IF ELECT, WILL YOU SERVE?

Isaiah 43:1-13; II Corinthians 5:11-21

Kate Harvey

The other day someone asked what I planned to do this weekend. “Going to Providence for an ordination,” I said. To which the response was a question: “I’ve heard of that word. What exactly is it?”

Good question. Just exactly what is it that we are doing here today as we set about to ordain Amy Johnson to the Christian ministry? Already now in this service we have heard and will hear again the expression “set apart” to describe our business here with her this afternoon. Occasionally you hear someone get the expression wrong and speak of ordination as “setting aside” - as if the person being called to ministry is being put somewhere on a shelf of irrelevancy, no longer at the center of life’s action. Is that what ordination means, entry into an ivory tower world which has little connection with real life?

Or the opposite view of ordained ministry occurs in the story of a bishop elaborately vested and mitered and staffed to lead a festive worship which included baptisms and confirmations. Afterward, thinking that surely someone would want to take his photograph, he remained robed in his ecclesiastical finery as he made his way down the hall to the reception. Just as he reached the turn into the reception room, a little girl came racing out of it and slammed into him. Bending down to look her directly in the eye, he said to her, “Little girl, do you know who I am?” “Yes,” she answered, staring up at him in awe.  Pulling himself up to the impressiveness of full height with his bishop’s staff in hand, he asked her, “Who am I?”  “Little Bo Peep,” she answered.

Does ordination set one upon the path toward presumptions of special status which require others to look up and be in awe? Or does ordination consign one to a shelf of irrelevancy, outside of the center of life’s action? You hear both views of ordained ministry as set above or set aside. Or does “set apart” bear yet a different connotation?

Let’s begin at the beginning of the journey which leads to this day. Before one is called to this set apart ministry to serve God in certain roles, there comes the call to know God as the center of one’s life. Each one of us here has heard God calling at different points in life’s journey. Perhaps when we were children,  something about the stories of Jesus touched a place deep in our hearts with the pure joy of such love that it would seek us out no matter how far we wandered from safety, like that hundredth sheep so loved though lost that the shepherd would leave ninety-nine others to find us and shelter us. Perhaps as we grew in stature but not necessarily in wisdom we did do just that, we wandered away believing that we no longer needed the shelter of our childhood faith, yet that voice though muted by the deafness of our stopped up ears persevered in pursuing.

And then perhaps, like the Israel addressed by the prophet known as second Isaiah, like them far away from home in the exile of our own making and yearning for home, once again we heard God calling and in our need it sounded like, “Fear not, I who have created and formed you have redeemed you and summoned you by name, you are mine, and because you are precious and honored in my sight I will give everything for your life and to be with you. Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past. Behold, I am doing a new thing.” Or perhaps like Paul, in the wilderness of his own life after setbacks and assaults and criticisms, we understood in a fresh way what it’s all about: “We know what it is to fear the Lord....If anyone is in Christ, that one is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”

Perhaps it is even possible that every one of those experiences has been our own as we have journeyed the life of faith until this day. Faith is not a once-upon-a-time happening which meets us at one place and leaves us there so that from that day on we never alter understanding or course. Doubts will appear, as do glimmers of absolute clarity, because we are creatures made of dust yet in the image of God, so frail and full of ambivalence yet capable of so much more, to which we aspire and which, God being our Helper, we occasionally  achieve. What never once changes is this God who calls and continues to call, so passionately in love with us that Jesus, whom we know as the only begotten Son of God, the very heart of God’s love, came and lived and died and rose up to newness of life to open the way for us, no matter who or where we are, to be made new. Every single step of the way, prior to each change in our journey of faith, the fundamental truth of our lives has been God’s choice of us: “You have not chosen me. I have chosen you.”

You see, sometimes it feels as if the journey of faith begins the day we first hear and heed and say yes to God. In fact it began long before even the first time we heard the stories of Jesus, even before we felt God’s first touch on our skin through the gentle hand of human love, even before we drew the first breath of sacred air on the day of birth. From the foundation of the world when Jesus was ordained to be the Lamb slain for us to open a way beyond the impasses and impossibilities and messes we make, God chose each one of us as the beloved of God created and destined for glory.

A while back a television show documented the true story of a little girl in an orphanage, where over and over children without homes were summoned for review by potential adoptive parents. Over and over these lonely little children put on a show, doing their best to display how cute and bright and eminently worthy of being chosen they were, and over and over the child who was the focus of the story failed to be judged worthy and remained unchosen as others left for new homes. This being TV- land, the story of course did finally have a happy ending for her.

Those of us who have endured our own times of being unchosen, not making an athletic team or the college of choice or a preferred position at work, resonate to the pain of having authorities who hold our happiness in their hands look at us and find us so wanting that we are rejected. We have all been there. Watching that little girl, my heart broke for her and every other sister or brother human being who has endured the build-up of hope and effort leading to the let-down of not making it and being shut out. Watching her story, I also recalled the struggles within the Church over what we call the doctrine of election.

The doctrine of election deals with God’s choosing of humanity to seek and save and bring home to our best, true selves. Some believe that from the foundation of the world God has chosen some and unchosen the rest; others believe that God has chosen every single person and gives everything to win and woo each one of us to turn and say yes to being chosen. In my younger years in a church which emphasized the former view I struggled mightily with that question, so much so that in moving to Rhode Island and beginning to worship with Greenville Baptist Church, that was the question I asked repeatedly of members: “What do you American Baptists believe about election?” For a long time those questioned claimed not to understand the question. Finally someone answered, “This is what we believe about election. You can’t vote until you join the church.” So I did.

Look, there is legitimate difference of opinion on exactly how that dynamic and dialectic between God’s choice and human response works out in our lives. I prefer to believe that God looks at all God’s children and as unworthy as we are out of profound love chooses every last one of us nevertheless, and in the fullness of time has come in Jesus and now comes over and over in the Spirit to convince us that we are invited to come home, until we say yes and turn in that direction. I prefer to focus not on the possible unchosenness of any but the chosenness of all so that we can choose to walk together in God’s ways.

But whatever any one of us believes about that piece of theology, all of us must surely agree that we who have gathered here in this upper room on this fine Sunday afternoon when there are countless other options to claim our time are among the chosen, part of God’s elect, whoever else may or may not be included. If it were not so, most likely we would not be in church right now. God has spoken to each of us: “You are my beloved daughter, you are my beloved son,” and we have assented to set our feet on the path toward home, where we shall only arrive together. That is the fundamental fact behind our business here with Amy today, and it is as true of each one of us as it is of her, because it is true of all of us together.

Once on that journey, one does well to wonder what chosenness means and what it requires. Are we merely on the way toward individual heavenly reward and pie in the sky bye and bye after we die, perhaps even earthly blessings here and now, or does being among God’s elect demand something of us? Isaiah said that knowing ourselves to be chosen is part of the larger story of summoning all God’s children home so that all may sing God’s praise. Paul said that God has committed to us the message of reconciliation and through us God is making an appeal to the whole world God so loves. Therefore not one of us can dare to speak a paraphrase of General William Sherman who declared more than a century ago during another election season, “If elected, I will decline to serve.”

The question to every one of us is this: “If elect, will you serve?” If you number yourself among God’s chosen because you have heard God’s voice and have responded, what will be your role toward the homecoming of all your sisters and brothers on the face of this earth, how will you be God’s ambassador? Which brings us back to our business here with Amy this afternoon. Each of us has been created and formed and gifted and called by God for a particular role in the magnificent enterprise of making this old and broken world new and whole and holy. When hands are laid upon Amy and she is set apart and ordained to the gospel ministry, we are not setting her up for a fall by collectively casting upon her the burden of making it all happen, any more than we are setting her above us or setting her aside from the action. Perhaps we might better say that we are setting Amy beside us as proclaimer of the gospel and lover of God’s people so that together we may better live out God’s love for the world, in our face-to-face relationships a chalice to receive and pour out grace.

You know, there is a fascinating tension in the Bible between the command not to be afraid and the corresponding command to fear God, and surely whatever else those words mean they tell us to fear or reverence God enough not to fear anything else and to do what is expected of us. If when we declare Amy chosen and worthy for ordination we were transferring to her the total responsibility for a church, she should well be terrified enough to take off before the transaction occurred. As a matter of fact, I love Amy enough to help her make her get-away.

But the happy, indeed blessed, ending to God’s story is that God has chosen all of us to be a special people and in God’s providence has granted to us along with an awesome challenge amazing grace and gifts sufficient to see it through. Election has always been the story of an insignificant bunch of folk chosen by God to make it together through the ordeals of life and in the process make their world new. It is the story of this God who says, “I am with you. You are mine,” and of a people who so reverence and love their God that all things are possible and all things shall indeed be made new. AMEN