No Call Waiting

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent III, Year B
December 12, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
On a regular basis, people ask about my calling to ordained ministry.  I will admit that I really do not mind the question, but the answer is much longer and circuitous than some might expect.  I do not have a one-paragraph version.  I do not have a flash of light, God speaking out of a sunset, or slain in the Spirit moment to describe.  My story is more like a rising tide of awareness, a series of doors that kept opening, and a wrestling match with the twenty-three-year-old not quite fully developed brain trying to make sense of who I wanted to be.  I had checked off my plans: an Eagle Scout rank with Troop 4, Athens, Georgia, high school diploma, Athens Academy, a collegiate level varsity letter in Soccer, and a BA in English, with a focus on poetry, The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, including two summers of study at St. John’s College, Oxford.  Along the way, I had worked as a whitewater raft guide, a paralegal, and a clerk/driver for the twelfth Bishop of Virginia. 
 
While I am grateful for an amazing education that pushed me to think critically, interact with certain kinds of people, and write reasonably well, all of this was great, but what I never considered realistically was: great for what?  There followed young adult despair and angst.  With good counsel from some trusted friends and mentors, I was called back to the one constant of my whole life: a lively and curious faith.  Faith was more important in driving me than all the credentials I chased.  In time, I realized that as crazy as the Episcopal Church, or any church can be, these we are my people.  The Church had formed me and I was invited to faith my way -- yes that is a verb – to faith my way through an ordination process.  And the rest happened.  From childhood into so-called adulthood, through marriage, ordination, raising two children, and all the ups and downs of life, I have lived in twelve different places in six different dioceses.  Fortunately for me, Janice is resourceful and agile in her vocation and outlook.  In all of that, when anyone asks me where home is, the best answer I can give is Church. 
 
That is a lot of long sentences that leave out the nitty gritty of life, occasions of profound joy, and my share of trauma, misfires, and failure. Nevertheless, that is shortest answer I can give about my experience of calling.  The best summary I can give is that you know in your knowing place when you know, you know?  That is how we all shape our lives, choose with whom we live our lives, and what we do to sustain our lives.  Logic plays some part, but illogic works in us too.  Faithing is important. 
 
While much of God’s calling is the steady backbeat of life, today we hear super loud calling with the ringer turned up loud and the vibrate setting in earthquake mode.  Our annual Advent guide, John the Baptist, upstages the scene and commands our attention.  At first, he seems like a crazy, ranting relative.  In fact, John is a crazy, ranting, but holy relative.  Let’s play the ‘who are your people’ game for a minute…  John’s mother is Elizabeth gave birth to him long after her child rearing biological clock had stopped ticking, which places him he is among the small club of miracle babies in the Bible This is the biblical version of a flashing red light, saying “pay attention!”  John’s father is Zechariah, a Jewish priest, which lends to the stereotype of priest’s kids tending toward a rebellious walk on the wild side.  And as it happens, Elizabeth is Jesus’s mother’s cousin, making John is Jesus’s second cousin on his mother’s side.  As to familial relations of Jesus’s father’s side, it’s complicated.  The family tree there is more like kudzu.
 
No matter how prickly the package, John’s really zeroes in on the heart and soul of calling.  It is not about pedigree: “Do not say ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor.’”  It is not about intellectual accomplishment, status, or station.  He says that God’s calling is not a philosophical ascent, an intellectual exercise, or something earned as an accomplishment.  When the people ask what they should do, he tells them to be givers and not takers, being satisfied rather than seeking more through positional leverage.
 
Be careful not to use the last paragraph about wheat kernels being separated from the and husks as some form of transactional judgement.  It is not about the good folks being the kernels, and the bad folks being the chaff.  We are all of it: the whole plant.  We all have the kernel, the seed, the DNA.  We all have the self-protective detritus that is no longer useful.  The work is allowing God to do the threshing, to slough off our outer coating, and get to the heart of matters – moving with God’s heart beat.
 
The last line is almost comedic.  After all the talk of axes at the tree, and burning in unquenchable fire, Luke adds this “So, with many other exhortations [John] proclaimed the good news to the people.”  What sounds like hard news is, really, Good News.  This business of ministry is not business at all.  The profit and loss statement is all profit. This what the prophet sees. 
 
As we live out this season in anticipation of gentle Jesus meek and mild, born in a lowly stable with looing cattle, bathrobed shepherds, and the boychoir anthems as the heavenly host, we must know that Jesus is not a cooing little child for long.  While he comes gently, he comes with the force of a storm, not a sunset.  Our calling is not to do holy, it is to be with Jesus.
 
Faithing is a verb, but our doing is not about earning anything or posing as anyone we are not.  God is perfectly capable of being God, even when we run off in on our own.  In God, there is no call waiting.  Living whole heartedly, out of the heart of who we are, out of who we are created to be, is the calling, is true fulfillment, and is our only. real. home.  Amen.