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Wayne Peterson
St. Barnabas Lutheran Church
Plymouth, MN
September 19, 2004
Proper C
In about six weeks,
we are going to be asking for our members to put on their nicest
smiles and sit for a few minutes to have their photo taken. It’s
time to produce a new edition of the St. Barnabas pictorial directory.
I know that your schedules are plenty full already, but I hope you
will try to make time to have your photo included because these
directories do become important historical documents. They are
literally a snapshot of the St. Barnabas community at a particular
point in time.
Take this directory for instance. This is the
very first St. Barnabas pictorial directory, taken about fourteen
years ago. The congregation was much smaller then, of course.
Only six pages are needed to display all the photos. The first
thing I noticed was that the pastor’s hair was all one color at that
time. But the part of the directory I want to share with you
this morning is the introductory page. This is what I wrote:
A seminary
professor was traveling by air to attend a seminar in another city
and had to switch planes at one stop. During the layover he
picked up the phone and called a local pastor who had been one of
his students. They talked for several minutes and the
professor discovered that the pastor’s church building was only a
few minutes from the airport. “I’ve got three hours before my
plane leaves,” said the professor. “Why don’t you pick me up
and drive me over to see your church?”
“I’d love to,”
said the pastor, “but three hours isn’t nearly enough time to see my
church. They’re all over town!”
Most
congregational pictorial directories have a picture of their church
building on the front cover. This one does not, and for a good
reason. St. Barnabas is not a building. St. Barnabas is
the people from all over town who regularly gather in the building
at 15600 Old Rockford Road to worship their God.
St. Barnabas
is accountants, bakers, computer programmers, dieticians,
electricians, financial advisors, gardeners, homemakers…an alphabet
full of people who live their Christian faith seven days a week.
Their faces fill the pages of this directory. It is they who
are St. Barnabas Lutheran Church.
So take some
time to look over the following pages and you will discover what St.
Barnabas really looks like.
This same
understanding of church underlies the devotional materials I write and
include in the Crosswinds newsletter. It is called
“Church Begins at Home” to be a gentle reminder that it is incorrect
to speak of “going to church”. We may go to the church building,
but we don’t “go to church” because wherever we are – at home, at
work, at school, on vacation – wherever we are, we are church.
Church begins at home because that’s where we begin. But when we
get in the car or on the school bus, the church of Jesus Christ gets
in the car or on the school bus. Wherever we go, there goes the
church.
That’s because each
one of us has received a call from God. What’s that? You
say you don’t remember getting a call from God? You know that we
often speak of those who work for a church as having a call, whether
it’s being called as pastor or church musician or lay minister or
parish assistant. But you work in the secular world. You
were hired, not called. In what sense do I say that each of us
has received a call from God?
The understanding
of call – or the related term “vocation”, which comes from the Latin
word vocare, “to call” – can be traced to Martin Luther back in
the early 1500s. Prior to Luther’s time, only priests, monk, and
nuns were considered to have a divine call. These were the only
people who were thought to be truly serving God. But Luther
understood one’s call to come at baptism, and that means we are all
called to be priests – the “priesthood of all believers”. There
are not gradations of status in God’s eyes. The ministry of Word
and Sacrament to which Pastor Chris and I have been called is a very
important ministry, but no more important than the ministries of
teacher, accountant, manager, nurse, programmer, parent, politician,
custodian, waitress, store clerk, farmer, or any vocation we might
name. All of these vocations are of equal status in God’s eyes
because any vocation that serves the common good is a way of serving
God. What makes a vocation a “Christian” vocation is not the
tasks that are done or the place where the tasks are done, but the
person who does the tasks.
Luther’s situation
was a little different from ours. There was little social
mobility in his day. If one was a baker, she was likely to be a
baker her entire life. If one was a coal miner, he was likely to
be a coal miner his entire life. That meant, for Luther, that
one is called “in” a vocation, not “into” a vocation. Luther
assumed people had a certain vocation and he helped them see that by
providing a service to their neighbor, they were living out their
baptismal calling to serve Christ.
In this day and age
in our American culture, it is becoming more and more rare for a
person to have one vocation their entire lives. Part of that is
due to rapid changes in technology. When I graduated from high
school, becoming a web designer was not a career option, though one
could get training in the repair of 8-track tape players. Part
of the change is also due to the fluidity of economics – in this last
generation the terms “takeover”, “outsourcing”, and “downsizing” have
become part of our vocabulary and, for some of us, have led to one or
more job transitions. Another reason many of us have multiple
vocations in our lifetimes is the simple fact that people live longer
today. In Luther’s day, the average life expectancy was probably
in the early 40’s. Today when people reach their early 40’s,
many of them start thinking about a change in vocation.
You put all those
factors together and the reality for many of us is that we are not
called “in” a vocation. Instead, we struggle trying to decide
what vocation we are called “into”. Some people have very
definite experiences where they believe God has told them to enter a
certain vocation, or they have known since they were quite young that
this particular vocation is what they want to do. Others have
never felt a specific call and feel like they are treading water while
trying to discern what God wants them to do.
The best advice I
ever received about discerning God’s call came on my very first day at
seminary. I was sitting in a large auditorium with other new
students and the speaker was the dean of students, Dan Simundson.
Dr. Simundson looked out at the variety of people in front of him,
both men and women, some just out of college, others in their 40s or
50s, and he said something like this: “I realize that some of you are
here with a high degree of certainty that seminary is precisely where
God wants you to be. I also realize that many in this room have
no clue why you are here. To both groups, as you continue to
discern your call, I suggest that you evaluate your talents and
interests, identify where those talents can be used effectively in
serving others, and consider that your calling.”
I love that
definition because it applies to every one of us. In whatever
stage of life you are in, evaluate your talents and interests,
identify where those talents can be used effectively in serving
others, and consider that your calling – the place where you serve God
by serving others. You might discover that you are indeed called
in the job you currently have. Or you might discern that you
have talents and interests that are not being given full expression in
your current job. That might lead you to explore a vocation
change, or perhaps seeking a volunteer activity that allows those
talents to blossom and bear fruit.
Luther’s insights
into the concept of Christian vocation have a very important
implication for us: we serve God in our work, whatever it is.
Commenting on Jesus’ teaching, “Do to others as you would have them do
to you”, what we know as the Golden Rule, Luther writes about the
vocations of his era:
If you are a
manual laborer, you find that the Bible has been put into your
workshop, into your hand, into your heart. It teaches and
preaches how you should treat your neighbor. Just look at your
tools—at your needle or thimble, your beer barrel, your goods, your
scales or yardstick or measure—and you will read this [Golden Rule]
inscribed on them. Everywhere you look, it stares at
you…Indeed, there is no shortage of preaching. You have as
many preachers as you have transactions, goods, tools, and other
equipment in your house and home. All this is continually
crying out to you, “Friend, use me in your relations with your
neighbor just as you would want your neighbor to use their property
in their relations with you.”
One of the goals of the Centered Life initiative that
we are beginning this month is to encourage each of us to see the
activities we do during the week at home, work, and school to be our
calling, our service to God and neighbor. In order to help us
begin to see the extent of the ministries of the portion of the church
that worships here at St. Barnabas, we have a favor to ask of you
after the service. There is a large map of the metro area in the
narthex and a set of stars. We ask that you go up to the map and
take as many stars as you need to show where you are called in
ministry during the week. It might be an office building or a
school or a retail store. It might be your home to show your
vocation as parent or spouse. It might the place where you
volunteer your time. I know that some of you need a national or
even world map to show where your vocation takes you. It will be
exciting to see all the places where the church goes every week.
God bless you as
you discern and live out your baptismal calling.
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