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In the end, and in the beginning, it’s
all about “The Call.” Yes, the call of the Bishop, but more
importantly, the call of God on our lives:
-
the call
which first comes in our baptism
-
the call of
the church to serve
-
the call to
preach the Word
-
the call to
“go” for the sake of Jesus Christ
This week, of course, is Annual
Conference. I picked this sermon title some time ago,
knowing that I would be sitting through my 35th
Annual Conference session—and I would be leaving Annual
Conference to come home to preach. I decided it was a good
time to reflect on the call and the ministry which has been
my life for these years. So this sermon is unabashedly and
unashamedly autobiographical, looking back over my ministry
and the call of God in my life.
Next week we will once again travel to
Estonia and the Baltic Methodist Theological Seminary, where
I will connect once again with one of my dear, long-time
friends, Charles Killian, retired professor from Asbury
Theological Seminary. Chuck has been involved with teaching
at the Baltic seminary since its inception, back in the days
when the seminary consisted of a few desks crammed into one
room with a pile of donated books in the corner. But our
journey together goes back farther than that. Chuck and I
met at Asbury more than thirty years ago. He was a
first-year professor with a freshly-minted Ph.D., and I was
a first-year student with a freshly-minted marriage. He grew
up in small-town central Indiana, and I grew up in
small-town western Pennsylvania, but I suppose for both of
us, from our two different directions, Pittsburgh must have
seemed like the end of the world.
A great storyteller, he tells a tale from
his childhood back in rural Indiana. He says:
I used to sit under the old walnut tree
back home and dream about faraway places.
“Got any dreams?” Grandpa would ask.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m dreamin’ about
Pittsburgh. Cy Sarber drives his semi to Pittsburgh three
times a week. It must be great to travel like that, to see
other places. Someday, I want to see Pittsburgh.”
“Well,” Grandpa would say, “don’t be
surprised where your dreams take you. You might just land on
the other side of Pittsburgh.”
Three decades and many miles later, I
guess Grandpa Killian was right both for Chuck and for me.
My grandmother lived to be 100. She never flew in an
airplane and hardly ever went anywhere as far away as
Pittsburgh. My dad died in a hospital in Clarion,
Pennsylvania, almost within sight of the house where he was
born. And had it not been for the Second World War and sons
scattered across the country, he probably never would have
traveled much farther than Pittsburgh.
My journey has taken me far beyond the other side of
Pittsburgh:
·
college and seminary in Kentucky
·
ministry appointments in
Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Michigan
·
mission experiences in Estonia,
Africa and Angola
·
from Hawthorn, Pennsylvania to
Hong Kong and Havana, Cuba
Back in summer camps and MYF in a small
town north of Pittsburgh, I remember hearing the call,
feeling the call, responding to the call, but I never would
have guessed where the journey would lead. I didn’t even
know there was a Birmingham, Michigan. In fact, I hardly
knew there was a Michigan. Now all these years later, I’ve
found that Grandpa Killian was right. You’ve got to be
careful what you dream, careful when you decide to follow
Jesus Christ, careful when you open your life to God’s
leading and seek God’s will—there is just no telling where
you will land. You might just end up on the other side of
Pittsburgh.
1. At this point on the journey,
above everything else, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for
“the call.”
I feel deep gratitude for the mysterious
and wonderful way God works—sometimes expected, sometimes
baffling, sometimes entirely by surprise.
Mike Lindvall, former pastor at First
Presbyterian in Ann Arbor, tells the story of God’s
mysterious call in the life of his fictional pastor named
David in the fictional small town of North Haven. David says
he remembers the day he was called for the third time to
Minnie MacDowell’s deathbed. He found her in bed dressed
appropriately in her lace nightgown, bedcovers neatly
folded, all in readiness for her final passing. She said,
“Ask me the question, pastor.”
“The question,” he knew from the previous
visits to her deathbed, was absolutely necessary to a
tasteful Christian death. “Are you prepared to die?”
And the die-ee would answer: “Yes, pastor, I am.”
Then the pastor would read the 23rd Psalm, say
the Lord’s Prayer, and the die-ee died. They had done it
twice before...all except for the last part. So he asked,
“Minnie, are you prepared to die?” And he was shocked when
she said “No.” Then she turned to her husband and said,
“Angus, you tell him.”
Well, it seems that when David was called
to this church, Minnie was the secretary of the search
committee. They narrowed the search down to two, David and
the Rev. Mr. Hartwick Benson. Both came to interview and
preach (remember, it was a Presbyterian Church!). The
committee made their choice and Minnie typed up the two
letters—one to Rev. Benson and one to David. But somehow
they got in the wrong envelopes. Mr. Benson got David’s
letter and David got Mr. Benson’s.
Minnie started dabbing her eyes with a
lace hanky. She said: “We never realized the mistake until
you called on the phone to say yes, you’d come. You were so
eager, we just decided, well, what the heck, and let it go.”
(David remembered that a few weeks later he had heard that
the Rev. Mr. Benson got a call to go to a church in
Hawaii.)
Minnie
said “I just couldn’t die with a thing like that on my
conscience.”
“All of a sudden,” says the pastor, “it
wasn’t Minnie who was dying, it was me. This near-deathbed
revelation derailed the rightness I felt about being in
North Haven. My ‘call’ was nothing more than Minnie’s mixed
up letters.”
But as
he reflected on it, he wrote:
I know that so much that has come upon me
in life I did not search out or choose, but rather found by
chance and accepted as grace. The will of God is an
infinitely intricate weaving of incidents and accidents,
plans and providence. Sometimes it works through us,
sometimes in spite of us, but in all things it can work for
good… I drove home to tell my wife that Minnie would live to
die another day, and that I thought I knew where ‘home’
was...but that how this became home is a stranger story than
I had thought.
(M. Lindvall, Good News from North
Haven, page 76)
Mysterious, multi-faceted, unexpected,
ingenious….working through feeble human foibles or the
infinite wonder of God’s design….I can only respond with a
sense of gratitude for the way God calls and God leads. And
I am sure that if you asked
Bob Ward, Bill Ritter and Carl Price…
or Rod Quainton, Carl Gladstone, Jeff
Nelson and Lynn Hasley…
or Scott and Wendy Chrostek…
or seminary students Jacquie Patt, Sally
Meese and Angela MacDonald…
or college student Ben Bower, just
getting started on the journey…
I am sure they would all say the same
thing: “…so much that has happened I did not search out or
choose, but rather found by chance and accepted as grace.”
Amazingly, Grandpa Killian was right.
When you decide to follow your dream, to
follow Jesus Christ, when you open yourself to God’s call,
when you say “yes,” there is just no telling what will
happen. You might just land on the other side of Pittsburgh.
I give
thanks for the call and for the journey this far.
2. And I am grateful for the people I’ve met along the way.
In every church I have served, I have
been blessed by the faith and witness of incredible people
who have taught me the meaning of faith. One example: My
first appointment was to three little churches in the hills
of western Pennsylvania, two of which lacked indoor
plumbing. I had nineteen funerals in my first twelve months
in that charge, preaching in all three churches every Sunday
morning, one of them on Sunday night, and three prayer
meetings during the week. Percy Copenhaver, an old, retired
railroad worker, was the lay leader. When I received a
welcoming letter from him, the handwriting and grammar told
me right away he had little formal education. But I quickly
learned he had a warm heart and a wealth of knowledge about
the faith that came from years of praying over his well-worn
Bible.
One night I had attended a particularly
frustrating Board meeting. In my eager bull-headedness, I
made some dumb mistakes and some of those folks weren’t too
forgiving. Late that night, after the meeting, I went for a
walk around our little village, and I saw the light was
still on in Percy’s living room. I walked up onto his front
porch, and it was as if he was waiting for me. In the warmth
of his living room, I paced and fussed and fumed and he
listened. We wept together and he stood and put his old arms
around me and said, “Son, you’ve got your whole ministry
ahead of you. Don’t let it get you down.”
Percy saved my ministry that night. And
in every appointment I have served along the way, I have
been blessed with the love and prayers, encouragement and
support of countless saints whose faith is still reflected
in my ministry. I have come to love and be loved by folks in
every church, and I have been blessed by saints young and
old, nurtured in my own faith by the faith of others. And
for all of this I can only say a word of gratitude, a word
of thanks for the people I have met along the way.
3. Grateful for the call, thankful for the people…and the
road goes on.
As my friend Chuck Killian says, when you
follow Jesus, you just never know where it will lead. The
road goes on…and God still calls…
·
calls all of us through our
baptism
·
calls all of us as members of this
church
·
calls all of us as disciples of
Jesus Christ
The calling of Christian discipleship is
a calling from which you can never retire, and as long as we
shall live, the journey goes on. Now in my case, I think it
is safe to say that this is the last “call” I am likely to
receive from the bishop. But far beyond where I can see at
this point, as long as we live, the road goes on and God
still calls.
You
know my love for Lord of the Rings and Frederick
Buechner. The two come together in A Room Called Remember,
where Buechner quotes the song of Bilbo Baggins:
The road goes ever on and on
down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone,
and I must follow if I can,
pursuing it with weary feet,
until it joins some larger way,
where many paths and errands meet,
and whither then?
I cannot say.
Buechner adds:
And whither then? Whither now? I cannot
say. But far ahead the road goes on anyway, and we must
follow if we can because it is our road, and it is His road,
and it is the only road that matters when you come right
down to it.
(Frederick Buechner, A Room Called
Remember, page 143)
When I was a kid back in my small home
town in western Pennsylvania, when I first felt the nudge of
God and understood it to be a calling, I had no idea where
it would lead. But I guess Grandpa Killian was right after
all: “You have to be careful about your dreams; you have to
be careful about saying yes to God’s call. You just never
know where your dreams will take you. You might just land
on the other side of Pittsburgh.”
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