Creekside Church Sermon of September 12, 1999 "Consider the Call" Isaiah 49:1-7 John 13:14-17	Rev. David Bibbee
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But before Wendy makes her pledge and takes the plunge, I have something to say to her. I was where you are now, Wendy, and I want to share some thoughts with you that no one shared with me... things you will encounter during this period of learning and testing that awaits you.

Thinking about your licensing, I wondered, "Why do we need to license ministers?" I understand the logic of licensing applied to other disciplines. It's comforting to know it is illegal to practice certain occupations and activities without a license. When I am in a jet cruising at 32,000 feet, I want the guy at the controls to have a pilot's license. I want the doctor performing my brain surgery to have a license to practice medicine. I want the lady at the wheel of an oncoming car I am about to meet on a narrow, winding mountain road to have a license certifying she is fit to drive. I understand why people engaged in potentially dangerous activities need licensed, but ministers?

Ministers are harmless. They pose no danger to anyone. If it were up to me, Wendy, I wouldn't give you a license. I'd give you an insurance policy instead. I thought about this as I read the titles of books in my library on ministry...Buried Alive. The Walk on Water Syndrome. The Wounded Healer. How to Murder a Minister. My goal isn't to scare you silly. I want to give you a head start however, in adjusting your understanding of the life to which God is calling you.

Frederick Buechner's words about calling have always impressed me. He says, "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." Ministry is doing what you need to do-being at home with yourself and doing what needs to be done for people groping to find their way in a cold, confused world. It's an awesome thing to be called by God to do his bidding, to proclaim his deeds, to stake your very self on the bet that if life has any meaning at all, it will only be found in his service. It is to have fire in your bones and a burden on your heart. It means giving yourself to a work which no one in their right mind would consider were it not for the fact that the thing you are called to do is God's thing.

The prophet Isaiah wasn't licensed to the ministry. He was called, and at a very young age. "The Lord called me before I was born. When I was in the womb he named me. You're my servant Israel. In you I'll be glorified." A mighty big load for one so young. God made his young tongue a sword. His testimony was sharp, but he didn't feel he had adequate tools for the task. God had made him a polished arrow in a quiver. But he was the only arrow and he questioned the sufficiency of the tools he had been given. Words were all he had, and words can be so feeble.

My first hospital call was a disaster. The first week of my intern year at Crest Manor I participated in a volunteer chaplaincy program at Memorial hospital. I walked toward the patient's room with my head full of facts about the great theologians, church history, and the latest insights of biblical scholarship. With these tools I walked into the room and was hit with a heavy antiseptic smell and was shocked by the sight of a man's mangled leg. In an instant all this knowledge vanished. "I'm the chaplain," I whimpered. "They're going to amputate my leg tomorrow. Pretty sick looking, isn't it?" he asked. I started sweating. The room began to spin. I don't know what I said, but the pastoral call lasted all of about 90 seconds. I hit the door as fast as I could because I was about to pass out. Welcome to the ministry.

I felt like a failure. It would be the first in a series of failures continuing to the present. But I fins solace in Isaiah because this servant of God, though called at an early age said, "I have labored in vain. I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity." Isaiah met what every prophet, and every minister before and after has met. Resistance. Rejection. Apathy. Bread cast upon the water with no return.

I'm glad I worked for a painting contractor before going to seminary. After painting a barn, a house, or a room at Timbercrest, I would stand back, look at the finished job and feel I had accomplished something. I still paint from time to time, but my major for tool for work is not a paintbrush, rather the tools I work with are words, and the one I work for is God. When you work for God, you have lofty expectations. Calling people to daily conversion, doing what you can to build the body of Christ...working for a harvest, telling the world that God is not pleased with the present arrangements. It's an enormous undertaking...work that is never done. It's the reason I kept the paint brush.

Ministry is a high calling, Wendy. It's a hard calling. High and sometimes impossible expectations will be placed on you. For this reason that you will sometimes sound like Isaiah. When you look forward to teaching a productive Sunday school class and no one comes prepared, when the person you have counseled through one crisis after another goes right on making the same mistakes, when a church pancake breakfast is considered the equivalent of going into all the world preaching, teaching, and baptizing in Jesus' name, when a 2% increase in the budget is called a leap of faith, when you give your all and can't seem to find a result anywhere, you'll sound like Isaiah, "I have labored in vain. I've spent my strength for nothing." But this doesn't mean all is lost. If you have no expectations; if there is no fire in your bones it's no big deal. But because God called you and you take your call seriously; because you have dreams and desires, ministry matters greatly.

Wendy, there's a perspective you bring to ministry that I didn't have in the beginning. I was trained as an architect. Conceive it. Draw it. Build it. Job done. You were trained as a teacher. Someone said that teachers must love planting more than harvesting. A teachers' satisfaction must come from making possible a harvest they will never see. And no one can minister who doesn't have a long perspective. There isn't a soul serving God who hasn't questioned whether their labors really mattered in the long run. But Isaiah says more than, "I've spent my strength for vanity."

He also said, "Yet surely my cause is with the Lord and my reward with my God." No one calls themselves to ministry. God does. In humble obedience we admit, "The work is yours, God. Not mine." We don't take credit for the outcomes. Our failures aren't always what they seem. I returned to visit the man whose leg had been amputated. I tried to apologize for nearly passing out. But before I talked, he thanked me for the encouraging words I offered which helped him face surgery. At times you'll preach a sermon that you were so embarrassed to deliver you would have just as soon had done it with a bag on your head, but then someone tells you the sermon was a gift that gave them the encouragement they needed to go on living.

Wendy, you are a very bright and gifted young woman. You graduated summa cum laude in your college class, and probably will be at the top of your seminary class, too. You have what it takes to be a success in this world. But while your high school and college peers are in pursuit of success, working for their first million by age thirty, a path toward success which at first glance doesn't seem successful has been picked for you. With this in mind I want to tell you a story by Walter Wangerin. It's his story, but it is also the story of everyone who has labored for God. And if you remember nothing I say, I hope you will remember this story called, "The Making of a Minister."

Wangerin pastored an interracial church. In his third year of ministry he pastored an old, poor, obscene, angry, bitter black man named Arthur Forte. Arthur lived in a tiny house, or more accurately, in a rotting stuffed chair from which he seldom moved the last year of his life. He hadn't been to church in a long time. The members were grateful. He was full of contempt and no one visited except Wangerin, and for him it was a grim sacrifice. After months of chair sitting, Arthur's house was filthy. Cockroaches scurried at every step. The TV was on constantly. Newspapers were everywhere. When his cigarettes burned down, he flipped them on the floor on the newspapers, but it didn't ignite them because a moist mildew covered everything.

Arthur was demanding of Walter. He didn't want a quick psalm or prayer. He wanted to dispute Walter's faith. He debated God's goodness. He cursed doctors and hospitals. After each visit, the pastor's soul seemed empty. His faith flat. He didn't like Arthur.

By late summer Arthur's health was failing. He was incontinent. Never left the chair. The August heat was unbearable, and instead of opening the windows, he took off all his clothes. He demanded prayer and communion from his pastor. It was so embarrassing for Walter, putting bread into the mouth of a naked man. He then asked Walter to help him get dressed...help him put his slippers and underwear on. Arthur's feet were grotesquely swollen. The pressure of the slippers caused him to groan in pain. In that moment Walter said he began to understand something about ministry and service and discipleship. He knew that what Arthur wanted more than anything was for someone to touch him. Communion was a way for him to be loved.

When Walter returned days later, Arthur was on the floor. He had fallen from his chair during the night. He fought going to the hospital. When they arrived at the hospital, Walter pleaded for a glass of water. "No." he was told. Not till the doctor was contacted. "Will you do it?" Wangerin asked the nurse. "The unit nurse will when he is in his room." Wangerin asked, "Can I wheel him to his room? I'm his pastor. I'll take responsibility." "He's our responsibility, not yours." When he finally got to his room, they still wouldn't give him a drink until after he had been bathed.

At eleven that night, the hospital called with word that Arthur had died.

Wangerin wept over Arthur's death. He writes, "Tears were my diploma his death my benediction. Failure was my ordination." The Lord didn't say, "Blessed are you if you know, teach, or preach these things. Blessed are you if you do them." Wangerin felt like a failure. "Ministry surely diminishes the minister," he says. "Makes him insignificant. The merest servant. Small. Weak. Unable." But when this happens, for the first time the minister isn't ministering out of his or her ability, but out of Christ.

Consider your call, Wendy. Consider what goes into the making of a minister. Consider the burden and the blessing. Consider it a path toward insignificance in which you will find your deepest significance. Consider that in Christ's service, failures aren't as they seem, but are occasions for God's glory to be revealed.

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