One of the first steps in the ordination process in the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh is to write a spiritual autobiography. As a part of this autobiography you answer the question: When and how did you receive a call to ordained ministry? I wrote, “I received a “call” into ordained ministry at age six. My father was an interim pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Wisconsin while I was in grammar school. One Sunday morning, I recall looking up at him from the first pew and thinking to myself, ‘I want to do that. I want to preach from the Bible and tell people about Jesus.’” As one might then suspect the path for me toward ordained ministry has not been a straight one. In fact, for the last 15 years, since starting seminary, the first time, my calling has been an enigma, wrapped in mystery, wrapped in a London fog. As such, it was near the end of my first semester at Trinity School for Ministry when I began to look very carefully at the entire idea of calling. What happens when there is a call from God, but it is in fact not the calling you either expected, or even the calling you wanted? What happens when the shape of the call, the destination, and goal of the call which is in your mind’s eye is not the one God has in his mind?
This is what I have been wrestling with in particular vigor in the last 18 months. I came to Trinity with a plan. I would earn my advanced master’s degree, and parle that into a placement in a PhD program. From there it would be a career teaching theology and spirituality in a seminary. However, my thesis advisor last January sat me down in his office and told me many of the faculty could not square what they saw with what I was selling. The calling I hoped for did not appear to be the calling for which I was built. So it all came as a quite, albeit, welcomed crisis. A wrestling with God’s call. Who am I? What is my life’s work? By the way, it is a wrestling I don’t believe is over yet. I purpose that there are at least 6 marks of God’s call, not just for Holy Orders but to borrow a phrase from Laity Lodge, The high calling of our daily lives.
There are 3 people, three saints that have helped me in the last 12-18 months consider the idea of calling and helped me to wrestle through what it means to have a difficult calling from God. The first is the OT prophet Jeremiah. I can’t imagine a seminary student, past, present, or future walking into his mentor’s, pastors’s, or professor’s office and telling that person, “I am called into a ministry just like Jeremiah!” Jeremiah is as one commentator put it, the “weeping prophet.” Jeremiah ranks right next to Job as a Biblical character in which God calls him to a life of immeasurable suffering and isolation. The second saint is Mother Theresa, the diminutive nun, whose larger than life heart made her famous for serving the undesirables and untouchables. The final saint is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man born with more going for him than most of us could hope for in our wildest fantasies. At the same time he was called to lay his life down in a failed, though noble opposition to Hitler.
The first mark of a Godly calling is God’s calling never arrives in the way you expect it. Consider if you will the life of Samuel. In Chapter 3 of 1 Samuel, the title character expects to serve in the temple his entire life; he expects his service to be outlined by God through the chief priest Eli. Instead of this, God calls to Samuel directly. Also consider the calling of the first disciples in John chapter 1:46, “Nathanael said to him, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Implied in this question is an expectation the Messiah and Nazareth had nothing in common, but here God arrives through the place least expected.
Second, the call is often enough not to the people we expect. It is not simply the how, but the who. Consider Mother Theresa, a five foot tall uneducated nun called to see Christ in a person’s poverty whether that be physically or spiritual. A gifted academic and scholar who is called to rally the Church against a dictator and take active steps to overthrow a government. As Eric Metaxas points out it was unthinkable that anyone born to the education, class and influence that Bonhoeffer was, would have ever taken an active roll in trying to assassinate Hitler. God has little regard it seems for the things we think we are, or are not good, gifted, or equipped to accomplish.
Third, a person is called into a ministry and to a life only he or she can live. There is never any validity when a person says, “I want to be the next. . . .” There is never a next. You are who you are, and though shaped and influence by others an individual’s call is the individual’s exclusively. Psalm 139 praises God’s wondrous ability to craft one of a kind individuals,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
And lest we forget there is nothing easy about God’s calling. In fact, in one manner of speaking God’s call is always beyond the individual’s ability to accomplish the call from his own power. Implicit in the prophet’s call as prophet is a dependence on God to accomplish the task God has laid down. Samuel in 1 Samuel chapter 3 responds to God’s voice saying, “Speak, for your servant hears.” Mother Theresa could never have hope to meet the needs of the poor and dying but time and time again as Katherine Spinks point out in her biography of Mother Theresa the funds and resources needed would be divinely provided.
Fifth, the call is always for the next step never the final destination. Christ says to Phillip, “follow me” (John 1:43). Can you imagine if Christ would have told Phillip or any of the disciples that they were going to build God’s Church on earth, be martyred for their faith, challenge the power of Rome, and that they would reshape the world as they new it, as any of us knows it? Quite simply, there has not been a saint in the course of human history who has ever been told the exact shape and destination of his or her calling.
The final mark of a Godly calling is this— God is present. In my own life, I have often wondered about this, through rejection letters from graduate schools, in the midst of my wife’s numerous health struggle. However, Psalm 139 makes it clear.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
I believe that any christian called into a ministry can and probably should turn these six marks of calling into question for spiritual journaling. At the very least they can be a starting point to prayer and reflection. God how am I the man/woman to accomplish the task you set before me? Lord, show me how you have always been present in my life?
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