Welcome to the new school year!

                                                            Proper 6 B (Pentecost 2)

                                                            St. Stephen’s

                                                            14 June 2009

Our lesson from the Hebrew scripture today starts out on the theme:  “God makes a mistake.”  Oddly, this is not all that unusual.  In this story, God has appointed Saul to be the first king of Israel, but Saul hasn’t really worked out all that well.  God thought Saul would be a good king when he first called him to the job, but—well, sometimes you’re just wrong about somebody.  So now God wants to change kings and pick someone else.  He calls another somebody—Samuel the prophet—to work this out for him. 

Samuel isn’t very happy about this, because Saul has been his mentor and he’s having some separation anxiety.  He’s also afraid of being killed by Saul’s supporters if he goes to Bethlehem, and really doesn’t want to go.  You may have noticed that a lot of the folks God calls argue fairly strenuously about having to go along with God’s call.  Just think of Jonah, if you need another example.

Well, God nonetheless convincingly talks Samuel into going forth to identify the third person with a calling in this one passage.  Samuel doesn’t really have the hang of this, though, and keeps guessing wrong about which of Jesse’s sons should be the next king.

“No, no” says God, as Samuel points to a likely candidate. “Don’t look on the height of his stature, for I have rejected him.”  That is to say, “Just because he is tall doesn’t mean he’s got the call.”  He also says appearance doesn’t count, but according to the text, it seems helpful to be handsome and have “beautiful eyes.”  I’ll let you work that one out for yourselves.

In any case, Samuel finally gets to David, whom God has chosen as the next king, and gives him the call.  The rest, as they say, is history.

 This business of being called can be messy and confusing and chaotic, even, apparently, for God.  If you find, like Saul or Samuel or David, that God seems to be calling you, you’re not necessarily in for an easy ride.  Trying to do what God wants may mean you are thwarted by the bureaucracy or crippled by indecision or awed by the size of the task.  You may well feel you aren’t ready, aren’t worthy, aren’t up to the fight.  But each of us is called to be a “man of mission” or a “woman of valor.”  How we’re expected to work that out varies for each of us, of course, as we’ve seen in those we’ve honored—Florence Gray worked for orphans in Honduras, among other things.  Charles Humphries is a source of seemingly unending diaconal energy and assistance.  Jane Prahl works quietly and beautifully behind-the-scenes for the altar guild. 

And Guy Bailey.  What did you do again, Guy?  Oh yeah—Guy has simply been one of the pillars on which St. Stephen’s has been grounded for most of his adult life—on the vestry, as a lay reader and Eucharistic minister, as chancellor, on endless committees…and here, through thick and thin.  And as he fulfills that mission, he also wrestles with the stumbling blocks thrown in his path as he moves toward that other mission to which he is clearly called—the priesthood. 

For you, then, Guy, a small prayer, straight from today’s psalm:  “May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend you; send you help from his holy place, and strengthen you out of Zion; remember all your offerings and accept your burnt sacrifice; grant you your heart’s desire and prosper all your plans.”

Guy, and Father Mike, and at one point all of us up here struggled with the meaning of this business of call and with difficult questions of how far to go to answer it.  Like Samuel, we all eventually set out for Bethlehem, despite the danger, despite the risks. despite the distance, despite the uncertainty.  There was  really nothing else we could do.

Each of us follows her own route to Bethlehem, to the stable and to the house of Jesse, to seek out our call and discern God’s will for us. At base, God’s will for us is not that complicated:  do justice, love mercy, walk humbly.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  We all know it’s not that easy, but each step we take to fulfill that call expands and increases the kingdom of God.

The kingdom is not heaven.  It is not a peaceful millennium at the end of time.  It is not a mansion in God’s house.  It’s not a place with streets of gold.  The kingdom is here and now, if we will make it be so.  The sower of the seed in Jesus’ parables in the Gospel today is not God—it is Guy, or Michael, or me, or you, or any of us.  And the harvest is not a “harvest of souls”—you know, that old evangelical standard by which we tried to convert as many people to Christianity as quickly as possible, regardless of how much we trampled on them while we did it.  The harvest is the burgeoning of the kingdom as each soul lives out its call to do justice and mercy, to help those in need, to make the world more Christ-like.

Again, it’s not easy.  Even Jesus’ parables tell us that.  If you were a zero-ith century Galilean peasant farmer—well, you’re not, but if you were—you would immediately realize that Jesus is pulling your leg a little by saying the kingdom is like the product of the mustard seed.  The mustard seed doesn’t create some kind of mighty tree; it only makes a low bush about 3 to 4 feet high.  And what’s more, it’s a really annoying bush at that.  It is, bluntly, a weed, a highly invasive weed that Jewish oral tradition forbids you to even plant in a garden.  It is hardly the greatest even of all shrubs, no less the greatest of plants.  The darn thing takes over where it is not wanted, gets out of control, and attracts birds into cultivated areas where they are destructive.

And it grows like wildfire, if only we get it started.  Don’t have to be much of a gardener.  Don’t have to know the latest horticultural techniques.  Anyone can answer the call to spread the kingdom.  All it needs is the tiniest push and it’s off and running.  And it’s not invisible—we can see the kingdom growing, we can see it taking over.  In random acts of kindness, in “paying it forward,” in helping the least of our brethren, we not only get the plant started, but we inspire others to do it, too.

All right, so it’s a weed and not a cedar of Lebanon.  That’s OK.  Life is weedy.  We like to say that no good deed goes unpunished, and often it seems that way.  Being a do-gooder can be a thankless calling.  But, like the nuns used to say in grammar school, “Offer it up.”  That was another way, I think, of saying, “Get over it.”  Not everything works out well.  Not every attempt to answer the call goes right, especially the first time.  But that vast weedy pasture of a Kingdom is going to need some measure of  management, so you’ll just have to get up again, for the hundredth time, and keep on keepin’ on. 

This is our call—a call to valor, a call to mission, regardless of whether we’re men or women, a call to build up the Kingdom.  The kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth, and people do not know it, says the Gospel of Thomas. It’s our job to make sure people DO know it and grow it.  And we do that by living lives that exemplify and display the goals of the Kingdom by, in the words of today’s collect, ministering justice with compassion. 

If we do this, it is unlikely God will ever say of us that he made a mistake in calling us.