January 20, 2008 - Affirming our call in the face of doubt - Frank Alton

Isaiah 49:1-7; I Corinthians 1:4-9; John 1:35-42

Each year on the third Sunday of January we combine two important experiences of call. We celebrate the life and work of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, one of the greatest, most daring and eloquent articulators of prophetic Christianity to arise in history. And we ordain & install deacons and elders to ministry at Immanuel. To connect ordination to the work of Rev. King is to recall that he acted as a minister of the Gospel, and to appropriately raise the stakes of what it means for us to be ordained.

Ordination is always a mixed bag. On the one hand it is an opportunity to focus on the call of regular folks to ministry. On the other hand, it can make it look like ordination is the privilege of a few – deacons, elders, and ministers of word and sacrament. If we look more closely it gets even more problematic. Ordination has always included a dimension of exclusivity. For most of the past 2000 years it was only available to men. After a long struggle it opened up to women. Today a struggle is going on to open it up to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Connecting ordination to Dr. King’s legacy may help us make ordination more inclusive as we remember his statement that “a right delayed is a right denied.” Maybe it’s good that ordination is not considered a sacrament in the Presbyterian Church as in other churches. Ordination as currently practiced is not something all Christians can or do experience. Baptism is. Baptism is our true ordination to ministry. Moses said a prayer in the Book of Numbers that was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost: “would that all God’s people were prophets.” Since Pentecost all of us are called to be prophets.

The church is still catching up with Pentecost truth. Beyond ways the church tries to exclude certain people from full participation in prophetic ministry, the call itself evokes insecurity. Call is usually accompanied by doubt & inadequacy. Isaiah speaks of being called from his mother’s womb. But in living out that call he said, “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” The Apostle Paul addresses self doubt in the Christian community at Corinth, where competition for the more spectacular gifts left people feeling insecure and alienated. Dr. King himself was a reluctant leader, ridden with self-doubt in the face of attacks from his own supporters and death threats from outside.

Prophets are those who act in the midst of their doubts. How does the Spirit of the prophets help people to act more authentically in spite of their doubts? Each of the 3 texts we read this morning speaks to one way the Spirit works in us to act courageously in the face of doubts.

The Isaiah text shows that when we doubt our ability to pull off our call, the Spirit expands our vision rather than take away responsibility. When Isaiah expressed doubt about his call he recalled the deep source of that call and heard God say, “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.”(Is. 49:6). “You think you’re inadequate to bring my message to Israel? Then let me make your task bigger: bring it to the whole world.” Why, when he already felt overwhelmed by the task, would the Spirit expand his vision rather than rein it in? When we fail to expand our vision we use fear to protect a reduced vision that no longer serves us. Do we need to shift from putting forth our best effort to depending on a higher force? Or to focus on the big picture even if it’s too big?

In the final years of his young life, Dr. King, as the prophet Isaiah before him, knew he had to raise the stakes of his call. He came to know, against the moderating voices of some of his advisors, that he couldn’t limit his efforts to the civil rights movement. He warned that unless we engage in a great revolution of values & overcome racism, materialism and militarism, we would be “dragged down the long, dark & shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality and strength without sight.”

Has the dark time has come in our day? We face a constitutional crisis brought on by the acts of a President who has placed himself above the law and is conducting an illegal war, subverting the Constitution & willfully ignoring a planetary crisis that threatens the future of life on earth. As we are manipulated by fear and distrust, despair overcomes decency. We are losing faith in our capacity to create the world anew.

Can we hear the Spirit’s call to enlarge our vision, to include rather than exclude, to embrace rather than reject? What does this look like in practice? Last year the Nobel Peace prize went to Mohammed Yunis, who developed the Gramein Bank lending that has made over a billion dollars available in developing countries over its life. The bank makes loans to non-governmental organizations that establish community lending co-ops which work with the poor as partners, helping them to understand the ins and outs of business development and debt repayment. In the third world this system has less than 2% default.

The prophetic texts call us to do something that is not rational. Why would I trust someone who had nothing to lose? It does not make sense intellectually. Emotionally, I don’t have anything in common with these people. But if I hear a spiritual call to social justice, everything changes; my actions are different. They may seem crazy if the framework is strictly rational or emotional; but in a spiritual framework, partnership with the poor makes perfect sense. In fact, the US government, World Bank & IMF are preparing to put part of their funding into exactly this framework.

As unlikely as it sounds on paper, the message Isaiah heard to expand the vision when every thing seemed to be falling apart actually makes sense. And so does the message given by Paul to the Church at Corinth: you already have every thing you need to get the job done. “You are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of Jesus Christ.” In this second case the Spirit affirms the adequacy of peoples’ gifts (I Cor 1:7)

Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth begins with three references to call: “Paul, called to be an apostle;” “those called to be saints;” and “all those who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Then Paul affirms that there are enough gifts to go around. From the rest of the letter we know that there was a spirit of competitiveness around gifts at Corinth. People thought certain gifts were more valuable than others.

Several years ago Jackie Herst taught us an exercise she used as a professor at the UCLA School of Management. We were training church officers like the ones we ordain and install today. She divided us all up into north, south, east and west based on certain ways we tend to behave. Those in the North are those who want to get it done now. They tend to be impatient with process and want to get to action. Those in the South want to make sure to take care of people while pursuing mission. It’s never okay for them that individuals might be ignored or overworked on the way to accomplishing something, no matter how important. The folks in the East who cast the vision. They look beyond roadblocks & practical details of actually getting things done in favor of clarifying where we need to go. Finally, people who identify with the West insist on breaking down the vision into baby steps, to focus on the practical details that make sure the vision gets accomplished.

The exercise serves many purposes for teams that work together. It helps us realize that our adequacy doesn’t rest in individual capacities alone, but by putting all our gifts together as a community. Each person must offer their gift - visions will never be accomplished if someone doesn’t attend to the details. But we must not focus on our feelings of inadequacy because we can’t get the whole job done by ourselves, or judge others as inadequate because they can’t do what we can do. Some have great ideas but do not know how to get them accomplished. Others can’t lift their heads from the details long enough to know where we’re going. Some are so impatient that they start out strong but watch as their projects keep fizzling over time.

Doubt & judgments characterize communities marked by a spirit of competitiveness. When gifts for service are seen as competitive each person wonders whether her or his gifts are adequate. Because each of us is so insecure, we are blind to the insecurity of others. So we criticize them, thinking their heads are too big, that they think they are too great, when the truth is that all the time they are questioning them selves. Our criticisms evoke either defensiveness or despair in them, instead of improvement in their performance. How much better to evoke the spirit of cooperation as Paul did with the Corinthians: “I give thanks for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift.”

Finally, we come to this morning’s Gospel text. The final strategy the Spirit uses to give us the courage to act in the midst of our doubts is to give us a new name: “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas (which is translated Peter). (John 1:42) We said last week that we receive a new name at baptism. The true meaning of baptism is that we overcome our doubts by truly hearing God’s voice call us by a new & beloved name. We also said that most of us need mediators in order to believe that voice. We need people who speak God’s word to us. I don’t mean preachers who expound the Bible. I mean people who call us by our new name – the name by which God calls us: beloved.

The new name we receive isn’t only individual; it’s communal. If individually we’re called beloved, communally we’re called family. We’re not the “human race” because that leads us to compete. We are the “human family” because Jesus’ calls us to forgive, to love and pray for our enemies & adversaries. A few years ago President Bush identified three countries as an axis of evil. Decades earlier, Martin King identified three enemies of the human family: bigotry, poverty and militarism. To follow Jesus and Dr. King will lead us to critique any international foreign policy that would seek to destroy or even dominate our enemies. Their followers will always seek political and diplomatic solutions over warfare.

On March 15, Dr. King delivered the eulogy for a white Unitarian minister named James Reeb. Reeb had worked passionately and at great personal risk for civil rights in the south. He was murdered by white segregationists during a march in Selma, Alabama. But in his Eulogy, Dr. King spread the responsibility much more broadly. “James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows. He was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician who has moved down the path of demagoguery, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff and law enforcement agent who practices lawlessness in the name of law. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam, yet cannot protect the lives of its own citizens seeking constitutional rights. Yes, he was even murdered by cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation & stands on the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice….

I can say to you this afternoon that in spite of tensions & uncertainties of this period, something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away. Out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened. Those at the bottom of society, shirtless & barefoot people of the land, are developing a new sense of somebodyness, carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. The kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.” (Excerpts from “A Witness to the Truth,” the eulogy for The Rev. James Reeb delivered by The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Brown Chapel, Selma, Alabama, March 15, 1965)

“Somebodyness” is a pretty good translation of the new name that people receive in baptism. Dr. King helps us realize that receiving that new name is not a transaction in which the recipient is passive. He said people “are developing a new sense of somebodyness.” Unfortunately, the new name was being blocked for some by others. It’s still happening today. Let us stop blocking the call of God that makes everyone a prophet and everyone a somebody. Let us follow Jesus and Martin to implement their prophetic agenda in a world that sorely needs it.