Three years ago, standing in an empty auditorium at Wingate University, my hand timidly rose above my shoulder. Five or six other hands joined mine, though theirs confidently rose straight above their heads.
“How many of you are considering going to seminary?” The question posed met with many confident hands, folks absolutely certain of their divine calling and then – my one, timid, wavering hand joined them. It was the first time, in fact, that I said with any certainty at all that I would go to seminary. Before then it was a passing thought, a cool idea but not a grounded reality or remote possibility.
To be honest, not much happened after that – a timid hand raise, teaching a few Bible studies and working with campus ministries, sure…but none of the really gritty work of getting on a path towards seminary. I suppose I was hoping that God would swoop down somehow and strike me with thunderbolts, or at least something dramatic so that I could know what my calling was.
It took three years for the gears to finally start grinding and while I’m not going to dive into all the circumstances that prompted that, I am going to say I’m here. I’m sitting right on the edge of campus, I’ve sat through the orientation and registered for classes and the only thing left for me is to step into the classes to begin my seminary education. On the tail end of a year that has forever changed my life, I am set to embark on the next three that will change the course of the rest of my life. I am on the verge.
And I’ve never felt closer to God’s calling.
In John’s Gospel, after Jesus dies, not much is happening with the disciples either. Jesus has brought them out of where misguided vocation has taken them – careers as fisherman, medicine, law and even political rebels. Jesus has changed their lives in radical ways, given them a new vision for the Kingdom and a new vocation – bringing about that Kingdom. Jesus fulfilled the prophecies and spoke truth with such authority that the disciples couldn’t help but think – We are on the verge of that Kingdom! And yet as Jesus last breath escapes his body on the cross, it seems that their hope dies with him. They walk away confused and sad.
It doesn’t take much for me to image their faces or feel the pangs of their heart as they walked away from that cross. I’ve seen it in the faces of those who have lost someone close to them, someone they didn’t expect to lose. And I’ve felt it when I have been let down or betrayed by those nearest to me.
When we experience suffering the way the disciples did after their rabbi was crucified, we often do what the disciples did next. They turned back to something familiar. In chapter 21, we find the disciples going back to what they know best – fishing. They return to the career they had in the first place, as if nothing happened at all.
And what’s more, Jesus encounters his friends on the beach next to the Sea of Tiberias only to learn that they no longer can even recognize the face of their rabbi. They have, in fact, forgotten everything about Jesus.
How many of us have had a radical encounter with the Christ with not much happening afterward? How many times have we felt we were so close to God’s calling, so close to changing the world but then got so lost that we could barely recognize the face of Jesus among all the clutter? What about the times when we opted out of God’s calling – returned to something more familiar – because we encountered our first obstacle and gave up?
I envy the feeling of urgency in the disciples when they followed Jesus but I also know too well their feeling of hopelessness when they lost their bearings after his death. Following Jesus can lead us down a path that is at once hope-filled and joyous as it is filled with despair and failure. We can be lost even when we have found Jesus in our own lives.
I realize through their story and through my own that when we cling to this sense of urgency – things happen. People follow, lives and vocations are changed, and even summer camp staffers can enter the halls of academic pursuits in theology. After Jesus’ wake up call at the Sea of Tiberias, the disciples got to work and the church grew to by thousands in one day. After my own wake up call, I no longer waited for God to take responsibility for my life, I took my own responsibility for God’s call on my life.
When we cling to a sense of urgency, we can ask the question, “What if the Kingdom of God is truly at hand?” What if the little I can give to someone else can actually radically change their life? What if my work with the One Campaign actually brought an end to world poverty? What if the work of Water is Life actually watered an entire country? Ask these questions not in some hopeful, or idyllic sense, but in the grounding that these things might actually happen in your lifetime and see what difference that has on your perspective.
My hope is that we could cling to this hope found in Christ, and use the work of our hands not only to contribute to our part to a solution, but to hope that our work may actually be that solution. What if our vocation was all it took to transform the world?
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy. And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. -A Franciscan Prayer
All that’s left for me to do is to step in to my first seminary class. Amen.
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