Your Own Call to Faith and Action

Your Own Call to Faith and Action  

• 1 Samuel 3:1-10, John 1:43-51

When I went to seminary I was fairly grownup, I was 48 years old. Among several of the startling things I discovered about myself during that experience, is that I was not very emotionally mature. I nearly always reacted emotionally from my own point of view before considering any other points of view, if ever. That surprised me. As I look at the culture today, it is pretty clear to me that the culture does not encourage emotional maturity. The result is that wide portions of the population are swayed by emotional appeals that effectively limit their willingness to be persuaded by facts and logic. 

One characteristic of a lack of emotional maturity is that not only are we reactive to appeals directed at our own hot buttons, but we “lend” our emotional reactions to others in our family or cohort groups, and then cover it with rationalizations, pretending to be smart. 

Within families, we often consider sharing anxiety as a measure of love. If Joey says something that makes me angry, I might tell Martha and put pressure on Martha to get angry at Joey with me. If she does not get angry, I might doubt that she cares about me, if I was raised that way.

The truth of the matter is, Martha is a pretty smart person. She might ask if I understood what Joey was trying to say. Maybe I misheard him, or he was trying to agree with me by being funny. (To be honest, I have had more than one occasion, when I was in violent agreement with someone. We agreed, but were unable to talk with each other and assumed we were arguing.) If Martha is mature, she will resist the tendency to get hooked emotionally until she is persuaded that there is a reason to be anxious. 

If I keep pressing her to be angry at Joey with me, this will expose my lack of emotional maturity, and put her under pressure to either help me grow up, or we may suffer some distance in our relationship, if I am unable to see why she behaves differently than we used to behave in my family of origin. Emotional maturity gives us tools to help each other see things in different ways, and find different and better ways to act and react to emotional stimuli. 

The call of Nathanael is simple and poetic. He was invited by a friend to see Jesus, and he was captivated by seeing in Jesus, the love of God personified. He was initially skeptical of any rustic soul coming out of Nazareth. Imagine Nathanael of Morton saying, “Can anything good come out of Creve Coeur?” Truly Nathanael was a spiritual person, and meeting Jesus was a spiritual event. 

The call of Samuel is also simple and poetic. The voice of God rings out and wakes the young man from his sleep. He presumes it is Eli. Samuel was delivered to Eli by his parents to serve an apprenticeship in the Temple of God. Eli recognizes that it is possible the young man is having a spiritual experience and encourages him. 

So what is a spiritual person or experience? I would first say that we are all spiritual beings in our very nature. Throughout the 1,000 years since the church split between East and West, and then after an even more combative split in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century; the Western church has invested virtually all of its energy in the rational mind. 

In our tradition, we love to be right, believe the right things, and enjoy a sense of superiority over those who fail to meet our exacting standards of divine interpretation. Unfortunately, our ideal godliness is focused on the wrong target. 

In the embodiment of God’s love that we celebrate in Jesus, we do not find a model of ruthless academic precision. In the teaching and behavior modeling we identify in the scriptures, Jesus remains approachable, generous, and caring for all. The target is not precise knowledge, but generosity and compassion. 

The challenge for young Samuel when he is called by God, is much more profound than it is for Nathanael. All that was asked of Nathanael was to come and see, and meet the Lord. Right from the start, Samuel was entrusted with a word from the Lord. And the word he received is bad news for the family of Eli. Nobody enjoys the favor of God when it contains bad news. From the very outset of Samuel’s career as a prophet, he was burdened with the uncomfortable truth, this time in the form of the corruption exposed in the house of Eli.   

Samuel was forced into emotional maturity by God, who entrusted him with hard truths from an early age. Eli, to his credit, had the maturity to recognize the spiritual nature of young Samuel; and recognize the truth God spoke to Samuel; and distinguish that truth from the boy himself.  

You and I have our own call stories. Many of us gathered here, have been in the church all of our lives. The revelation of God has come to us incrementally, often best expressed in the memory we hold of specific mentors in the faith. We remember people, often people of another generation than our own and from another family, whose kindness impressed us early in life, and around that basic charity, we have constructed our belief network. 

I think that this is true for a great number of people. I see that Community UCC has identified this basic approach and tries to make it intentional with mentors for each of the kids in confirmation, and more widely with the TEAM concept that encourages adults to pay specific attention to one of the kids in the church. 

I believe that our spiritual nature understands that this orientation to kindness and compassion is the presence of God in our lives. And still we prefer to rationalize in our heads about issues and dogmas, and model the combativeness of the world, and presume that the church honor that secular model.  

Invitation into the love of God can seem so much more powerful when it comes directly to us as an adult. This is part of why our friends who “discover Jesus” become so enthusiastic about the moment of their salvation. They resonate with a startling awakening that took place for them at a specific time and a specific place, and feel that the only true faith must be rooted in an ecstatic experience. For them “spirituality” is rooted in an emotional moment combined with an act of human will. 

Many times we see this sense of revelation trigger the culturally driven practices of emotional manipulation to bully people they love into the faith. That manipulative effort is in stark contrast to a mature faith, rooted in charity, compassion, and invitation. The world of human faith and spirituality is often held captive by emotional immaturity. 

We can read the call stories of Nathanael and Samuel from that point of reference, and claim that these represent specific moments of epiphany or spiritual awakening. Or we can see the larger script, where these individuals were prepared in advance, in order to have the capacity to grow when the moment arrives. 

From Samuel we see that emotional maturity is not measured by years, but instead an awareness of ourselves, and an intentional effort to understand and control our “automatic” emotional reactivity. 

In time and space we learn about our own emotions, not to label them but to understand what they are, and then control our responses. If we can channel the energy that used to be spent willy-nilly on our favorite forms of outbursts, we make room for facts and logic to influence our thinking. 

It is possible then, to train our awareness to see more than just our own perspective. We might see the needs of our emotions; and also the needs of the community; the validity of the other; and also the contributions of society. And then, maybe, we can let the model of Jesus guide us to think and react in ways that demonstrate the love of God, in our time and place. 

We are called to demonstrate love and care in this time and place. Well, actually, you are called to live and love here. I only have a few months with you. I hope to encourage you to see the great love that God has invested in this community, and the enormous potential you have to provide a radical welcome in a conservative neighborhood.  

You are called. With God’s love, may this community grow in patience and wisdom. May you be permitted to develop a new capacity to see more than what is right before your eyes. May you be enabled to hear not only the thoughts, but the hopes and fears of those around us. And may you be empowered to represent the love of God, relying on the spiritual awareness of the presence of the Christ within you and among you. Amen.