Beyond the Call

sermon by Torin Eikler
Acts 9:1-20

If you know me as well as I hope you all do (or if you’ve listened to very many of my sermons), you will know that I spend a good deal of time thinking about “calling.” The six years that I was in BVS was largely due to the fact that I couldn’t decide whether I was called to work in microbiology or in systems ecology. Did I want to work with the very small or the very large, and which field did God want me in? As it turned out, God wanted me in a different place altogether.

It was a long struggle to find my path, and really I only found the next few steps. I am still trying to see the path before me more clearly, and I still have doubts about the way that I have chosen every once in awhile. I suspect that will be the way of it for the rest of my life.

There have many times in my life when I wished for an experience like Saul’s. Not the blinding or the sense of guilt that I imagine he felt when he saw the truth of what his persecution was doing to people … I hope that I’ll never be faced with that kind of realization. But, the clarity of his call, spoken by the very lips of Christ, is something that I envy. Once while we lived in Washington DC, I told a friend of mine that I just wished for something clear and easy – a neon sign, perhaps, falling from the heavens above the Mall and saying, “Torin, I want you to do ……” But that has not been the way of it, and however much I would like to have it all figured out, it seems that I am doomed and blessed to wrestle with God for every bit of clarity I find.


In truth, my story is more like that of Ananias. Though we don’t know much of anything about him – nothing about who he was before he met Saul and very little about what happened later, he remains a good example of what most of us experience in our journey as Christian disciples. What I mean is that he was a good Christian. Though he must have been converted not long before we meet him, his was not as dramatic an epiphany as Paul’s.

He was just another disciple there in Damascus, living in faith and in fear of the reign of terror Saul was leading. He was, I’m sure, doing his best to follow the teachings of Christ and to listen for the leading of the Spirit. And then it came, “Get up and go to … the man of Tarsus named Saul. [Lay your hands on his eyes that he may regain his sight and serve me.]” It was a confusing call to be sure, but a call just the same.

What strikes me about these two very different men is not so much the different ways in which they were converted. What I think is most interesting is that despite their different backgrounds, they both heard the voice of God in a vision. They both received a call and, despite their doubts and fears … despite the consequences that would surely come, they both responded. And, in doing so, they became, each in their own ways, the hands and feet and voice of Christ carrying out the work of God in their own time and in their own world.

Now I don’t know the story of each of your conversion. I don’t know if you have had a close encounter of the Pauline kind, if you turned to Christ and the church because of teachings you heard or reading you did, or if you were simply raised in the church and found yourself growing into Christian faith gradually. I suspect that most of us are in that last group, and there is nothing unusual or undesirable about that. We all come to faith in our own way and in our own time, and while I would love to hear each of your stories of conversion or call, what I’m wondering about right now is how you have responded to the power and the presence of God in your lives. What has happened and what is happening now that we have become people of faith? How are we, all together, giving life to our faith because as James says in one of the passages beloved by Anabaptists of all stripes, “faith, by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”


Last week, Lawrence Brenneman spoke to us the Christian call to “missional living” which is another way of saying that an important part of our lives as followers of Christ is looking around us to find the places where God is already at work and joining in. At it’s heart, the work that we do – the worship we carry out in service to the world – is not our work but God’s, and whether we are waiting or acting, we are called to stay awake and be alert to the ways in which we can become the hands and feet and voice of Christ carrying out the work of God in our time and in our world.

While he was with us, Lawrence reflected with us on our own vision and the concerns we shared as a part of a listening project carried out by Allegheny Mennonite Conference a couple of years ago. For those of you who weren’t in Sunday School, I’d like to share some of his insights.

We are a congregation that has many facets, and our lives together involve finances, nurture, education, worship, fellowship, mission, and evangelism. At times, it seems that our concerns rest mostly with our financial situation and the state of our Sunday morning programming, but from what we shared two years ago, it is clear that our dreams live in realm of outreach, worship, and community building. Not only were two thirds of our comments about those three areas, but we seem to come alive when we talk about what we are doing or would like to see ourselves doing in those areas.

Some of the comments about what we are doing were:
-Reaching out to the community through Vacation Bible School,
-Supporting individuals as they carry out mission trips,
-Providing facilities for an alternative child care that provides important
opportunities to build connections with others,
-Community based mission projects like Circle of Friends and Habitat for
Humanity that meet needs in this community,
-And supporting existing mission projects through general and specific
giving.

During Sunday School we added thoughts about what we would like to be doing:
-Increasing connections and outreach to university students – both
Anabaptists and others,
-Enhancing our witness and teaching concerning environmentally
sustainable lifestyles,
-Connecting with peace and justice ministries in the community,
-And building on the promise held out by our Children as Peacemakers
week this summer.

Add to that list the dreams we listed on our 5-year plan several years ago:
-Increasing the community’s awareness of peace and justice issues through
displaying posters, inviting speakers, and having classes on issues,
-Increasing fellowship opportunities for adults by organizing small group
fellowships around particular themes and combining work and
fellowship through congregational service projects,
-And increasing attendance by encouraging regular attendees to invite
friends to come,

and it seems obvious that we are filled with a vision that points toward taking our worship with us into the world.

As a community of faith, we have felt a call to outreach and service, and when we think and plan and move in that direction, we find an energy that we didn’t think we had. It comes out in our voices. It comes out in our body language. It comes out in the smiles on our faces and the liveliness of our fellowship together in the midst of our work. That is something that Lawrence reflected to me after worship, and it is something that Carrie and I have seen in our time here with you. Again and again, people get excited about finding new ways to reach out to Morgantown or Waynesburg or Benin or Haiti. We do come away from it a little bit tired, but it’s that good kind of tired because there is a sense of fulfillment that comes from being in sync with what God is doing around us.

But I don’t think we see ourselves that way. We seem to have heard the call. We know what we are to be about. We feel it there within us. We sense it even when we are just talking about it, but we haven’t found a way to see ourselves actually living it. Something – some confusion or fear or maybe just habit stops us from going on beyond the talking and the dreaming to the doing.

I think, maybe, we are really more like Paul’s companions. We have heard a voice calling for us to change, but we haven’t glimpsed the vision. So, we muddle along as best we can, and we hope that is enough.

Maybe we just need a new vision. Not a new vision statement, though that could be helpful too, but a new way of seeing ourselves. We are a young…-ish and vibrant faith community with talent and passion to spare, but we tend to think of ourselves as an old…-er, worn out congregation struggling to survive. Yes, we have some problems meeting our budget. Yes, much of the work of the congregation is done by a large handful of people. But that is the case in just about every church I know. And however true that was in the past, we don’t have to let that define us.

Saul’s past, after all, was considerably more … “checkered” … than ours has been, but that didn’t hold him back. The power of God showed him a new vision. Once he had his eyes opened to the truth, he saw himself in such a different light that he took a whole new name, and he turned all his passion toward answering the call. Saul the persecutor became Paul the apostle, and, with joy, he followed that call despite the risks and the hardships. Whenever he saw God at work he joined right in, eager to lend his voice and his hands to the effort. And, wherever he went, God went with him, giving him support, strength, and encouragement for all that he faced.


I don’t expect any of us to be another “Paul.” But, I do wonder who we could become if we committed ourselves as whole-heartedly to answering the call that we have felt as a congregation. What could we do to further the work of Christ in our own communities if we put down our anxieties and fears and embraced the work of peacemaking or service to the hungry and homeless or reaching out to offer university students (or anyone else) a warm community of support and encouragement? How would it change us … being filled with the energy and excitement of giving life to our faith, putting feet and hands and voice to our dreams?


I had a friend once who was a prophet who heard voices that sent her to others to share important information or extend an invitation to God’s work. I asked her once about free will and what she thought happened when someone said no to the call she shared. Her response, to the best of my memory, was, “If someone doesn’t accept the work that God has for them, that’s okay. God will get someone else to do it. But, if you say no often enough, you get fewer invitations, and you miss out on all the fun, and life becomes less joyful.”


God has called us to this work – to give joyful life to our faith. We just need to offer willing hearts and eager hands, and God will open our eyes to a new way of seeing – a new vision that will show us the way. Let’s not miss out on all the fun.