In angst-ridden poetry, thinkers,
whose ponderings pour out beautiful verse or angry verse, express their
questions, their frustration, and their confusion. In those questions see this: see a person
desperately seeking God. Even if his
language is raw and strewn with bitter, atheistic sentiment, deep down he – the
critic, the skeptic - needs what only God can give, and he or she, the poet
knows she needs it.
God smiles and invites that person. “Come, drink.
Come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.” Thirsty for truth? Come.
Thirsty for hope. Come. Are you literally thirsty because you live
where clean water is hard to come by?
Come. Come to the living waters
of God. Everyone who thirsts, come.
I saw a man crawling along the
sidewalk. He has some kind of
degenerative condition either in his legs or in his back. His body is contorted in a shape that doesn’t
appear human as he uses his hands to drag himself, useless legs and all, up the
street. He’s extremely poor in a country
that is, for 95% of the people, extremely poor – Ethiopia. So for him there is no treatment, no surgery,
no physical therapy, no wheelchair. His
condition begins as a pain in the back or legs and then gets worse and worse
until his legs no longer work and he has to continue on by dragging himself
through the dirt, using his hands as his feet.
He’s poor.
To him, God says, Come! Come buy wine and milk. Come, and without money, eat your fill. Delight yourself in God’s rich food.
Through his prophet Isaiah, God
reminds the world that He is a God who calls and invites. Noah was called to be part of the story when
God started over. Abraham was called to
a place he did not know. Moses was
called to face the enemy and lead God’s people to salvation. Jonah was called to lead the enemy to
salvation. And in Isaiah 55, God calls
the thirsty to drink God’s living water and the hungry and starving to feast at
God’s table.
God
calls us – each one of us.
When I was a college student, I remember
receiving invitations from theological seminaries. We were invited to attend weekend programs
with titles like, "Come Explore your Call."
Or, "A
Weekend of Discernment."
Or, "What
Plans does God have for your Life?"
Nearly every seminary had a program where they
recruited college juniors and seniors who studied in religion departments or
participated in campus ministries. The
recruitment was based around the question Are you being called into
vocational ministry?
Now, some 25
years later, I have to ask, is it only "vocational ministers" who are
called by God? Is it that someone decides to be a lawyer
or a teacher or an accountant, but is called to be a pastor?
I think all who
turn to Jesus are called by God. I
believe God even calls people who have not put their faith in Him. In Luke 15, it says he seeks the lost. God goes out of His way to draw those far
from Him into His embrace. Maybe in
terms of one’s profession, people wait tables or hammer nails to pay the bills
not because God called them into food service or construction. I am under
no illusion that everyone is working in a job to which God called him or her. Sometimes
we do jobs because we need to work. That
was my story when I was high school substitute teacher many years ago.
However, all Christians whether pastors,
waiters, truck drivers, nurses, or college professors are called by God.
Furthermore, table-waiting or trash collecting can indeed be a call for a
season of life even if not for a life time. Every person who is part of
the body of Christ is called by God. In
most jobs, we have the opportunity to live as called persons who give witness
to the love of God and the life we have in Jesus’ name.
At HillSong, we
are going to spend five weeks in a church-wide emphasis exploring God’s call on
us. Specifically, we will consider what it means to live our lives as
part of a bigger story. We will look at
the story of God and how God calls us to be part of it. What do our lives look like when we live
daily with a sense that God is summoning us?
Who are we as a people and as individuals when we live in God’s
calling?
Each of our small groups will be given thought-provoking
questions to include in their prayers times as they engage with what we do on
Sundays.
I described the man I saw in Ethiopia, the one
crawling along with a back and legs bent in ways I have never seen. Can any two people be less alike than me, a
healthy, educated, middle class American, and this Ethiopian man who lives in a
completely broken body – mangled because no medical care is available to him? We
literally and figuratively are worlds apart.
And yet, he and I share this. The
water we both need for life and the food that makes us both rich beyond the
dreams of the wealthiest people on earth cannot be earned or acquired but only
received from God as a gracious gift. In
Isaiah 55, God declares that He wants to give that gift. He wants to give both me and that man and
also you the living water and the sumptuous food set on Heaven’s table;
moreover, he calls us to that table!
God does not silently sit at the crossroads
and hand out blessings to whomever happens to stop. God proactively reaches out and invites. We are summoned to God’s table. In fact, in Jesus Christ, the eternal God,
steps out of Heaven and into our time-bound world as he takes on himself all
the pain of the fall and of sin and death. Jesus coming in the flesh is how God
hand delivers the invitation to each of us.
Two ways we live in our calling and enact the
gift of God are the Lord’s Supper and communal meals. Of the Lord’s Supper, also called the
Eucharist, James K.A. Smith says, “it is a normative picture of the justice of
the kingdom of God.”[i] The broken Ethiopian man and you and I and
Donald Trump[ii]
and any other person we can envision all have an invitation and we each have
equal standing. We each come to God’s
table unworthy. We are not invited
because we deserve to be there. We’re
invited because we don’t deserve it.
Jesus died for us while were yet sinners. The broken bread evokes the reality of his
broken body. The dark juice is his spilt
blood – shed for us. The justice of the kingdom; here, all
come because of God’s grace.
Smith also says the Supper constitutes us as
an eschatological people. With that
fancy theological verbiage he means we are directional – living toward the end
and then toward resurrection. In the
resurrection, the broken man will not be broken. I will not be a rich American in the present sense,
where I am wealthier than most people in the world. In Christ we are all called to inherit the
riches of God. Participating in the
Supper reminds me of where we are going and it reminds me to work for justice while
we are on the way there. In the case of
the man I saw on the street, I did not work specifically to empower him other
than through my prayer. But I was in
Ethiopia as a part of a HillSong trip to join in an effort to help other people
who are materially poor, but relationally filled with abundance.
At the table the justice of the kingdom sets
us all – the crippled man, Trump, the people we visited, you, me – as equals
and we all, in Christ, look forward to eternity at God’s table where Isaiah 55
is no longer a prophetic anticipation, but an eternal, literal reality. We go from working for justice to living in
perfect justice in God’s physical presence.
We go from praying for that time when we can eat and drink without cost
or limitation to eating and drinking without cost, enough for everyone. We are called to God’s table and we enact
that call by taking communion in worship with other believers.
Another way we enact and anticipate the call
of God is by sharing table fellowship; eating together. After worship today, we’ll have lunch together. We’ll eat food prepared by us and provided by
us. We each bring something to
share. Is it clear that this is much
more than a biological act? All animals
take in food and their bodies convert that food into energy needed for life. When we sit together, we eat food that has
been carefully, lovingly prepared. We sit with old friends and new
friends. We laugh, reminisce, retell old
stories and hear other stories for the first time.
In all this we enact, or “live toward,” the community in which we will spend eternity. We could reduce the significance of it all by
saying, “Well, it was a nice potluck at church this past Sunday.” That would be a true statement, but also an
incomplete one. The “nice potluck” is a
gathering of the people of God in joy.
We don’t come just because it’s the best choice among many options for
how to spend a Sunday afternoon. We come
and eat together and join our hearts to each other because we are called to
this.
The enactment is also anticipation. We are called people – called to have lunch
together but also called to spend eternity together. When our bodies and our souls feel things we
would describe as “contentment” or “happiness” or “satisfaction,” those words
are the best we can do in communicating what is happening. But those descriptors fall short in
portraying the feelings we’ll have when we sit at God’s table in the
resurrection. What we do today in taking
communion and then in sharing a meal together whets our appetite for the table
God has set for us.
Smith calls the Lord’s Supper a meal “to go”
because it is but a “foretaste of the feast in the Kingdom.”[iii] As persons called to
God’s table we spend our lives moving toward God and bringing others with along
the way. Three spiritual practices of
answering the call to God’s table are (1) participation in communion with the
church, (2) participation in community meals like today’s potluck in a
community of brothers and sisters in Christ, and (3) the offer of hospitality
to one another and to strangers outside of the worshipping context.
Two of these spirituals practices can be done
within the next hour – the Lord’s Supper and a meal enjoyed together. The third, hospitality, is one I pray each of
us will explore in the week to come.
Hospitality can take countless forms.
Experiment with it. Discover how
you will extend hospitality to another person.
I think you’re called to this. We all are.
And the words of the call come from God
through the prophet Isaiah.
“Everyone who thirsts, come. You that have no money, come, buy, and eat.”
“Listen carefully and eat what is good and
delight yourselves in rich food.”
AMEN
[i]
J.K.A. Smith (2009), Desiring the Kingdom,
Baker Academic (Grand Rapids), p. 201.
[ii]This
reference specifically to Donald Trump comes as he is most likely to be the
Republican nominee for president in the 2016 race. His polarizing campaign has been viewed by
progressives as dangerous as with great bombast he continuously says
xenophobic, racist things. The
Republican establishment has gone to great lengths to defeat him, yet he
continues to win primaries. At this
point, just mentioning his name in a sermon, especially suggesting that he
would sit at a communion table, is enough to raise hackles in the crowd.
[iii]
Smith, p.200.
