Let the
words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord.
Amen.
Have
you always known what you were meant to do in life? Your goals? Your aspirations?
Were they constant throughout life, or ever-changing? Did everything go as
planned or do you look back over your life and wonder how you ended up where
you are today?
This
is certainly not where I thought I’d end up, that’s for sure! When I was a kid,
I wanted to be things like a police officer or a librarian. As I got older and
headed into university, I thought for sure I’d be a high school chemistry teacher.
After flunking out of university, I felt lost and settled on banking and
accounting because I seemed to have a talent with numbers and loved the organized
details of the business world.
But
nothing ever felt quite right. Do you know what I mean? I never felt like I fit
in, like I was where I was supposed to be. I couldn’t find the joy in my
vocation. As they say, I was just in it for the money.
A
vocation in more than just paid work. It is who you are called to be and what
you are called to do across all the parts of your life – not only in
professional work, but also in your family and friendships, community
engagements, relationship with the earth, search for meaning, and pursuit of justice.
It essentially amounts to a sense of calling. Vocation is work that is
meaningful to the person who engages in it. In ministry, whether clergy or lay,
vocation is often preceded by a spiritual calling from God to engage in a
particular type of activity or function or even turn that vocation into a
profession. Vocation should be something in which we feel joy, that makes us
feel alive to the reality that we do not merely exist, but we are “called
forth” to a divine purpose.
This
vocational summons is often against the will of the one who is called into
service. Abraham at first doubted that God’s covenant with him could be
fulfilled. Moses complained that the Israelites, to whom God sent him, had
never listened to him and therefore neither would Pharaoh, “poor speaker that I
am”. Jeremiah, the Hebrew prophet, not only resisted the call, but continued to
complain that God had overpowered him and placed him in an impossibly difficult
circumstance, even protesting that God’s call had made him “like a gentle lamb
led to the slaughter” (Jeremiah 11:19). Jonah attempted to flee from the Lord
to Tarshish, rather than going to Nineveh where he had been called. Even Jesus
prays to be delivered from his appointed calling.
Have
you ever felt called to a vocation that seemed strange or out of place? Where
you doubted that you were understanding the call correctly?
Everyone
engages in vocational discernment at some point in their life, wondering where
God is calling them to be or to do, whether this career is right for them, or
what their role is in the community. Questions like “is this all that there is?”
or “Where is the joy in this work?”
Presbyterian
theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “The place God calls you to is the place
where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” This quote invites
us to do something that we often don’t: to bring the question of our deep
gladness to the question of what we’re going to do with our lives.
There
are all sorts of reasons why we might disconnect our sense of joy from our
sense of God’s call. For one thing, prioritizing joy in one’s work or service
can feel privileged, even selfish. It can seem superfluous, especially when
juxtaposed with the world’s deep hunger. Why should my joy matter if I’m in a
position to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, free the captive? Shouldn’t
their need trump my joy?
There
are certainly situations in which another person’s urgent need can supersede
the need for personal gladness. But the reality of burnout tells us that this
isn’t good for us. Over the long term, prioritizing others’ needs at the cost
of our own leaves us exhausted and disillusioned by the bottomless hunger of
broken systems and people.
We
need deep gladness to sustain us. Perhaps this reveals a deeper reason why we
don’t prioritize joy in our work: we’re afraid of what will happen to us when
we allow our joy to guide us into the hungriest parts of the world. Joy might
take us to the places where the world is gasping in pain. It might bring us to
the places where systems of trauma and abuse have already taken a terrible toll
and stand poised to take even more. These places are just like the one where
Jesus is standing in today’s gospel. What will happen to our joy there? Will it
be swallowed whole? That breathless question leads us into today’s text from
John 12.
This
scene occurs just after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The whole city
is talking about Jesus. In the verses leading up to this morning’s gospel
reading, the crowd that witnessed Lazarus’ raising was testifying, and their
story was compelling. Now, these Greeks want to see Jesus! Everyone wants to
see Jesus! It’s all very glorious and shiny. But Jesus can perceive the cross in
the near distance. He recognizes that he has arrived precisely where God has
called him to be. Here, he will be led into pain, suffering, and even death.
The world’s deep hunger is about to gulp him down. Where do we perceive joy in
this scene?
Over
the last few weeks, we have been talking a lot about joy and have touched on
the truth that suffering and joy are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they
might even been connected, “Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you
have crushed rejoice,” we hear in this week’s psalm (51:8). As Jesus grapples
with the impending reality of the cross, he holds fast to God’s call, to his purpose.
The profound joy of that purpose is written into every line of the gospel that
has led up to this moment.
You’ve
heard me say before that joy thrums throughout Jesus’ life, overflowing into
actions every time he heals, casts out a demon, prays to God, speaks with his
disciples, and teaches in the synagogues. These are not things he is required
to do out of sheer obedience to God’s will. These are the things he is
privileged to do because he is God’s incarnate, enfleshed Child. He can walk
and speak and touch as God never has before or since, and he can love up close.
That is what he spends his whole life doing: loving. Here is the nexus of
Jesus’ deep gladness and our deep hunger: God loving us up close. Jesus is so
deeply in contact with this divine love that the very voice of God, which
speaks in this gospel scene, is no longer something he needs to hear, because
his life resonates with those frequencies all the time. God’s call is written
on his heart (Jeremiah 31:33).
Following
God’s call to the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger
doesn’t guarantee that you will be happy, popular, or even respected. It does
offer a lifelong opportunity to follow Jesus in this particular way: to pay
attention to the intersections where the work and play that make us most joyful
meet the places where the world needs us most.
Imagine
that the thing God wants you to do is to live with joy, to be guided by it
(John 15:11). Imagine that such joy is not selfish but is actually the thing
that leads you deeper into the will of God. Imagine that following such joy
might lead you deeper into selflessness. How might your life change if you
internalized God’s desire for your joyfulness as well as for your service? How
might it transform the way that you think about your vocational call?
Perhaps
a savoring of joy can lead us to the place where we no longer need to hear the
voice of God thundering assurances of the rightness of our path from heaven. Perhaps
we, too, will perceive the harmonies of God’s call resonating within us—I am
your God, and you are my people—the notation etched onto our very hearts.
Amen.
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