Illuminating

Sermon

On this weekend when we remember the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I wonder how things would have been different had he not be killed. Would he have continued his insistence on nonviolent resistance? How would his opposition to the Vietnam War affect his work? Would he have added concerns about the climate and the reality that poor people often live in the most polluted areas? Would he have run for president?

We don’t know. What we have is the history of this man and the fruit of his work. Here is this man, the son of a preacher, well-educated, born with a fire in his soul and call from God to bring justice to people of color and people in poverty. His legacy lives on, and I’m not sure what the Black Lives Matter movement would look like without the legacy of Dr. King.

Dr. King’s faith in his God and his surety of God’s call upon his life enabled him to be a light to the world. As I read the Isaiah text this week, I wonder how Dr. King’s understanding of his call changed over the decades when he was so active in his fight for civil rights and equality.

Because from this text in Isaiah, it seems as though Isaiah’s call changed. God called Isaiah before he was even born; God equipped him with the gift of prophetic speech and called him to bring Israel home. But then, Isaiah says, God changed things up. “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

God enlarges the call and sends Isaiah to illumine the world. That reminds me of something Jesus said, some four hundred years later. “You are the light of world. … let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Mt. 5:14-16)

As I look back on Dr. King, I see that his light shone throughout the world, and maybe that was an expansion of his first call from God. His work in racial justice and income equality and nonviolence deepened and grew, and we see his light still shining.

And yes, people try to extinguish the light all the time. Dr. King was murdered as some sought to put out his light, and yes it was dimmed, but his followers continued. Murder, intimidation, mockery, violence—all the means of putting out the light of good works are evident every day in the world. But the light persists.

God has put that light within all of us, and we might think of that light as a call to shine. Now the way I shine is not the way you shine, because if we all shone in the same way, the world would be very boring and uninteresting. Each of our calls is different.

Have you ever thought about God’s call upon your life? We clergy spend a lot of time talking and thinking and reflecting about our call, but I really don’t know how others consider God’s call to them. Many are familiar with Frederick Buechner’s thoughts on all of this. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

But as one commentator says, “It’s a lovely definition—but it sometimes doesn’t seem to fit. Moses, for example, doesn’t demonstrate much ‘deep gladness’ when God calls him at the burning bush (Moses sums up the discussion with, ‘O my Lord, please send someone else!’) (Ex 4:13); nor does Isaiah’s ‘servant’ initially feel qualified and competent (‘I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.’) (Isa 49:4).

“In the Gospels, too, the disciples typically experience their calling as leading them toward difficulty, not away from it. In the end, while Buechner’s formula is still a valuable discernment tool, so is its complementary opposite: ‘The place God calls you to is the place where your deep discomfort (or ambivalence, or insecurity) and the world’s deep blessings meet.’” (https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/1/4/lamb-of-god-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-epiphany-2)

Have you ever thought about God’s call upon your life? I think some people are living out their call and they don’t even know it.

Some are called to care for another person. There are seasons in life when you or I spend most of our time caring for someone else. Parents of small children often experience this call. Toddlers are all-consuming, and I felt seen when Michelle Obama spoke about the ten years that she hated her husband. “People think I’m being catty by saying this—it’s like, there were 10 years where I couldn’t stand my husband. And guess when it happened? When those kids were little.” She added, “Little kids, they’re terrorists. They have demands. They don’t talk. They’re poor communicators. They cry all the time.”

Sometimes the call is to care for the young. Sometimes it is to care for the sick, for someone you love so dearly who is slipping away. It is all-consuming, and frustrating, and heartbreaking, but you do it because you are called to this kind of work.

Sometimes the call is to lament. On Friday morning, we learned that a man who had been sleeping in the stairwell on 17^th Avenue had died there.

The staff was aware of him. He moved in there some time in early December, and because he wasn’t causing any trouble, we let him stay. A few people reached out to him, but he made it very clear to us that he wanted to be left alone. We wanted to respect his decision, so we left him alone.

On Wednesday we decided to do a welfare check on him, and on Friday, we found out he had died there. The medical examiner came, as did the police. At this point, we do not know his name or if he had family. We do not know how he died, but the medical examiner said it looked like natural causes and probably not hypothermia.

Obviously, we are all shaken up by this. An unhoused man died on our property. A beloved child of God died alone, unhoused, unknown. On Friday night Gregg and I met with a friend of ours who has worked in direct outreach with unhoused people for two decades. We needed to process what had happened, examine our guilt and our grief.

What our friend said was that before we do anything else, we need to grieve the death of this man, who was precious in God’s sight. We need to feel our feelings, to accept the sadness, to accept the helplessness, to accept that even though our congregation does a lot of work with the unhoused and with the issue of housing, despite all of that, an unhoused man died in the church stairwell. And that is terribly sad.

Some of you are just now finding out about this; Gregg e-mailed the leadership of the church on Friday. And right now you may be jumping to conclusions, and thinking about who’s responsible for this, and considering what we can do to fix the problem.

What I ask of you is not to go there, not right now. I invite you to sit with your feelings and to grieve the death of this man. We do not know how he might have been a light to the world. We do not know who will mourn his death, so I invite us to do that on behalf of our community. When the service is over, I invite any of you who want to join me to gather above the stairwell on 17^th to say a prayer for this man and for all our unhoused neighbors.

Allow me to talk about one more way we are called. People often ask their pastor about their call to go into the ministry. My call began with a church in Houston, where I grew up, which loved me and gave me opportunities to use my fledgling gifts. Then a summer youth intern asked me if I’d ever thought about being a pastor. She planted a seed that took a while to grow, but here I am.

In addition to being called to ministry in general, we pastors talk about being called to serve in a particular place. I always had weird little confirmations when I was considering moving to some new church in some new city. When I graduated from seminary, I was interviewing at a church in California, near my parents, and at one in Springfield. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember if it was Springfield, Missouri, or Springfield, Illinois. I interviewed with the church in California, and the next day I flew to Springfield, Illinois. After spending a weekend there, in the capital of what I used to think of as a flyover state, I knew. I knew that was where God was calling me to go.

Six years later, as I was discerning whether or not to leave Springfield, I was considering taking an interim position in Crown Point, Indiana. I worried about what kind of social life I would have as a single woman in a county seat town in Indiana, and I wasn’t sure it was right. But one day I was driving to a friend’s house, a place I’d been dozens of times before, and I passed a street in her subdivision named Crown Point. I kid you not. I spent two hard years there, but I met Gregg, so it all turned out okay in the end.

When the interim position finished, I was considering another move. I was in conversation with a church in Delaware, a solo pastor position, and considering an associate pastor position in the Chicago suburbs. I really did not want to be an associate pastor again. I was in the middle of trying to figure all this out when a friend took me to lunch at a sort of exclusive club restaurant in Chicago. We walk in, and who is the first person I see? Christine Chakoian, the head-of-staff pastor at the church in Chicago.

When Gregg and I were discerning whether or not to come here, I had no such sign. The process was bumpier. We had never worked together before. I hadn’t worked full-time since Sarah was born. Gregg had never been the pastor of a congregation. We weren’t sure we wanted to move more than halfway across the country, and leave dear friends, and become Oregonians. And I didn’t have a sign that it was what we should do. Was God calling us to this place?

We took a leap of faith, and this is why. I think the greatest call God extends to any of us is to love, and part of that call is that God loves us, even when we make a mistake or don’t do what God wants. I wasn’t sure we should come to Westminster, but I would come here with Gregg and Sarah and God, and I was pretty sure that I could go anywhere with those three, because they are who I love most, and above all, I am called to love.

Every one of us, as people of faith, is called to love. But it’s not the sort of love that the movies get wrong; it’s not the sort of love that you say to your fraternity brother after one too many beers. It’s a call to expansive love. One pastor put it this way.

“Whatever our story… God’s calling is never for our sake alone; it’s always also for the sake of others, and ultimately for the sake of creation: ‘that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth’ (Isa 49:6). It’s ‘too light a thing’ to focus only on ourselves. Like ripples from raindrops on the surface of a pond, God’s liberating love and redemption continually expand outward, beyond the self, beyond family, beyond community, beyond religion, beyond humanity—finally to embrace the whole world and all its creatures.” https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/1/4/lamb-of-god-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-epiphany-2

How is God calling you right here, right now? Maybe you are caring for one other person, and you simply cannot do one thing more. Thank you for that. Maybe you are grieving the death of a person, the death of this unhoused man, or the state of the world. Thank you for that. And maybe you still haven’t figured out how to love the way God or Jesus loves. That’s okay. None of us has that down perfectly. But in the midst of all of this, know that God loves you, just as God loves that man who died. God has put a light in you to shine out to all the world.

To the glory of God.