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February 7, 2010
Isaiah 6: 1-8, Luke 5: 1-11

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time here over the past month talking in one way or another about the notion of God’s call in our lives.  And a fair amount of that has been in terms of God’s call to ordained ministry.

We started the year bidding farewell to Kristin Gorton after her year with us as a pastoral intern. She talked about her sense of call as she wanders along the path toward a more formalized ministry.

Then we welcomed Pastor Leah into our midst and began to get a sense of how her presence with us would weave into our journey as a congregation. Last week we celebrated Leah’s call to ministry among us with a joyous installation service.

It’s easy in the midst of all this to think that God’s call has to do with folks who chose to make ministry a profession.  And when you listen to the reading from Isaiah today, you definitely get the sense that God’s call is something awesome, powerful, even a bit strange, something that happens in holy places to people set apart.

That’s why I’d like to focus today on the notion that God’s call is something that has to do with each of us as individuals and with us as a congregation as a whole.  It’s not just about God’s call to Phil and Leah and “they’ll take care of the rest of us.”

It’s about how we each pay attention to where our greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need, to quote theologian and author Frederick Buechner. It’s not a one-time deal. It’s a continuing awareness of the different roles we each play as ministers to one another and to our community.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I don’t think lots of folks here are not already engaged in amazing forms of ministry or that you don’t think about these things as you go through life.  

I do want to offer the idea that it is worth remembering what we do here is ministry and that we ought not give short shift to thinking of our lives as something to be lived in response to the call of Jesus.

“Come and see,” Jesus told those first people who were curious about what he was up to. They discovered that he was offering a whole new way of looking at life, one with a message of God’s abundant love for each person, one with a message that spiritually freed them from so many of the things that weighed them down.

And then there was that fishing trip we heard about in today’s Gospel. If you think about this story in the most literal terms, it just sounds like a fish story to top all fish stories.

“Yeah, we went out in the boat with this guy Jesus and we caught so many fish the boat began to sink. And you know … they were all this big.”

This story is not about fishing. It is about going deeper in our search for God, discovering the abundance of God’s love, then realizing that we have a role to play in being with others on their search and finding ways for them to experience the abundance of God’s love. And that always requires us to change a bit along the way – to leave the old fish nets behind as we set off on the path of Jesus.

Let me take those ideas bit by bit.

When this story began, Jesus was on the solid ground of the shore of the Sea of Galilee – Luke calls it the lake of Gennesarat, but it’s the same body of water. This was probably right along the shore at Capernaum, where Simon and James and John lived and worked.

Jesus asked them to take him a little ways from the shore in their boat so there would be more room for those who had come to hear the word of God. It’s a small step at first, moving from solid ground to the gentle rocking of the waves in shallow water.

Then he asks them to go deeper. And he asks them to try something that they had tried before without success – at least on this day. Go out to where the water is deeper, the water rougher, the fish harder to catch.

Think of that as an invitation to us. Sometimes, we need the security of solid ground. But if we are going to really get connected to God, we have to be willing to go deep within ourselves and seek out the sense of God’s presence. We have to go to places that are uncomfortable, risky. It doesn’t work every time. So we try going deeper again.

What we may well discover on one of those trips deep within ourselves is that God’s love really does fill our lives.  At first, that can amaze us. And then we want to let that love spill over to others by the way we live. We begin to think of what our sense of God’s presence calls us to do.

A number of years ago, I spent some time talking to a number of people about their sense of call and wrote a little book about it.

Sandy Simonson was a farm widow in northwest Wisconsin who was struggling with personal grief and economic loss on many levels when one night, she sensed that what she should be doing was starting support groups for other farm families in distress.

La Vella Hawes was a mom who was paralyzed for a time after a serious car accident when she was 28. As she recovered, she began to focus on what God might have in store for her. She teamed up with another woman in Kenosha and started a neighborhood center. But it wasn’t like her sense of call was finished. She said: “Every morning, I say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I call that wrestling with God.”

You may not know Sandy or LaVella, but many of you will know the singing group Peter, Paul and Mary. Paul talked about finding his calling backstage after a concert in Texas in 1968 when a young man named Steve said he wanted to talk to the singer about God. That conversation shifted the focus in Paul’s life from what he called the “success-excess syndrome” to repairing his relationships with his family and to using his opportunities as a musician to make the suffering and injustices in places like El Salvador ever more vivid to his listeners.

The stories go on, but the point is this. Each of us senses God’s call in different ways, at different times. If you are waiting for an angel to show up with a hot coal for your lips … well, be my guest.  But for most of us, the sense of God’s call comes more gently, more gradually. And like for Simon and James and John, it comes in the midst of our ordinary daily lives.

I’d ask you to think about two things as we move through the rest of our service this morning. One is that all of us are called to ministry in one way or another.  The other is that we as congregation also have a call.

When Jan and Connie read scripture this morning or when the ushers serve communion or when Jeff plays the piano, they are engaging in an act of worship ministry.

When Jon and Michael and Rick and Wendy were commissioned as council members this morning, they were engaging in the ministry of leadership.

When some of our members trek out to St. John’s in Oregon this week to make meals or play with kids or spend the night with homeless families, they are engaging in acts of caring ministry.  

When the Oebsers and the Neidharts got things ready to serve us in Fellowship Hall this morning, they were engaging in acts of the ministry of hospitality.

When Doris Knaack and Sue Webb testified before the county board last fall trying to head off cuts in human service funding, they were engaging in a ministry of advocacy.  

When the Tetzlaffs and Bob Webb and others gather here once a month to send out our newsletters, they are engaged in a ministry of service.

The list goes on and on around here. It’s easy to just think of these things as volunteer tasks that we do. I’d encourage you to think of them as one of the ways you respond to God’s call in your life. They are acts of ministry.

The second thing I’d ask you to think about this morning is what we as a congregation sense as a collective call from God.

We are known as a place that is welcoming, that is engaged in the community, that cares about the environment, that has a focus on children, that values good music, that cares deeply about each other.

But just like LaVella wakes up every day asking God about what she’s doing, we as a community need to be continually listening and talking about how to discern where God is calling us next. Where does our deepest joy as a community cross paths with the world’s need?

Just as Jesus took his first followers out into the deep – where it may have seemed futile and may have seemed scary – Jesus’ words invite us, as individuals and as a congregation – to go deeper in the hope of experiencing the abundance of God’s love.  

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus told Simon – and us.  

So let’s set out for the deep and let the abundance of God’s love be with us as we put down the nets that limit us to the way things have been. Let us live all into our callings as followers of Jesus.