and teacher Parker Palmer, this idea that vocation that comes from outside the self is “rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be ‘selfish’ unless corrected by external forces of virtue.” True vocation, he suggests instead, comes when “the soul speaks.” Martin Luther King, for example, described his call to ministry “not as a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.”

It makes sense that the call of the God–who, in the beautiful words of today’s psalm, created our inmost parts and knit us together in our mothers’ wombs–would come from deep within us. And yet, most of my life, I’ve persisted in the belief that vocation is a call that comes from outside me, disconnected from the longings and desires of my inner self.

I became a teacher because my mother told me she thought that was my gift and my calling, despite spending all of college telling people that yes, I was an English major and no, I didn’t want to teach. I trusted my Mom’s viewpoint, so I started subbing at the school in my home town, and thirty-five years later, I’m still in the classroom. Over the years, too, whether it was to teach Sunday school, serve on a committee, or fight for boulevard trees, when someone called, even when I was already overcommitted, I always said, “Here I am.” Good has come out of that work. But as I’ve actively lived into my vocation as a priest in these past few years, it now seems to me that all of that other work was just throwing shovels of good soil into a deep hole that needed to be filled with something else.

Because here’s the thing. While outside voices can call us to work that might not be our innermost vocation, but that is still good and important, they can also keep us from that inner call. When I was a girl, being a priest at all, never mind a priest who could have children, was not even a possibility, at least in the faith tradition that nurtured me. The voices explaining with gentle logic why only celibate men should be priests stamped out that spark before it even had a chance to flame. Maybe that terror I felt as a child wasn’t actually fear that God wouldn’t let me have babies some day, but a deep mourning for that inner urge King experienced, that soul speak that was silenced before it could even whisper.

So what’s the alternative? Parker Palmer suggests, “Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.” To hear the voice of the soul, the voice of the one who searches us out and knows us, we need the space and freedom to listen to our lives. The soul, Palmer tells us, “speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.” Instead of outside voices directing our path, we are helped most by the voices of others who echo today’s psalm by simply, quietly affirming that we are marvellously made.

In the Gospel, Jesus and Philip both provide this kind of freedom and affirmation to Nathanael, the skeptic sitting under the fig tree who responds cynically to his friend Philip’s excited declaration that they have found the Promised One: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

First, Philip doesn’t try to argue with Nathanael, just tells him to come and see, opening a space. Then when Nathanael does, Jesus doesn’t come at him like that voice in the night, directing him to do something completely out of his comfort zone. Instead he says, “Here he comes…Look at him! He’s a real Israelite. Genuine through and through…I saw you under the fig tree” (John 1:47-8).

Fig trees provided sacred space in biblical times, where people would go to study God’s word, together or alone; their fruit or lack of fruit is frequently used in the Bible as a symbol of the spiritual state of God’s People. Jesus looks at Nathanael and lets him know that sees something in him that is fruitful and real, something that God’s People should be. Recognized and loved for who he truly is, Nathanael’s skepticism gives way, and he opens to truth and light.

It’s not so easy for some of us. It’s only now toward the end of middle age that the fog begins to lift, and I can see the road I’ve been stumbling along for years. I suspect I’m not alone: that many of us, as Palmer says, “ if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss… spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.”

And yet that voice has also always been there, directing my hands and feet, even when my eyes couldn’t see. And there have been those like Martin Luther King with clearer inner vision from the start who model another way. In the end, maybe what’s most important is not when or where or how we hear our soul speak, but what happens once we do.