Sermon for Epiphany 2: Responding to God’s call
St Mark’s Church, Newnham
St Andrew and St Mary, Grantchester
Isaiah 49:1-7, John 1:29-42
May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord our rock and our salvation.
‘Kings shall see and stand up, princes shall prostrate themselves because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.’
Isaiah has the gift of expression. Matching human hopelessness and timidity with bold claims about, and on behalf of, God, he describes the so-called servant’s sense of God’s call with an eloquence we may all wish we had from time to time. As an ordinand who has been through the Church of England selection process not once but twice, I’ve often longed for the gift of articulating just what it is that that we sense God doing in us and around us, what it is we feel called to and created for, what it is we feel we could not be doing were it not for the Spirit of God working through us. And yet, words aren’t always easy to find, and God’s work in us is often as hard to express as it is to predict:
Six years ago I started to feel uneasy during my post-grad opera training. I’d always wanted to be an opera singer and was sure that God had given me a voice for that reason, yet a longing for the Anglican Church, a church that I was baptised into but had never attended, started to distract me. Now I was a faithful, bible-believing, Christian, so I thought. I saw myself as a missionary to the strangely secular world of the performing arts, and this new sense of call disturbed me.
You see, I didn’t like the Church of England. They had women priests, and I was adamant that allowing women to preach was not biblical. But God continued to tug at my heart and eventually I sat, rather reluctantly, before God and said “Lord, if this is really your will, you’re going to have to change mine”. The rest of that story will wait, but evidently the Lord answered me, and taught me that my rather limited understanding of God’s word was not to be confused with who God is or what God can do.
In Isaiah we see this transforming nature of God’s call, not as a sudden redirection or remodelling, but as a continuous renewal and shaping of the servant, who wrestles between his sense of life-long vocation and the apparent unfruitfulness of his mission. ‘I’ve laboured in vain’ the servant says. There are twinges of insecurity, mixed in with a picture of God’s tenderness as he describes God shaping him into a sword and then hiding him in the shadow of God’s hand. But the making and shaping of the servant is just the beginning.
The result of God’s ongoing work within us is something unimaginable to the human mind. When the servant describes himself as the one ‘formed in the womb … to bring Jacob back to God and that Israel might be gathered to God’, God usurps the servant’s sense of limitation, saying ‘it is too easy … to raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel…. I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” What we imagine God calling us to do, through our own, human, perception, and what God actually has in store, might be very different. We don’t always know or understand what God has planned for us, and that’s probably a good thing, given our aptitude for thinking we know best, but it isn’t always a sudden change of plan. The uniqueness in and with which we are created, is all part of God’s work and purpose in us.
In our gospel reading we see more responses to God’s call from three odd but very ordinary characters: John the Baptist, Andrew and Simon Peter. Each of them responds differently, but faithfully, to Jesus. John is a prophet and has been since his conception, he was literally born into his role, he is bold and courageous. He walks around and shouts out about the Messiah and calls people to repent. Andrew recognises Jesus as the Messiah, which is a pretty good start, but then does that very human thing of asking Jesus the awkward and seemingly irrelevant question, ‘where are you staying’ before bringing his brother Simon to meet him. And Simon says nothing at all here but has the extraordinary experience of being renamed ‘Cephas’, or Peter, foretelling his role in the establishment of the church.
I wonder whether we would classify our own response to God as like that of Isaiah the eloquent, John the prophetic challenger, Andrew the bringer-alonger or Simon Peter the understated rock. Each of these people was created unique, each called by God to a different role, and each responds as they are, where they are. God does remarkable and unforeseen things through each of them and, in the same way God calls and works through each of us, as we are, where we are.
We may be gifted lawyers or teachers, we might be passionate about saving the planet through protest or through engineering, we might be students hoping one day to make a difference in our field, or ordinands longing to see a more diverse and united church. We might be gifted in hospitality or in being able to talk to strangers. Whoever and wherever we are, let us ponder how God has made and shaped us, and respond to God’s call with open hearts, so that ‘in the constant renewal of our lives, God will make known his heavenly glory’.
Amen.
