Starting my third year (and final - woo hoo!) of my Master of Divinity degree, I have heard about calling... a lot. Today I heard yet another sermon on calling from Rev. Dr. Mark Fowler of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. It really was a fantastic sermon but after three years in seminary, the word “call” almost becomes cliché when it is constantly brought up in sermons during chapel, when we dissect and analyze it during VFCL, and over and over again you get asked the “tell your call story.”
Don’t get me wrong, our call stories are incredibly important and at the church where I am doing my field education this year, we’re hoping to spend a lot of time looking at the intersection of vocation and faith through our preaching, small groups, and other areas within the life of the church. But as a person in ministry, especially as we trudge through the ordination process in our respective traditions, calling can be a huge pain.
Calling can be exhausting, frustrating, sometimes even disappointing. It often seems to go from this brilliant flash of light illuminating the path before us to a dark rain cloud making us wet and cold but always reminding us that it is there. Sometimes the longer it takes to fulfill that call (i.e. the longer it takes you to get ordained) the more annoying and frustrating calling can be… And God help you if you’re calling isn’t crystal clear and you see not one path in front of you, but many.
So back to chapel and the sermon. Dr. Fowler truly did preach a fantastic, powerful sermon on calling. Yet, for the first half of the sermon, all I could keep thinking in my head was, “Yes, I know I’m called. I’ve done the whole ‘Here, I am. Send me,’ business. God, could you tell me something I don’t know?”
You would think I would have learned by now never to ask questions/make demands of God…
All I know is that the next thing that popped into my mind was, “Do you remember why I called you?”
Clearly, God takes after my professors who love to answer questions with questions (or maybe vice versa?).
And so I sat there, in the Chapel of the Unnamed Faithful, with the sun shining through the stained glass windows, surrounded by friends and fellow seminarians, a very impassioned sermon going on, and it was like everything faded away in that question.
Do you remember why I called you?
Seminary has made me talk for so long about “what” I am called to or “when” I was called or “how” I was called but I don’t remember ever being asked “why,” why was I called. Why was I called at this time in my life? Why was I called to this thing or that thing?
Why me?
Sure, we’ve talked about gifts and graces for ministry but I never found that those “spiritual gift inventories” to really be the “why” of calling – more of a justification for choosing to follow a calling.
Do you remember why I called you?
As that question kept playing over and over in my head, I went back to all those moments where I felt called. The points of time in my life that I’ve written about in so many papers, told so many times to peers, professors, and mentors. I’ve talked about my love of the sacraments but God didn’t call me because I love the sacraments. I’ve talked about my gifts I've been told I have for preaching and teaching, but God didn’t call me because I can preach a good sermon and I can teach. Because really, those are things that have grown over time as I’ve 1) learned more about the sacraments and theology of the sacraments and 2) done more preaching and teaching to develop those skills.
It was during the pastoral prayer before communion that I remembered why. My calling, or at least that first nudge in the direction that would eventually lead me to this time and place in my life, came way back in high school, somewhere in the freshman year era. It was shortly after I had been asked to give my “testimony” at youth group. I didn’t know theology (or at least didn’t have the big words to articulate it), I barely knew the Bible, and I had only been actively attending church for less than a year. The only thing I had was a story of a truly hard-knock life and a story of how my life was better with God in it. From a preaching standpoint – it was a terrible sermon from the shaky, nervous delivery to zero exegesis – but those stories were why I was called.
Do you remember why I called you?
I was called because I had a story and more importantly, I had a story to share. A story of a girl who, to quote Rihanna (and this will never happen again), “found love in a hopeless place.” A story of a girl who discovered the transformative love of God for her and for all people and vowed to make sure everyone knew they were loved, both by her and by God.
I was called because somehow God saw that despite having gone down a rocky road time and time again, I still had the capacity to love and that love for others and the love that I have experienced from God has continued to drive me ever since. That love helped me to slowly overcome my fear of public speaking so that I can give half-way decent sermons. That love drove me to Oklahoma City University for a BA in Religion, drove me to Garrett-Evangelical for an MDiv, and drives me to still pursue ordination. And that love has burned a story into my heart that, after all this academic study of the Bible, church history, church leadership, pastoral care, and years of deconstructing and reconstructing my theology, still rings true and I still believe must be told.
Do you remember why I called you?
To be honest, I had forgotten. I had forgotten that, to be a bit cliché again, Jesus loves me, this I know. I had forgotten that story of love that set me on this path in the first place. I had forgotten why God would call an imperfect, broken misfit like me. God called me because God saw an imperfect, broken misfit who loved people, loved God, knew that God loved her, and had a fire inside her soul driving her to want others to know they were also loved because the world is full of imperfect, broken misfits who need to hear that message, who need to be not only told they are loved but shown they are loved.
Do you remember why God called you?
Tasha Sargent is a third year Master of Divinity student at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
