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In the name of God, who meets us with surprising blessings
when we follow our call. Amen.
As a child, I always had a bit of a way with words. It’s no surprise that the vocation God
revealed to me ended up having a lot to do with words – and the ways that these
words can be opened up in front of us to help us know and experience God.
My parents will be here visiting in a couple of weeks, and
I’m sure they’d tell you – that “way with words” that I had could land in
different ways at different times.
Sometimes I might articulate some observation that seemed to reveal
unearned and early wisdom. Sometimes I
could be really funny. But, of course,
it wasn’t all great…
My favorite way of crafting words was – and sometimes still
is – sarcasm… Shade… Being a smart aleck. As a child, my parents would find it
intermittently amusing and infuriating – depending on the context, and how far
I’d push it. And I’m sure Michael feels
the same – sometimes he’s laughing with me, sometimes, very not…
One of my smart alecky observations as a child, that I still
think of sometimes, was when something was lost and I’d run to my mom for help
finding it. She’d invariably list off
some expected places where the lost thing might be. Yes, I’d looked there. After a while she’d give up and say, “It’ll
be in the last place you look.”
Frustrated, I’d say, “Well, yeah. Why would I keep looking if I’d already found
it?”
In all of our readings today, the message is simple and
consistent: God’s blessings flow from where we’d least expect them – in the
very last places we’d think to look.
For the disciples it was literal.
The freshness and the grief of the crucifixion was still very real. They knew of the Resurrection, but they still
didn’t know what that meant for them in their lives. And there comes a point in every experience
of grief, when you’ve just got to start trying to move on with your life in
your new context. Even if it doesn’t
make sense, you’ve got to try to cling to whatever you can find that might
make sense.
For Simon Peter it was fishing. The world wasn’t making much sense, and he
was feeling profoundly vulnerable – physically, politically, spiritually. So, he needed to cling to something that
would make sense – something where he felt like he knew what was going on – if
only for a moment. So, he said to his
friends, “I’m going fishing.” Other
disciples joined him, and they went out on the water, working all night, and
all for nothing. They hadn’t caught
anything.
But then Jesus came, and he said, look where you hadn’t
thought to look before: and suddenly the blessings – in this story in
the form of fish – couldn’t be contained.
It took all the men to pull them in and it strained the limits of the
nets. All because they decided to follow
Christ and look somewhere new – somewhere they wouldn’t have expected.
You know, whenever a priest begins a new ministry in a new
setting, one of the questions that gets asked of us again and again is: how did
it come to be? And in our situation,
where a call to ministry led to such a big trans-regional move, and picking up
a whole family’s worth of lives and setting them down in another place – the
questions are even stronger.
So, settle in, children, it’s story time.
The call process for priestly ministry is so very different
from just about any other kind of job transition process. Because very little of it is about the “job”
part of ministry. Of course there’s some
of that, but that’s not the biggest part.
When it’s done faithfully, it is a deeply prayerful process. And, for me at least, that doesn’t just mean
going to God with questions or petitions – not even just with silence, which I
believe to be one of the holiest forms of prayer.
Discernment prayer is about deep, vulnerable honesty. It means sometimes getting pissed off at God.
Sometimes falling down in exasperated
agony. Sometimes crying – literal tears
– at how lost we feel. And then, through
all of that, finding yourself newly opened to the Holy Spirit of Wisdom, and
the ways that she pulls us into places and situations we never could have
imagined on our own. In discernment, God
takes our biggest dreams and laughs out loud at how we’ve limited
ourselves – at how small we’ve let ourselves become. In discernment, God pulls us through barriers
we didn’t even know where there – much less that we might dare to cross them.
So that’s how our journey together started – through
years of me feeling the Holy Spirit needling me into thinking that God must
have something in store for me – and me prayerfully, painfully learning how to open
myself to that unknown horizon.
In those years, I read about literally hundreds of churches
and other ministry settings. Only very
rarely did something pique my interest enough to have me even consider entering
into formal discernment for the position.
A couple of years ago, Michael and I were passing through
Toledo on a vacation, and we stopped by to stay for a couple of days to visit
our friend Andrea and her family. I was
in the very deep end of discernment at that point and struggling to hold
myself up. By that point I knew
something was coming and I was trying to help God usher it into the world
however I could.
So, one night Andrea and Michael and I were talking about it
– this vocational cauldron I was swimming in.
I had sort of imagined for myself a few different ways that I might meet
this calling that was bubbling so loudly around me. We talked through the various options I had
in my mind and ranked them in terms of the order I thought best suited my
call. Option A, option B, option C… Where we left the conversation that night,
was that whatever happened, there were options – any one of which, I believed, would
lead me to that vocational growth I was craving. Now mind you, Trinity, Toledo was none
of those options. If I’d counted out to
option Q, this place never would have been a thought in my mind. I’d never even heard of it.
And then, over the course of the next several months, those
options that I could imagine started to fall apart. I was devastated. I believed to the point of deep soul-knowing
that God was calling me to something more, but it just wasn’t happening. I had a lot of those ugly prayers with God
that people often think you shouldn’t have.
I questioned my vocation, entirely.
Eventually, in the same way that Jesus told the disciples to
drop the net into different waters – unplanned and unexpected waters, I found
Trinity. In what was to me, an unplanned
and unexpected place. And in the same
way that the disciples started pulling in their nets and noticing abundance and
blessings that they couldn’t have imagined, I started pulling in my net here,
and the more I invited Michael into the process to pull along with me, we both
found that same sort of abundance and blessing such as we never could have
imagined on our own, coming into view.
The nets were full and still coming.
The story of Saul – who we’d later come to know as Paul – is
of the same sort. He was a man who
assumed he was following God’s call. It
was an understanding of God’s call that the leaders of his community told him
was an authentic call. He was a
persecutor of Christians. And not even
with a passive hate. He sought out those
early Christians. He hunted them. And his only goal was to bring them before
the leaders in Jerusalem to make them pay.
He was ruthless.
That’s the context of Saul’s encounter with Christ. He was out on a mission to hunt down the
followers of Christ. And then, to his
great surprise, he found Christ instead.
He would be blinded by the insight, and then, in three days, see the
world in a whole new way – his own resurrection experience of personal growth.
The long and short of it is this: like the disciples
clinging to their fishing in a world where nothing else made sense; like Saul,
thinking the world made perfect sense and that he’d go on forever just as he
was; just like them, we make our plans.
It’s good to make plans. Ask the
members of the staff here at Trinity, I love planning. But even after we’ve made our plans, we meet
God in the surprises. We meet God in the
improvisation that dances around our plans; and sometimes even in the cacophony
that derails our plans entirely.
And my goodness, the ways that meeting God can disrupt and
derail and remap our plans can be a pain in the neck. It can mess us up. Saul’s plans certainly got messed
up. And the fishing disciples wanted to
catch fish, but pulling in those overloaded nets that nearly broke and nearly
sank the boat – that wasn’t their plan.
That was a lot of work.
People sometimes think that if something is a part of God’s
plan, then it must be affirmed with simplicity and ease. If God wanted it, it wouldn’t be so
hard. The thing is, that’s just almost
never true. God’s call might be affirmed
by feeling natural and sometimes even by feeling good, but it’s almost never easy.
The Holy Spirit almost never pulls us in a straight
line. She pulls us through twists and
turns and hills and valleys. Discernment
is hard. Being called by God is hard.
But avoiding God’s call in our lives is harder. Walking a lonely road and choosing to live
your life in a way that contradicts the love and the grace and the hopefulness
that was embodied in Jesus’ way is harder.
It’s blinding.
But through the discernment, and through the
calling there are incomprehensible blessings. Blessings so abundant and so
vast that God laughs when we even try to imagine them. So abundant and so vast that
they could only ever be seen through the spiritual gift of surprise.
The unsuccessful net teaches us; and the blinding walk
teaches us; and most of all the empty tomb teaches us that God works
through surprise. God works through
wonder and curiosity. And the real
surprise – the real wonder and curiosity of it all: God works through
us. In our fear, in our anger, in our
misunderstanding, in our dreaming too small: surprise! God works through us. God blesses us and keeps blessing us. And not just for ourselves, but so that we
can be the blessings the world needs.
That’s our charge: receive the blessing. But most importantly, be the
blessing. Amen.
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