A "Sermon" on Vocation
A few years ago, I began experimenting with a new way of formatting the word portion of a non-Sunday worship service (e.g., midweek chapel). Rather than the traditional sermon, I find an assortment of poems, quotes, or passages that relate to the theme of the day’s and have different people in the community simply stand up and read them one after the other. I’ve found it useful because it mitigates against the one authoritative person climbing the pulpit to tell us all what this biblical passage really means and instead allows for a mosaic of voices from different traditions, generations, and cultures to form a messy and overlapping polyphony of wisdom.
A few weeks ago, I was asked to lead morning prayer at the Association of Theological Schools Newly Appointed Faculty Roundtable (I’m sure because I have “worship” in my title) around the theme of vocation. I have a love/hate relationship with the word vocation because I believe strongly that we do have a calling on our lives that we should listen for and open ourselves up to, but so often vocation and calling is conflated with a particular job and narrowed down to a singular path. Vocational discernment then becomes this anxious search for that one perfect job on that one unique path because if we somehow miss it, we will have missed our true calling (in a similar way to how the language of soulmate can create an almost impossible search for “the one”).
All of these pressures are only exacerbated when discerning some type of ministerial vocation. For example, one of the pieces of supposed wisdom I often hear bandied about in conversations around discerning pastoral vocation goes back to Charles Spurgeon (at least from my initial Google search) and goes something like, “If you can do anything else [but pastoral ministry], do it. If you can stay out of ministry, stay out of the ministry.” That is: you should be so called to this one specific vocation—ministry—that there is no possible way you could even imagine doing something else. You have to be all in.
I wholeheartedly disagree.
When vocation becomes so intertwined with a specific job—especially the pastorate—it limits our imaginations for the many paths we could take to live out our call. Each of these paths could use different combinations of our gifts and parts of our personality to work toward a vision of goodness, truth, and beauty with which we have been particularly graced. It also can create an all-too-common situation where an unhealthy pastor does not leave the ministry when he (most often “he” in my experience) should because he has been formed to think there’s nothing else he could do. I want a minister who has gifts that they could use in many different ways, but who feels called in this moment to pastor a particular congregation until they discern that that season is done. Perhaps just as I’m growing suspicious of the one preacher telling us the singular authoritative interpretation, I’m likewise suspicious of the one call that can only be lived out in one way.
So, here is the cloud of witnesses throughout time and space that I used a few weeks ago to “preach” on vocation:
“I understand that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS. THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES…IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL! Then, in the recess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love…my vocation, at last I have found it…MY VOCATION IS LOVE!”
-St. Therese of Lisieux“The Spirit is not the monopoly of a movement,
even of a Christian movement,
of a hierarchy, or priesthood, or religious congregation.
The Spirit is free,
and [the Spirit] wants men and women,
wherever they are,
to realize their vocation to find Christ,
who became flesh to save all human flesh.”
-Óscar Romero“Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”
-William Stafford“Every [person] has a vocation to be someone: but [they] must understand
clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation [they] can only be one person:
[them]selves.”
-Thomas Merton“A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into
compassion and understanding for others.”
-David Whyte“Vocation implies limitation.”
-Flannery O’Connor“Today I understand vocation quite differently—not as a goal to be achieved
but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean
scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the
treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a
voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a
voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the
original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
-Parker Palmer“I’m often accosted by students who want to know, ‘Dr. Weems, do you
think I should go on for a PhD?’ And I always say, ‘That depends.’ ‘On
what?’ they ask. ‘Well, it depends upon whether you love footnotes. If you
love footnotes, then you’re on to your destiny, because for a scholar, it’s not
the book, it’s the footnotes. For the scholar, it’s not the front of the book, it’s
the back of the book.’Others ask, ‘Do you think I should become a writer?’ ‘It depends,’ I
answer. ‘It depends on what?’ ‘It depends upon whether you love
sentences. You’ve got to just read sentences and fall in love with
sentences.…If you love sentences, perhaps you’re born to be a writer.’‘Suppose I’m supposed to be a minister. How will I know?’ ‘Can you live
with the possibility that no one will believe a word you say? Uh-huh, now
you’re on to your destiny.’I asked a painter once how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I love the
smell of paint.’I asked a gardener how she came to be a gardener. ‘I love the smell of wet
dirt.’I asked an interior designer how she came to be a designer. She said, ‘I
love the color black.’When the work’s complexities fire your imagination and its contradictions
fascinate you, then you know you’re on to your purpose.”
-Renita Weems
Amen.
Wonder-ings
Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it the first time, but I re-read Ali Smith’s Autumn recently and was shocked to think I barely registered its beauty the first time around. A meditation on post-Brexit England and nativism, late-capitalist bureaucracy, death, and intergenerational friendship, the prose is gorgeous and littered with relatable feeling and insight for our time:
I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encouraging it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.
and:
“There is no point in making up a world,
Elisabeth said, when there’s already a real world.There’s just the world, and there’s the truth about the world.
You mean, there’s the truth, and there’s the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said.
No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said.
And whoever makes up the story makes up the world, Daniel said. So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion.
How does making things up welcome people? Elisabeth said.
What I’m suggesting, Daniel said, is, if you’re telling a story, always give your characters the same benefit of the doubt you’d welcome when it comes to yourself.
Like being on benefits? Like unemployment benefit? Elisabeth said.
The necessary benefit of the doubt, Daniel said. And always give them a choice…By which I mean characters who seem to have no choice at all. Always give them a home.”
and:
“It’s a question of how we regard our situations…how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all.”
I’ll read and listen to anything Marilynne Robinson deigns to give this world because there’s few people that use words with more care, nuance, and clarity. She didn’t disappoint in the first half of this interview with Ezra Klein where she discusses the necessity of beauty for our understanding of God and the world:
“God does not need food. God does not need shelter. God does not participate in the satisfaction of these kinds of demands that the world makes on the rest of us. But God can participate in beauty. Even in the creation of the tabernacle in Exodus, the assumption is that beauty is meaningful to God. And it’s something that he conceives, that he wishes to see, that he celebrates the fact of people being able to make real in the world and so on.
God knows beauty. And God enjoys beauty. And he plants the world full of it. We live in his Eden, in a sense…”
and:
“a mind that’s schooled toward good attention sees beauty all the time.”
and:
“When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.”
May you too find things that are beautiful, expose yourself to them at length, and give them preferential attention for the sake of your mind and the sake of the world.
Peace,
Dave