Peyton Drynan, Age 9 – St Andrews Streetsville
The words kept echoing through my mind. I had no peace and no rest. Strangely and goadingly, they seemed to speak to me.
My dad’s home office door was open and he sat puffing his pipe, perched over the original text of the Book of Job. On my next pass he called me in. “What is wrong?”
“Wrong?” I breathed in youthful defiance. “Nothing.”
He waited. He was a man who knew when to be quiet. I flopped down in a chair. “Well, pa, you see I was reading the Book of Hebrews this morning.”
He lifted his eyebrows; he was no small expert on this book having written a commentary on it.
“Here’s the thing, ‘today if you hear my voice do not harden your hearts.'” He puffed on his pipe and kept quiet. “Well, I can’t get these words out of my mind.”
“Ah,” he said thoughtfully, “Perhaps God is calling you?”
I sighed the word, “yes,” my sense of discomfort faded. A great burden was lifted.
To be called is to have a vocation. It gives meaning to one’s life. If there is anything we need in today’s church in Canada, it is the sense of meaning and purpose which flows out of knowing who we are and what we are called to. We are in a kind of exile today. We are frantically trying to salvage dying congregations. That exile invites us to a new sense of call on our journey of Christian spirituality.
Stories of calls to leadership lie at the heart of the history of Christian spiritual formation. Such stories are highly personal and particular because God calls individuals in unique ways. But although particular and contextual, such stories always carry universal implications in the great unfolding story of creation and redemption.
But experience remains a problematic measure of call. For Martin Luther, his experience of peace and acceptance after striving so much to please God was crucial in gaining certainty of faith. John Calvin insisted that one should not look at one’s self but rather at Christ for assurance in an attempt to turn the Christian journey away from self – absorption.
By the 17th century, the pietist movement in Germany and the Puritan movement started to emphasize experience, and experience became fundamentally associated with certain religious feelings in persons.
Religious experience of this kind tended to individualize faith and the call to follow God as it merged with the rise of the autonomous individual in the Enlightenment. Today, personal experience, and particularly individualized feeling, has become a basic expectation. How often do we say, “I feel that…”?
It is clear that experience has importance in biblical stories of call. It is also clear that an excessive emphasis on experience, particularly extraordinary experience, can be frustrating and painful to those who never seem to experience such feelings. Moreover, those who do claim special experiences sometimes consider themselves spiritually elevated. Combined with individualism, such religious experience can lead to isolation or cult – like spirituality.
Call cannot be divorced from experience nor reduced to experience. That is why churches have emphasized the role of community in connection with call. It is the community who discerns call and leadership. Whether the individual has a profound experience does not determine call. In all the biblical stories, God’s call was to community.
Call Today
In early times, Christian vocation involved risk and commitment. In medieval times, vocation was connected with monastic vows. During the Reformation, vocation or calling became a concept that included the idea that one’s daily work could be part of vocation. For much of the modern period, this Protestant idea of vocation played a formative role in shaping people’s sense of meaning in life. In our post – Christian context, significant questions are being raised about vocation. Thus William Placher writes:
The very claim that there is something that God wants me to do with my life, for instance, threatens many contemporary definitions of freedom. Surely, I can do whatever I want with my life, and the choice is mine? Much of the Christian tradition, however, has argued that that vision of life as a sea of infinite choices is more like slavery than freedom. If “freedom” means that every choice is open, and none is the wrong answer, then my choices cease to have any larger meaning. The direction of my life can be shaped by the pervasive siren calls of consumer culture, or by my own quest for immediate satisfaction. Either way, the advent of next year’s fashions or the boredom I find in the pleasures of the moment leaves me hungry for something else, a cycle of hunger always unfulfilled.
The ever expanding world of choice, information and constant technological change requires a new emphasis on God’s call and vocation for our spirituality.
Finding our identity, call and spirituality can be located in the opening chapters of Genesis. Having a calling is not just something that happens to us for specific church jobs. More importantly, calling is integrated with the way and logic of the whole of God’s creation. The very act of creation is an act of God calling forth. The Word—God speaking—is the way of God’s gracious act of creation. All things are constituted by God’s call, and out of this deep and profound loving call comes our call as human beings. We need to grasp this profound connection between God’s creating Word that calls forth creation, and God’s gracious word that brings redemption and calls us to be part of it in mission.
The Evocative God in Genesis
Old Testament scholar Walter Breuggemann says Genesis is a book of call. First, God calls forth creation to be God’s faithful world. (Genesis 1 – 11) Then God calls specific people to be God’s faithful people. (Genesis 12 – 50) Thus, both creation and the community of faith are “evoked by the speech of this God.” To be human is to be called forth by God and then to be called by God for a special task or mission in creation. This is who we are. Christian spirituality starts here.
Our identity and spirituality grows out of our call to a journey of mission with creation. The inherent potential for creatures to resist God and not heed God’s call is soon realized in the unfolding story of the first three chapters of Genesis. This rebellion leads to the second kind of call, the call of anguish, the one we discover in Genesis 3:9, when God calls out to the human creatures in what is rendered in the Hebrew language in one agonising word, “Where?”
This is an impassioned God. In fact, there seems to be a kind of suffering within God. The freedom of God’s creatures to obey or to rebel does not only bring the potential that God may suffer—the potential is realized! Whereas the calling forth of creation by the creative Word is an act that cannot be resisted, the calling of humankind and creation to its covenantal journey with God can be resisted. According to this story we can resist and we do. But God does not turn God’s back on rebellious humans. God, who loves and cherishes creation as a child will not let it go. In this sense, God is already in this early text in a judging and gracious solidarity with the “poor” and the “poor in spirit.” We, the cowering humans, are foolishly hiding until we hear the judging and gracious agonising cry, “Where?”
We are called and marked as creatures of the good and cherished creation and we are called in anguish as we run and hide in the garden. Just as these stories helped the Hebrew exiles to find their identity in Babylon, these texts tell us who we are in the “foreign lands” of consumer and technological culture or global empires of finance that exploit and destroy creation and people. It is here that we need to start if we want to talk about Christian missional spirituality. The message of God’s agonizing call in the face of our resistance invites us to repentance and provides hope. Together, people and creation stand under God’s dual call which sets them free. Creation is not abandoned but the great promise resounds, “I will bring all things together in reconciliation!”
his article is adapted and edited from Charles Fensham’s forthcoming book, A Missional Christian Spirituality for the Emerging Church: The Journey to the Nations and for the Earth. To be published by Clement Academic, 2012
