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Sermon Index

HEEDING THE CALL

by the Reverend Richard Gilbert
at the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore
on the 5th of May 2002
Union Sunday

Two weeks ago, I escorted 17 14- and 15-year-olds from our Religion in Life class on a pilgrimage to that hub of the Unitarian Universalist universeBoston. That Sunday, Earth Sunday, we visited three of the downtown Boston churches for worship, intending to compare notes on their very different liturgies on the bus ride home. The most passionate of the sermons dealt with what the preacher deemed to be the moral imperative of vegetarianism. One of our accompanying fathers who heard that sermon was impressed by its power and wondered about his own eating habits. Then he asked me, quite worried, What is the half-life of a sermon?

Now, the term half-life usually refers to the process by which a radioactive isotope falls to half its original power. As I understand it, this process continues, but the original power of the isotope never really reaches zero. What is the half-life of a sermon? As I face retirement in just under 2 months, I begin to wonder about the half-life of the several hundred sermons I have preached for the Rochester congregation.

I like the idea that the value of these sermons never completely reaches zero. I have my doubts, but then, who am I to know?

There is no doubt, however, that the Baltimore Sermon preached by William Ellery Channingon May 5, 1819, in this sanctuary retains much of its original power and never will disappear as a markera historical turning pointin the history of Unitarian Universalism. That declaration was a hinge of our history. It sounded the call for a new and untested faithUnitarian Christianity. Channing was invited here by a group that wished to make a statement that this new faith was not simply a warmed-over Christianity, but a new way of being faithful to the call to ministry in the world.

Called! By whom? To what? What is the nature of the call to ministry? Who is called? How does one know? I do know that I was literally called to preach this sermonnot by God, but close. John and Phyllis extended the invitation long ago, and I felt compelled to accept. So what else could I do but accept the call?

My theme is vocationthe vocation of ministry. We speak of job and career and profession, but we do not often speak of vocation, a calling to live a particular kind of life. The word vocation itself comes from the Latinmeaning call. Choosing a vocation is not choosing a career; it is being open to the invitation life extends to each and every one of us to become fully and responsibly human.

My thesis is that all of us are called. My question is - have you heard your call? My text is a parody of Jesus words: Many are called, but few are chosen. Poet Lee Pieper writes:

Many are called but most are frozen

in corporate or collective cold,

these are the stalled

who choose not to be chosen

except to be bought and sold.

The sense of call in our time is counterculturalit cuts across the grain of our society; the prevailing ethos of our time is that we can live what Walter Brueggeman called in Hopeful Imagination, his nook about the prophets, an uncalled life, not living for any purpose beyond ones self. Do you remember the most popular line in President Bushs Inaugural Addressthe one about cutting taxes? Whatever happened to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country? Unabashed self-interest is the zeitgeistthe spiritof our time.

I was called to ministry at 14 at the 1951 National Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.Ironically, I now do battle with that same group over its homophobia. Nevertheless, I often wonder how my life would have been different had I not attended.

That Sunday morning, I heard a sermon by a Methodist bishop from Indiana, which I interpreted as a call. Then and there I decided to be a ministera choice I have neverwell, almost neverregretted.

It was a still, small, voice within. Its source I do not know. Some would say it was the voice of Godwhich is what I thought at the time. My seminary Bible professor used to say that the Hebrew prophets thought God had whispered in their pearly ears. Therefore, they could punctuate their pronouncements with authority, such as thus saith the Lord, or in more modern parlance, God made me do it. I dare not be quite so presumptuous.

Nevertheless, Ive been exploring the nature of call ever since. I am fascinated with the theory that human beings evolved into what we now know as consciousness in the centuries after these Hebrew prophets lived. In those ancient days, people had no concept of Iof the individual having independent thoughts. It was God or the Muse speaking through them. There was little differentiation between what was perceived as the divine voice and human thought. Only gradually did humanity develop consciousness of the I. We may have lost transcendent authority, but we have gained human responsibility.

There are times when I long for the purity, the power, the persuasive force of that call I heard at 14.

There are times I desperately long to feel that I am speaking holy writ, that I am a mouthpiece of the Almighty. But that naïve faith has given way to adult skepticism, and I move to a more psychological explanationwe might call it a deconstruction of the experience: an impressionable young boyimmersed in the life of his small town Universalist church, catapulted to a much more cosmopolitan setting, vulnerable to powerful preaching.

The painter Pablo Picasso once said he wished he could still paint as he had as a childand tried to recapture that innocence and creativity. I would love to have the adolescent surety that my pulpit pronouncements, my every word, have divine authority.

But, happily for the Rochester congregation, I know better, and so do they, and so do you. Yet that callwhether it was divine or psychological or spiritualhas become internalized in me now for 50 years. I heard and heeded the call at 14, and that has made all the difference.

There was another time in my life when I experienced a dramatic call to ministry. It was in 1965, the year of Selma. The Rev. James Reeb had responded to Martin Luther King's call and had gone to work in a voter registration drive there, only to be brutally murdered. The Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees adjourned its session from Boston to Selma, and President Dana McLean Greeley urged Unitarian Universalists to converge on that bastion of racism. At the time, I was doing graduate work in social ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, having tested my social gospel at the First Unitarian Church of Clevelandmy first ministryand found it wanting. I knew I had to go to Selma. We flew to Atlanta, where we were met by Gene Pickett, former UUA President, who led our car caravan over those treacherous miles to Selma.

As we walked toward Brown's Chapel, I felt I was part of a liberating army, although the Alabama State Police who formed a gauntlet had a monopoly on the means of violence. Our welcome was tumultuous, and the service honoring James Reeb was one of those transforming moments in my life.

The sanctuary was so crowded I had to stand in back of the pulpit. There was a stir behind me, and Martin Luther King, Jr. brushed by me as he moved forward. It was our only encounter. His eulogy touched me like nothing else ever has, and the spiritual chemistry of the Jewish prayer for the dead rising above that diverse congregation singing "We Shall Overcome" was overpowering. That scene is etched in my memoryvivid even today.

When I returned to Chicago the next day, I tried to resume work on my paper entitled "The Transformative Role of the Contemporary Church in the Thought of H. Richard Niebuhr"a riveting title. My professor would read itno one elseand he would grade it and return it. I was suffering from pulpit deprivationI had a story to tell and no one to whom to tell it. There is no worse feeling for a preacher. When my wife Joyce came home from teaching that night, I confessed to her I had to go back to the parish ministry. My call had been renewed. Was God its source? Or Martin Luther King? Or was it simply that still, small voice within?

The call to ministry does not have to be quite so dramatic. We are constantly called to ministry in a thousand subtle ways; we are called to life day by dreary or delightful day. I have the sense, though, that our lives are so busy and our world is so noisy we may not hear itand even if we did, we might not heed it.

There is plenty of precedent for not heeding the call, for choosing not to be chosen. To believe oneself called is both exhilarating and frightening. Takethe Book of Jonaha rich allegory for our time. The late Abraham Maslow developed a theory from that book about running from responsibility, running from greatness, running from the call that he termed the Jonah Complex.

You know the story: Nineveh in ancient Assyria was a sinful city. The Lord enjoined Jonah, a successful but timid merchant, to go there and prophesy in the Lords nameto call the people to account, to urge them to righteousness. Jonah was doing just fine, thank you, and resisted this divine imperative. He even boarded a ship to escape the call, but the ship sank, casting him into the belly of the whale, from which he was eventually thrown up on the shores of Nineveh. Only the powerful persuasion of Yahweh finally convinced him to preach righteousness to the wicked inhabitants, who at last repented.

Maslows point was that people tend to resist the call to their own life vocationresist doing what they might do when they are at their best. For the comfortable, the call can be quite disturbing. It is tempting to resist it.

Even in our own tradition, there are pivotal figures who did not want to heed the call. In the early 19th century, William Ellery Channing, whose sermon we commemorate today, was happily ensconced as minister of the prosperous Arlington Street Church in Boston, a congregation with many cotton merchants who benefited from slavery. He was as John Mendelssohn said in his book Channing: Reluctant Radical, the apostle to the Brahmins. Channing, while morally opposed to the evil of slvaery, had not spoken out forcefully against it. Besides, the abolitionists were a rather abrasive lotnot the kind of people a Boston patrician could or should embrace.

Then rom the heart of Upstate New Yorkthat cauldron of social reformcame The Rev. Samuel J. May of the Unitarian Church in Syracuse, who inveighed upon Channing to take a strong stand against slavery, even if he had to risk his ministry to do so. Channing, the reluctant radical, heard that call, and attacked slavery with a vengeance, incurring the wrath of many in his congregation. From whence came that call? From God or from Samuel J. May or from the deeper regions of Channings own conscience?

I have concluded how we name the source of our call should not be our primary concern.I am not worried about its theological geography, but its power and authenticity.Whether we believe the call comes from God or from the heart or if they are part and parcel of the same motionI am convinced each of us is called. We have but to open our ears and hearts to hear and heed.

Our culture doesnt really want us to hear or heed the call to anything beyond ourselves. The God of the marketplace would be pleased to keep this call in a subordinate position. The siren calls of profit and power and status are enticing; the call to climb the ladder of success is seductive; the call to triumph in the fierce competition of life is so loud that it is rarely wehear any other voice.

We Unitarian Universalists are not very good at listening, either; we are awfully busy talking. We, who have been called the technicians and bureaucrats of the establishment, are very busy. and we are very important. The voice within is still and small and hard to hear.I believe we suffer from the Jonah Complex: We are tempted to triviality to deny our call to greatness.

I remember being surprised during a tour of denominational headquarters in Boston some years ago when the director of computer services noted how many online Unitarian Universalists listed Unitarian Universalism as their hobby. Our faith must be more than a hobby. There can be no casual commitment if we are to survive and thrive as spiritual beings and if our movement is to flourish as a significant force in the culture.

You may recall W. B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" with its prophetic lines, the best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Without presuming we are the best, I agree witheducator Harold Taylor, who wrote of our movement, "There is no hot white flame burning, there is only a smoldering of branches with an occasional spurt of fire. In a movement where everything is allowed, too little is asserted with passion.

Dietrich Bonhoffer, the German pastor martyred by the Nazis in 1945, had a different sense of callthe call to life as a vocation. The work to which one feels called must be set within the larger context of responsibility. He wrote, If, for example, I am a physician, then in the concrete instance I serve not only my patients, but also medical science and, with it, science and the knowledge of truth in general. It may happen that I, as a physician, am obliged to recognize and fulfill my concrete responsibility no longer by the sick-bed but, for example, in taking public action against some measure which constitutes a threat to medical science or human life or truth.

Vocation is responsibility, and responsibility involves a total response of the whole person to the whole of reality. While I was attending chapel at Harvard Divinity School during a 1986 Sabbatical, I heard a story about a man who at 30 decided to write his memoirs and spent the next 15 years doing so. At 45, he determined he had left a great deal out, and so spent the next 30 years refining the project. At 75, he found himself immobilized by the mountains of paper in his house. He concluded that nothing had happened since he began his memoirs. He was right. His whole life was on "call waiting." He had neither heard nor heeded the call to any purpose beyond the self.

There is within each of us that still, small voice that calls us to be better than we are, to do more than we now do, to aspire to become what we uniquely can be.

Ministry is a particular calling, of course. It has been my privilege to explore that calling for four decades. But, in a larger sense, we are all engaged in a mutual ministry. As my colleague Gordon McKeeman so wisely put it, Ministry is what we all dotogether.

To what are we called? Surely we are called to do more than merely survive in a dog-eat-dog world. Surely we are called to do more than indulge our pleasures. Surely we are called to do more than make our way in the world in some false sense of self-sufficiency, as if we were not interdependent creatures. Surely we are called to be more than consumers of abundance, more than manipulators of material. Surely we can be more than self-indulgent practitioners of a faith that is all about ME!

We are called, but to what? Individually and collectively, we are called, and our most vital vocation is simply being there in love and justice, being there at the point of need, whether it be at the bedside of a dying friend, joining hands with her family singing Amazing Grace, or marching for racial justice in Selmaor Baltimore.

The call can be uncomfortable. Robert Withnow comments in Acts of Compassion that it would be hard to imagine Jesus saying, Take up your cross and follow meitll make you feel good. We are called upon to be. To be for others. To be is to be for others.

In a sense all my life I have been called called into being by loving parents, called to ministry at Valley Forge, called to graduate study during my first ministry in Cleveland, called back from academia to parish ministry by my experience with Martin Luther King in Selma, called from time to time by my wife and sons to shape up, called to account by my parishioners in three congregations, called to action by that saving remnant of souls who cannot give up the conviction that they can repaireven if they cannot quite savethe world.

We are called by our consciences, called by our history, called by our own religious communities, called by God if you prefer, to be there in love and justice. We are called to come out of a culture of contentment that would cocoon us, isolate us from an unjust world in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, allow us to arrogantly despoil the planet, make us mere shoppers in an exploitative global supermarket, make us constant consumers of a bland and boring cultural diet, and convince us to express the lowest common denominator spiritually and ethically.

We who are caught in the predicament of the prosperous are called to a theology of relinquishment, not a condescending charity but an ethic of justice to work unceasingly for a just society that will not accept the market as God, that yearns for a Beloved Community in which none shall want, equity will replace superfluity, and generosity will transform self-indulgence.

In Why Religion Matters, religious scholar Huston Smith tells of a Labor Day block party at which a newcomer asked him if they could have lunch together. When that happened, writes Smith, he catalogued a string of way stations that he had moved throughpsychedelics, India, Rajneesh, Da Free John [before he] came to the point. My problem, he said, is that I am convictionally impaired. I can believe something for a year or two, and then it dissolves and I start searching again.

Many are called but most are frozen,

in corporate or collective cold.

These are the stalled who choose not to be chosen

except to be bought and sold.

Each one of us is called to conviction if we listen to the still, small voice withina troubling voice, a disturbing voice, a compelling voice, an imperative voice. We are all called to this ministry of love and justice.

The German poet Heinrich Heine stood with a friend before the cathedral of Amiens in France. Tell me, Heinrich, said his friend, why cant people build piles like this any more?

Replied Heine: My dear friend, in those days people had convictions. We moderns have opinions. And it takes more than opinions to build a Gothic cathedral.

And it takes more than opinions to build a religious faith that inspires; it takes more than opinions to sustain a movement that would repair the world; it takes more than opinions to build the Beloved Community of Love and Justice.If we aspire to be more than mere occupants of time and space; it we wish to be more than mere historical footnotes; if we wish to be creatorsnot merely recipientsof history, we had best open our ears and our hearts to hear and to heed the call.

As Mary Oliver writes:

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesnt everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

And that is the fundamental question, to which I respond:

Listen! Hear! Heed! In those rare moments when we hear the voicethe source of which we do not know, but the reality of which is beyond doubtmay we heed its tender ministrations and be convinced by its strength.

Listen! Hear! Heed!

Listen! Hear! Heed!