Matthew 3:13-17
Please permit me to play pollster for a moment or two this morning and ask you some deeply provocative questions. When I ask them please feel free to respond by raising your hand or piping in where appropriate. The first question is: How many of you here believe that all Christians are called to full-time Christian service? If not, who is? Okay. How many of you think of or thought of your work, your employment, as a vocation to which God called you? If you are a full-time dad or mom or Grandma or Grandpa consider that to be your work. Are their other activities that you associate with a calling from God?
Now why am I asking all these questions? Well, I know that most of us deal with the question of “Where is God in my daily life?” Is it simply that God just shows up for a minute or two while we’re having devotions (if even then) or when we go to church and then disappears for the rest of the day or week while we go about doing what we do and trying to be a good person while we’re doing it. Or, could it be really be that God is with us always and has put us where we are so that somehow he can be working through everything we do? I guess the question is whether or not God really has anything to do with the stuff that we spend our days doing.
Before I left for seminary I wondered about those same questions. I considered myself called to fulltime Christian service which I believed meant going into the ministry. I was inclined to believe that full-time had to do with employment. I wonder if God wanted me in full-time ministry, then why am I working at the hardware store that I was working in. I figured that there had to be some reason why I was there rather than doing ministry since that was what I wasted my time in university preparing for. I came to see that somehow through that job at the hardware store God was preparing me for the ministry, giving me certain public relations skills and so forth. I never really considered my work at Golden corral or at the Hardware store as a calling from God until I met Mrs. Jackson one day.
Mrs. Jackson was a short, grumpy, and very abrupt little old lady who walked stiff-legged wearing very padded slippers. When she came into the store she always stood at the cash registers barking out her demands. She would stand there whining loudly, “Somebody help me. Somebody help me.” Usually, one of the cashiers up front would help her and that would entail having to run throughout the store to get what she wanted while she stood there waiting and then listen to her complain because it took them so long.
Well, this particular time I heard up front asking for help and then over thover the loud speaker “Randy, please come to the front.” I was like no. Please don’t do this to me. Well, I went up front and sized up the situation and realized that this was not going to be easy. I immediately saw that she was actually in a great deal of pain and did not want to be on her feet for too long, but that day she needed a telephone and not being too up on the latest in telephones she realized that she would need to have them explained. So there I was. I looked at her again and immediately it came over me that Mrs. Jackson, as rude as she seemed to be, just needed to be treated with respect and given the time of day and that I was the person to do it because I was a Christian. I escorted her to the phones and listened to her explain what she wanted and I gave her a couple of options to choose from and took the time to explain the differences and how they worked. She choose one and I escorted her up to the checkout. After she checked out the cashiers came to me and said “I don’t now what you did, but that’s the easiest she’s ever been to check out.” From that day on I was the one called for the difficult people.
That experience and many more like them made me realize that it didn’t matter whether I was going into the ministry or not, my first calling was to be Jesus’ disciple wherever I was and whatever I was doing. And now I firmly believe that God puts his people into different forms of employment in order to carry out Jesus’ ministry that begin at his Baptism.
So now I ask you two more questions: What is God doing in your circle of the world and why has God placed you there in the middle of it all? These questions are important because we believe that God is at work in this world. He leads. We follow. God is not simply the scapegoat we use to explain everything that goes on in the world as if he were the world’s after thought. God is at work in this world and usually way ahead of us. He leads. We follow. When we start asking the questions “What is God doing in my circle of the world” and “Why has God placed me in the middle of it all?” we are talking about our calling. What God has called us to be and do.
Now I know that when I use the word calling most will think that this word applies only to those people God has called into the ministry - pastors, missionaries, elders, deacons. It is not a word that is typically applied to the everyday life of the everyday Christian. And because of this we often do have trouble trying to make the connection of how God works in our lives outside of what we do for the church. God has called and still calls us each daily to his work. Called does not solely mean called to some form of service in the church. Called first and foremost means that God is calling out to us, inviting us to become Christ's faithful disciples wherever we are. To be Jesus’ disciples is our vocation, our purpose in life, our mission in life, our job, our work wherever we are and whatever we are doing.
When we were baptized as children our parents made a vow to God on behalf of us and when we came of age and joined the church we made the same vow to God for ourselves. That vow was that we would be Christ's faithful disciples, obeying his Word, and showing his love wherever we are. To be Christ's disciple means to listen to him and to love others as he loves us.
Jesus’ life work, his vocation began when he was being baptized. The moment he left the Jordan that day he began to live out what God had put him here to do. And so it is with us. When we became baptized members of Christ's church being Christ's faithful disciples in everything we do became our calling, the life’s work to which God has called us.
As Jesus’ faithful disciples we share a common identity with him. As he was God’s Son, the Beloved One, the one that God loves so we also are God’s children and God also loves us as he loved Christ. God is our Father and he takes that task seriously. He is active in our lives and wants to see to it that we become all that he has created us to be. He doesn’t abandon us to raise ourselves. He gives us the Holy Spirit to help and enable us. It was the Holy Spirit who moved me with compassion that day that I helped Mrs. Jackson. The Holy Spirit opens the Scriptures to us so that they become transforming, life-giving words to us. He feeds us when we hunger and thirst for his presence.
Finally, since we are children of God and Jesus’ faithful disciples and the Holy Spirit rests on us as it did on him, we participate in Jesus’ ongoing ministry in the world. When we go to work we go as Christ's faithful disciples and he has ministry for us to do there. When we go to school, when we go curling, when we go to Tim’s we go as Christ's faithful disciples and he has ministry for us to do there. When we raise our children and grandchildren, we raise them to be Christ's faithful disciples. That too is part of his on-going ministry in the world. We are Christ's faithful disciples and we are all called to full-time ministry of his on-going ministry in the world. Amen.
