CALLED John M. Buchanan
Mark 1:14-2 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
January 27,1985 Columbus, Ohio

Dag Hammarskjold was one of the early and most distinguished Secretaries
General of the United Nations. He was a fascinating man. A scholar and successful
international banker, he was persuaded to enter the Swedish Foreign Service. From
there he was elected Secretary General of the United Nations in 1953. He served
for eight years, and died in an air crash while on a U.N. peace mission in Africa
in 1961.

After he died, his personal journal was published under the title Markings.
It revealed a deeply thoughtful man who, all his life, struggled with doubt and uncer-
tainty about the purpose of his own life and the existence of God.

Gradually Hammarskjold could affirm himself and the God he addressed in
one entry as:

"Thou
Whom I do not know
But whose I am..." (p. 215)

Slowly Hammarskjold concluded that something was at work in his life to
which he must respond: something summoning, pushing, calling.

The book is a favorite of mine and one of the entries which I have turned
on countless occasions and which has always cheered me is dated Whitsunday, 1961.
He wrote:

“| don't know Who - or What - put the question. I don't know when it
| was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I

did answer Yes to Someone ~ or Something - and from that hour I was
certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in
self surrender, had a goal." (p. 205)

The essence of Christianity is saying "yes." Hammarskjold called Christianity
"The Way," which is what it was called by the early Christians. It is a way, a living,
a following, an answering, a saying "yes." (it is not an ethical system. The essence
of Christianity is not believing certain ideas about God. The essence of it is a
relationship: an answer to a call. It is supported by a theology. We Presbyterians
are the resident experts at expressing our religion intellectually. It also spawns
an ethical system, a morality. There has never been much apreement about what
the morality is, as anyone who ventures into the public crossfire on issues like abor-
tion quickly learns. But a morality is part of what Christianity produces, Yet ethics,
is not the essence of it. If it were, we would still be Pharisees. The essence _is |
hearing the summons, the call, and answering it, as in getting up from your fishing
nets and following Jesus.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his powerful work, The Cost of Discipleship, began
by focusing on the astonishing transaction which occurs in our text this morning.
Bonhoeffer acknowledged the discomfort we have with this story. Surely something
else happened between the call of Jesus and those fishermen's response. Surely

they knew,/him before and had been thinking about, maybe even talking about follow-
ing him: (a kind of sabbatical, a stint in the Peace Corps to get their lives in order,
a mid-life trisis nigel ara concluded that the story is there at the beginning
of the first Gospel to be written, in the tight, spare rhetoric in which Mark cast
it, precisely to nail down forever that the essence of this thing is the call and the
response; not the theology of the Sadducees or the disciplined ethics of the Pharisees,
but precisely the call of Jesus and the answer.

That dynamic, or something very close to it, turns out also to be the essence
of mental health, of becoming a full and alive human being. We become who we
are as a product of our choice. We are at our best committing ourselves to some
purpose other than our own amusement. >

John D. Rockefeller II urged people in a speech one time “te become involved
personally and positively inthe great dramas of our times rather than feeling our-
selves to be impotent victims of imponderable forces. The antidote to despair,"
he suggested, “is to be involved."

And so it turns out to be blessing, not burden, to be called. It turns out to
be our salvation to hear the voice and to answer it. W.H, Auden wrote the Forward
to Hammarskjold's book in which he made this wonderful observation about his
struggle with depression:

"“Hammarskjold knew exactly what his problem was ~ if he was not to
go under,’ he must...find a calling in which he could forget himself -
and knew that it was not in his own power to do this." (p. xv-xvi, Forward,

Markings)

Part of what John Calvin and other reformed theologians added to our under~
standing of Christianity was in the area of vocation ~ which meang_"calling." [The
reformers taught that all Christians have a vocation - a calling.] Subsequently,
refermed—theologytattght—that-one—may- wer —ones calling occupationally —but
that—is—not—alweys—possible,- AVRIL are called to be children of God, to
be full human beings, to be followers of Jesus Christ. Even though we still talk
as if the only person we expect to be called is the minister, we are at our best
when we know that each of us has been called by Jesus Christ to be his disciple.
Some of us respond to that call by being ministers; and some doctors, and lawyers,
and steelworkers, and teachers, and secretaries, and cooks, and homemakers, and
bankers. Within the context of whatever we chose to do with our lives each of
us is called and each can respond by living as a disciple i means living with

integrity and love and a passion for justice, kindness, and peace

So the church is called, those reformed theologians taught, to hear the voice
of Jesus and to obey it. There are a lot of pressures on the institutional church
these days, particularly on those of us who may be called mainstream churches.
We are not doing well numerically. We are not doing nearly as weil as others. Presby-
terians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians - are cheered these days
when the rate of membership decline slows a bit. But it is the glory of the church

when, in spite of that, it keeps faith with what it hears its Lord calling it to doe

nal-suicide, nor do I think there is moral merit simply
nd death. But I do affirm the glory of the church
that its bugine’s is to hear the call of Jesus Christ and to follow

2.

stebe]

=3—

It is the glory of this

urch that it has tried to do that over the years: thz
it has asked what the Lord ires, that it has heard the and followed,“ Not
without debate and argument, net without doubt \and questioning bout
call is, certainly not without\‘that same “argumentati
in the Bible express when G ells them to do so

we ~ you are still at it:
programs, new ideas,
and the peace of Chri

still listening, still formihg dommittees

: d planning new
w expressions of love arid caring and a pas

sion for justice

That most difficult moment in the ordination trials of a candidate for ministry
used to happen with a question that went something like this: “Do you sincerely
believe in your heart that you have been called to the ministry?" That was difficult
because there are those blessed few who could not only say yes to that, but could
name the date, time, place, and what the voice sounded like and what it said. We
have always been inclined to make that experience the norm: to wait for an experi-
ence like Simon and Andrew, James and John called directly by a man standing
in front of them.

But that is not how it is for most of us.

Frederick Buechner, in Alphabet of Grace, tells how it was with him. He
was sitting at a lunch counter in his town:

"I hear you are entering the ministry,' the woman said down the long
table, meaning no real harm. ‘Was it your own idea or were you poorly
advised?’ And the answer that she could not have heard even if I had
given it was not an idea at all neither my own, nor anyone else's. It
was a lump_in the throat. It was an itching in the feet. It was a stirring
in the blood It wags a\sickening of\the h at "the sight of misery...It

in a dream, new was a name
enough to do thé dying myself."

was a na whicl’ when! wrote it
worth dying for ¢ven if I\was not b
{p. 109)

The call of Jesus Christ comes to most of us, not with singular clarity, but
mixed in with many voices, many experiences. It comes, | believe, in our impatience,
in a passion for justice, imamanger at unnecessary suffering.

It comes with the summons we feel to be faithful to something, to live for
someone, to give openly and profoundly. The call of Jesus Christ comes when we
know deeply that God wants us to live the kingdom - of justice and peace and kind-
ness, here and now: that call comes in the struggles and joys, the laughter and
tears, the victories and defeats of the life we are living.

The call of Jesus Christ is blessing, not burden. And it is one of the deepest,
dearest truths of the faith, that it comes to each of us.

~qe

Dag Hammarskjold, just two months before he died, wrote beautifully:

"Tired

And lonely,

So tired

The heart aches,

Meltwater trickles

Down the rocks,

The fingers are numb,

The knees tremble,

It is now,

Now, that you must not give in,

"Weep

If you can,

Weep,

But do not complain.

The way chose you -

And you must be thankful." {p, 213)