“But to Each Was Given Grace…”
By Rev. Mary Luti
January 21, 2007
The Third Sunday After Epiphany
Lessons: Ephesians 4:1-17; Luke 4:14-21
Most of you have wrestled at one time or another with the big question of what you are called to do in this life. Your wrestling was probably focused on which profession to choose, but it may also have led you to confront larger questions about the purpose and meaning of your life—whether there is a calling beyond your professional callings, a vocation that precedes and is more encompassing than what we usually refer to as our vocation in life.
This search for self-knowledge, for our place in the world and its meaning, is easily caricatured: we roll our eyes when someone announces that she is trying to find herself! But to find oneself—to know one’s own heart and one’s deepest desire—is sacred human work, especially for the Christian who believes that God wants us to be happy. It’s not an easy discernment, but it is a vital one.
When I was teaching at a seminary, vocational questions were our daily bread. My students at Andover Newton were there because they had all felt some sort of nudge from God to “do ministry,” but working out the precise kind of ministry they were called to often flummoxed them. I especially remember one student who came to talk this matter over with me. She was a young woman with a remarkable gift for relating popular culture to Christian faith, and Christian faith to teenagers. And she’d already begun working as a youth counselor at a suburban church—to rave reviews.
But when she came to see me, she was full of doubt. She had recently watched a documentary about a selfless physician in the Amazon who was making a huge difference in the lives of indigenous people in the selva, and she had been deeply affected by it. It made her question whether she was wasting her time in this self-indulgent culture helping pampered teens cope with relatively easy lives. By the time the film was over, she was on her knees in tears promising God that she would get in touch with that doctor, join his ministry, and never look back.
I know that feeling. I’ve seen those documentaries. I’ve been on my knees in tears many times swearing I’d go and do likewise. All it takes is an hour at Rosie’s Place or an evening at a GBIO Delegates’ Assembly, and I start thinking, “I could be doing this kind of work! Maybe I should be doing this kind of work?” Compared to ministry in the Amazon, what I do here every day can appear removed, antiseptic, self-indulgent. My impulse is to drop everything and start fresh.
I asked the student who wanted to serve God in the jungle if she was okay with hairy bugs. She was not. Had she ever been camping? Yes. Hated it—no hot running water. Did she think this might be a problem in the Amazon? She would grit her teeth and bear it, she said. Besides, the harder a thing is, the more it goes against the grain, the more you can be sure that God is asking it of you. Right?
Well, it is true that something truly worth doing will cost you. Faithfulness to a calling always entails sacrifice and self-mastery. Not everything about our calling will be fun or come naturally to us. But in general, no, it should not go completely against the grain of who we are.
A genuine calling eventually brings us closer to ourselves and makes us more who we are, rather than twisting us into someone we are not. It gathers up the joy already in us and places it at the service of something that increases that joy. And even if it is sometimes hard to carry out some aspects of our calling, hardship itself is not a hallmark of a genuine call.
If creepy-crawlies terrify you into emotional paralysis, it is unlikely that God is calling you to a ministry in which bugs are a fact of life. Calling is closely linked with creation; that means that who you are in all your singular particularity contains most of the clues about what you are meant to do in this one precious life you have been given to live for God, for your neighbor, and for your own happiness.
I bring up this subject of calling because of our gospel reading today. It describes a pivotal moment in the ministry of Jesus. It is a scene that unfolds in his hometown of Nazareth, where he had lived (we believe, for no one really knows) in obscurity for about 30 years before the Spirit-charged events that Luke recounts earlier in his gospel thrust him into the public eye.
At his baptism, the Spirit descended upon him and he is named “God’s Child,” and “God’s pleasure.” The same Spirit drove him straightaway into the wilderness, where he is proved and prepared for his ministry. And what a ministry! It too is Spirit-driven, a series of extraordinary healings and exorcisms—acts of decisive liberation and the restoration of human wholeness, accompanied by the announcement that God’s reign is very close at hand. And who wouldn’t believe it, witnessing what they are witnessing? The buzz about Jesus is growing.
And so he comes home. His neighbors, who know him simply as Joseph’s boy, turn out in big numbers at the synagogue to see him. He’ll be the preacher of the day. They hand him the scroll of Isaiah, and he chooses a text:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
He rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, sits down and says to his neighbors, “Today, with your own ears, you have heard the fulfillment of this text.” In other words, “I’m the one the prophet speaks about, the one God’s Spirit has anointed and sent. And to this I am called.”
What’s the this? Nothing short of a revolution. Jesus lays out his calling in clear political and economic terms. It is about bodies and their well-being, about power and relationships. If you were ever tempted to think that Jesus came to show us a disembodied “spiritual” path, go back and read this text again.
We often use the blanket term, ‘social justice,” to describe the world-oriented mission of Jesus. And we believe that his calling to give the poor something to cheer about has now fallen to his Body, to the church, to us. No matter our particular professions or our personal and social locations, by baptism we have all received from the Spirit of Jesus a calling that suffuses our lives with divine purpose. Jesus’ messianic ministry of repairing and renewing the world grounds and encompasses the whole of our Christian existence.
Well, good. But how do we live out this calling?
In mainline liberal churches like ours, social justice ministry is nearly always conceived and carried out institutionally, or programmatically—the church runs a shelter, a free clinic, a tutoring program. It strives to have a public voice, to take stands on matters of worldly moment, and to make its presence felt in all the causes that aim to make society more peaceful and just.
Over time, it’s not surprising that many of us come to think of the church’s calling to be an agent of God’s justice in the world mostly in these institutional and programmatic terms. And once we do, we also tend to lose sight of something vital—namely, the ministry in the world of the individual Christian, the member of the church.
I’m talking about you. You do not spend all your time in church. All week long you are elsewhere, working in industry, education, politics, retailing, "helping" professions, at all levels of responsibility. You shape families and communities. You belong to social service groups, environmental groups, political associations. You are involved in peace efforts, associations and task forces of all kinds, as well as in sports and health clubs. You, with your faith and your willingness to serve, are the church’s greatest outreach program on a daily basis. If the church is in the world, it is because you are there. If the church is giving witness in the world, it is because of who you are and what you do every day.
In our efforts to have an institutional impact and a corporate outreach, we do not generally pay enough theological and spiritual attention to the hidden ministries of the members in the world. Listen to what one executive at a big steel company had to say 30 years ago about this lack. Nit much has changed—it is a lament and an indictment that could easily be made today. Perhaps it is one in which you hear your own disquiet echoed:
In almost 30 years of my professional career, my church has never once suggested that there be any type of accounting of my on-the-job ministry to others. My church has never once … asked if I needed …support in what I am doing. There has never been an inquiry into the types of ethical decisions I face or whether I seek to communicate faith to my co-workers. I have never been in a congregation where there was any type of public affirmation of my ministry in my career. In short, I must conclude that my church doesn't have the least interest whether or how I minister in my daily work. [Bill Diehl]
Institutional witness is critical, but it cannot crowd out the fact that Christians in the world are the primary agents of Jesus’ revolution—and not by accident or default. It is the way things are supposed to be. Remember what Jesus said about “salt of the earth,” “leaven in the dough,” and “light of the world”?
Over the years in many congregations I’ve also noticed how frustrated some very active and dedicated leaders of the church’s outreach ministries become when, say, they call a meeting aimed at getting the congregation to do something together about AIDS or hunger or racism or peace, and only a few folks show up. At the root of their frustration is a genuine, selfless desire to create opportunities for the church as church to make a difference.
However, because they assume that everyone in the congregation should be equally committed to everything that matters to them, and that everyone should be going about making good on their commitments in the same way and by the same means, they are often disappointed when this doesn’t prove true. Their disappointment may even turn to judgment—people just don’t care anymore, they complain.
But this judgment ignores the fact that there is nothing lock-step about the way the Holy Spirit operates in people’s lives. There is nothing uniform about the ways we are called to minister in the name of Jesus. There is no indication in the teachings of our faith that anything except a vast diversity of gifts, graces, ministries, and manners is pleasing to God.
Not everybody is supposed to show up! In the early church, for example, those who were gifted at prayer and fasting were thought to be putting their bodies on the line for the sake of the world every bit as much as those who preached and prophesied and confronted the powers and died for their trouble.
Wise counsel in a confusing moment; silent patience in the heat of argument; the persistent refusal to succumb to the pressure to acquire more than one can use; creating a moment of beauty and pleasure; spending a day in attentive care for an elderly parent or a sick child; sharing a longing or an experience of the divine; shouldering the worry of a neighbor; listening to the pain of a friend; treating employees fairly even if it means a little less black on the bottom line; loving one’s students; just doing one’s duty gratefully with the intention of excellence —who can say that these are not ministries of justice and wholeness, of liberation and reconciliation, ministries of Jesus that change the world?
Faithfulness in ministry—that is, the way we live out our commitment to the cause of Jesus—is a subtle matter of particular gifts and callings. This is in part what Paul is saying in the letter to the Ephesians this morning. In it he explains that to each member of the Body a different grace has been given to carry out the ministry of Christ. He is referring to ministries for the strengthening of the internal life of the church, but the point is also valid also for ministry to and in the world. The implication is that it is likely that no two Christians will be gifted in the same way, and that no two will employ their gifts for the sake of the world in precisely the same fashion.
The trick for us in Christian communities is to delight in this diversity, to value each gift, and to welcome the peculiar ways each person has of giving it. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job, not ours, to make a whole out of all these parts, to order every gift toward the common good, and through the faithful exercise of gifts differing, to bring about a world worthy of the dream of God.
I wrestled for years with guilt, afraid that my work as a teacher and scholar was an ivory tower indulgence in the face of so much suffering and need in “the real world.” Later, as I prepared for ordination, I worried that I did not seem to be equipped for the kind of galvanizing social justice leadership that come so naturally to many of my clergy colleagues, and which I so admire. But finally I have come to understand that my calling is different, that the gifts I have been given for ministry are different, that they further the mission of Jesus in a way that is also precious and needed—and that in some mysterious way, only I can give them. My daily work is to be grateful that I am who I am, and to give all I have been given to the cause of Christ in the particular way I am called to give.
And this brings me back to that young woman at seminary and her attraction to the Amazon. She came to me with an arrow in her heart—the impact of that moving documentary. I never said she should not follow her newly-pierced heart. All I asked was that she first consider her gifts. All I asked was that she try to be true to the uniqueness of her creation and the grace of her baptism.
After much discernment, she came to see that just because you can recognize that something would be a good thing to do doesn’t mean that you are the one called to do it. She became reconciled to the truth that she was gifted for a different way of bringing about a world of justice. And more than reconciled: she began to rejoice in the unique grace she had been given—the grace to convey the compassion and strength of Jesus to young people under assault by a culture that wants to train their bodies for exploitation and their souls for consumption. Faithfulness to that grace is even now making her more the person God created her to be; and in the end, such authenticity will make her holy.
You’ve probably heard this old Jewish story a million times, but it seems like the only way to end. It goes like this: I
In his old age, as he was preparing to die, The Hasidic Rebbe Zusya called his disciples to himself and said: “When I die, in the heavenly realm they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?” They will ask me, “Why were you not Zusya?”
Why, indeed?
May God stir up in us the grace each of us was given, and whether gathered in congregation or scattered throughout the world, may the church faithfully witness in word and deed to the justice and joy of Jesus, savior, brother, and friend. Amen.