What is God Calling you Into?

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The opening stanza of The Second Coming by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats goes like this:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote this remarkable and well-known poem in 1919, a time much like ours. The Great War with its mass slaughter had just ended, the Irish War for Independence was just beginning, the Russian Revolution was well underway, the world was in the midst of a vicious pandemic which almost claimed the life of Yeats’s beloved wife, pregnant with their first child.  “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”, said Yeats, a faithful Catholic. The anxiety expressed in the poem concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them.

Sound familiar? “The ground is shifting beneath our feet”, we might say. And we are certainly surrounded by plenty of “passionate intensity”, aren’t we? These times of turbulence, conflict and division, of norms and guardrails which seem to disappear overnight, of a vanishing sense of common purpose, are stimulating the kind of anxiety that Yeats was familiar with. So what’s to be done? I’m going to suggest that in times like these, the way forward for us as Christians is to put our feet firmly on the ground, take a few deep breaths, and remind ourselves where we are, where we’re going and how we’re going to get there. Sounds pretty basic, doesn’t it? Yes it does and yet the basics are essential, especially in times of turbulence and conflict and division like we’re living through today. It is indeed time to get back to the basics.

The Apostle Paul and his community of Christians in Corinth were living in a similar time. Subjects of a brutal foreign empire, an empire which had in fact executed the one whom they called Messiah just a few years before, they were living in a culture where the ground was rapidly shifting beneath their feet. Things were falling apart. The centre was not holding. And there was serious conflict in their little community over what they were to believe which was striking at the core of their identity and threatening to tear them apart. In fact, many in the community were conforming their beliefs to what we might call the “conventional wisdom.” It’s a system familiar to us, a system based on rewards and punishments which led to an understanding that God’s grace was given as a reward for so called “right beliefs” and “right behavior.” You know, God as Santa Claus—he’s making a list and checking it twice; he’s gonna find out who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Might stimulate a little anxiety as you imagine where you land in that metric, eh? This “holier than thou” competitiveness, the “holiness Olympics,” you might say, was breeding a self-regarding arrogance that was fracturing the community. So Paul writes to them, to ground them in the truth of their faith, to bring them back to the basics.

He begins by reminding them of the beliefs they hold in common. He tells them that this is the message he proclaimed, the message they received, and the message in which they stand. Even though they don’t treat each other the way one would expect Christians to treat each other, there is a basic message that all of them affirm. And what is that message?

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 1 Cor 5:3-5.

Paul understands the end of this age is coming about through a radical transformation that will include our own resurrections, and that Christ is the “first fruits,” as he calls it, of this transformation. Later in the letter, he will tell them “…for as all die in Adam, so will all be made alive in Christ.” 1 Cor. 15:22. The gospel that Paul proclaims is a call to a new life now, in the present age, grounded in the hope of the age to come. So when Paul proclaims that Christ died for our sins, he’s not talking about an abstraction. He’s talking specifically about the sins of those in the community who indulge in the arrogant belief that their self-proclaimed righteousness earns God’s grace, their arrogant belief that their self-proclaimed righteousness makes them superior to others. Their sin is that they are not living out the Great Commandments, to love God and to love their neighbor. Their sin is that they don’t understand that by the love of God which Christ’s death has revealed they have been liberated from their arrogance and self-regard. They have been liberated from their need to assert their superiority over others. They have been liberated from their worship of the “conventional wisdom.”

So it was back to the basics for the Corinthians. Back to the core belief they held in common–the belief that the death and resurrection of Christ had set them free from captivity to sin. And once they understood the particular sin, the sin of self-regarding arrogance, the egoic belief in their own superiority, the sin of believing that they were better than their neighbors, they could begin to bind themselves back together in community. The conflict would be healed by returning to the basics.

So here we are in our own times of conflict. It’s certainly a time when the “conventional wisdom” seems to be the order of the day. The need of one group to arrogantly assert its superiority over another group, often with such “passionate intensity”, the fear and anxiety this stimulates, the bitterness and rancor and blaming and shaming that seem to be in the very air we are breathing, all these symptoms of our contemporary malaise should be a wake-up call for us. Things are falling apart. The centre isn’t holding.  Time to get back to basics! Time to remember who we are, where we are, and where we are going. Time to reground ourselves in the Apostle’s call to the Corinthians. 

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

You and I and every one of us, every human soul, we are all children of the Resurrection. This is the lens through which we need to view everything else about our faith and indeed everything else about our daily living. We live in the tension of a world which seems to be torn apart by human arrogance and greed on the one hand and the world as we hope and long for it to become on the other, a world where we all share the gift of divine love with one another, a world where we all belong, not just a privileged few. We live in the tension between the conventional wisdom and the wisdom of God. Paul tells us that as we “hold firmly” to this gospel message, this the way we are “being saved,” which is to say, as we live and love God and our neighbors—all our neighbors—we are living in the power of the Resurrection. Now, in this very moment. These, my dear friends, are the basics of our faith.

OK, I can hear you saying it. “Sure, Lex, this seems fine but what can I do about it? Give me something practical!” So let’s turn for a moment to our gospel story. It’s a familiar story about the calling of Simon Peter and James and John as Jesus’s first followers. Jesus gets in Simon’s boat, does a little teaching work, then tells him to push out from the shore and let down his nets. In a tone that sounds exhausted and maybe a little exasperated, Simon tells Jesus that he’s been fishing all night long and hasn’t caught as much as a tadpole, “’…but OK, Jesus, if you say so, Jesus, I’ll drop the nets one more time.” Lo and behold, when he pulls up the nets they’re so full of fish they’re about to sink the boat. Seeing this, Simon falls to his knees and says, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” Jesus replies, “Do not be afraid (how many times have we heard that in the Bible?); from now on you will be catching people.” And they left everything and followed him.

At its heart, this is a story of repentance and new life, new life with Jesus. You’ve probably heard before that it’s the Greek word “metanoia” which gets translated as “repentance.” It literally means “to turn around.” It’s dynamic. It’s a call to change, a call to conversion, a call to new life. When Simon repents, he hears the call to a new life. In his case, that meant dropping his old career as a fisherman, dropping his nets, as it were, and following Jesus. What does the call to new life mean for us? Looking at this story though the lens of the Resurrection doesn’t necessarily mean we are called away from our ordinary work. Too often, when we think about being called, we imagine it means giving up everything familiar and taking up a new vocation—you know, like becoming an ordained minister or a missionary—a religious vocation. That can feel discouraging to lots of us. But the Latin root word for “vocation” is “vocare” which literally means a call. And calls are different for each one of us. One definition of vocation that a wise friend once offered me is that your vocation is whatever you do that makes more of you. Let me say that again. Your vocation is whatever you do that makes more of you.

What could you do that would make more of you? Here’s how the great writer, Frederick Buechner put it:

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger me.

Let that sink in for a minute. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Do you see how that place will be different for each one of us? I have a dear friend who candidly says she’s spent much of her life beating herself up because she’s not Mother Teresa. But the reality is that she does more good for more people than most anyone I know. So letting go of the false and unrealistic expectations we impose on ourselves is really important. The call to follow Jesus, which is nothing less than the call to find our own vocations, doesn’t necessarily call us out of one life or one kind of work and into another. It does mean that in the power of the Resurrection we allow God to transform our ordinary work, our ordinary lives, into the vehicle that reveals Jesus’s real presence in the world.

In a world where things are falling apart and the centre is not holding, a world where the ground is shifting under our feet, a world filled with way too much passionate intensity, stopping for a moment, breathing deeply, planting your feet firmly on the ground and reminding yourself of the first and most basic belief as a Christian, that you, yes you, are a child of the Resurrection, that’s what will pull you off the ceiling and down onto firm soil. It’s just basic. And that basic understanding of who you are as a Christian will call you to that place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And Christ will be waiting for you there.