Pastor’s Report for 2002
Annual Meeting – January 26, 2003I know it’s customary to talk about the particular achievements that we have had this past year...and about our hopes and plans for the coming year. But I’ll leave that to the reports of others. I haven’t been able to get the story of God’s call to Samuel in our Old Testament lesson from last Sunday out of my head.
We have heard on numerous occasions about the call to ministry that God reveals in the lives of pastors and priests that have led them to leave careers and life plans to attend seminary and go into fulltime church service. We have also heard, but perhaps not as often, about the call God places on each of us to be disciples...to live the Word.
But what is a call? “Hey, Adam! Come home for dinner!” is a call. Ring! Ring! “Mr. Kappus, I am from the Surefire Vacuum Cleaner Company and we’d like to come by and show you how wonderful our vacuum cleaner is.” That’s a call.
Or there’s the kind of call God issued to the boy Samuel in the middle of the night. “Samuel, Samuel.” And Samuel kept going to see his teacher Eli to find out what it was Eli wanted, until Eli urges the boy to respond as though to God ... and sure enough. At an early age, God called Samuel to be God’s messenger. That was Samuel’s call.
This story of God’s call to Samuel has always held great power for me. For one thing it is one of the many biblical examples of how involved in human lives God is. For another, I believed with all my heart that God was perfectly capable of forgoing pen and paper or use of the telephone and choosing instead to call one directly out of sleep into God’s work.
It is from the Bible that we Christians get our idea of a call from God to some particular work. There are many biblical examples: Abram becomes Abraham, Moses, Deborah, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Mary, John the Baptist, Jesus’ call to his disciples, and Paul. Christians place great importance upon call. It’s not something only biblical heroes and heroines experience. Christians are called into church membership and a Christian life. Ministers are called to pastor churches and serve as hospital chaplains, campus ministers, counselors, and missionaries. We believe these calls begin not with our initiative but with that of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
I think it’s significant that those who receive such a call from God are not always eager to accept it. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jonah all resist God’s call because they recognize that the call God offers will not be problem-free or popular. Having rashly volunteered to serve as God’s prophet, Isaiah gets these daunting words from God: “Go, and say to my people: ‘Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.’ Jeremiah protests his tender years do not equip him to accept God’s call. Jonah goes so far as to ship himself off in the opposite direction. And what if Jesus had used as his opening gambit with the disciples these cheerful, but true, words? “Follow me and I’ll make you fishers of men, which means, many will admire you, many will despise you, and ultimately all you’ll have left is disaster and your leader dying on a cross.”
Fortunately those aren’t the words that come to us as Christ calls us to follow him...or is it? Do we know what Christ’s call to us is? Have we even heard it?
Sometimes I wonder if most of us are really listening -- in worship, in prayer, in reading the Bible. We have become so comfortable with the Word of God. The name of God rises to our lips many times each day -- in table grace and bedtime prayer; in casual expressions of “God bless you,” or “God willing”; even in those meaningless (and slightly blasphemous) punctuations of speech: “Oh God,” when the traffic light turns yellow, and “God, it’s cold today” (as though the Lord really needs to be informed).
In a strange way, the word of the Lord is almost too commonplace today. Every motel room has its Gideon Bible; every courtroom witness is sworn in with a hand on “the Good Book”; on countless coffee tables and bookshelves across this great land, the scriptures are accorded an honored place.
Yet when are they ever read? When is their message ever heeded? When -- in this frenetic, over-programmed world of ours -- do we ever take time to simply sit in silence; to open ourselves to what the Lord may be revealing; to say, as Samuel did of old, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening”?
You and I make ourselves busy -- oh, so very busy -- and it works out very neatly that way, doesn’t it? Sometimes I suspect that’s half the reason for the mad pace of life today: so we don’t have to tune our souls to the silence ... So we don’t have to face the disturbing possibility that the Lord’s agenda for our lives may be different from the one we have so carefully plotted.
“Life is short. Play hard.” That’s the bumper-sticker motto many of us live by. Leisure has become serious business in our society. We now have, in America, a multi-billion-dollar leisure “industry” -- how’s that for an oxymoron: “leisure industry”? This industry provides everything from sporting goods, to time-share vacations, to pay-per-view movies. The incessant drumbeat of advertising not only calls us to line up for the leisure activities we already know we want, but creates in us a thirst for those we never knew existed. That’s how complicated our leisure pursuits have become!
Once upon a time, “leisure” meant relaxing with a good book ... puttering around the yard ... spending a quiet evening at home. Now, it’s results-driven. Leisure is that long list of things we’ve got to accomplish on our day off, or else we’ll fall behind in our recreation. (Sounds like a second, or even third, job to me!)
So raucous have our lives become, so filled with background noise, that we find it hard to hear the voice of God, calling in the night. Jesus said of the spiritually bedraggled people of his day: “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” [Matthew 13:13]
The same, sad to say, can be said of us, though we call ourselves Christian disciples. We honor Jesus as “the Word,” but make ourselves too busy to listen for his living word in our lives...too busy to seek the fellowship of worship or spiritual growth.
You and I have the power to change that. All we need do is give ourselves permission to say “no” to the busyness; to cease merely doing and start being; to listen for the voice of God in our lives. Start with just a few minutes a day. Empty your heart and your mind, and simply enjoy being who you are, a God-created person who has been redeemed by Jesus Christ. Simply thrill at being in the presence of your Creator. Take time to read the Bible as a family. Use a daily devotional...it only takes a few minutes.
I am becoming more and more convinced, the longer I am in ministry, that God is not silent; it is we who have stopped our ears. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” God is calling you...find a way to hear him.
