Who does God want you to be?

 

Eli and Samuel by John Singleton Copley, 1780

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 14th January 2024, the 2nd of Epiphany

Today’s readings are mostly about people hearing God’s call and how they respond to it.

I believe that God calls each and every one of us to be the person he means us to be. But how can we be sure that a voice we hear is truly God’s voice? And how can we be sure what he is calling us to be and to do? The technical word for this is ‘discernment’, and discernment is difficult. Most of the time, in our busyness, wrapped up in our own thoughts and desires, we may not even hear God’s voice. If we do, it is often so much easier to ignore it. And sometimes what he asks of us seems so difficult that we try to run away from it.

Today I’m going to reflect a little on the readings, because I think they can help us get to grips with the problem of discernment.

In the OT reading (1Samuel 3:1-10, 11-20) Samuel hears God calling to him.

You may remember that Samuel’s parents Hannah and Elkanah had dedicated him to God as a child, and left him in the guardianship of Eli, the priest at the pilgrimage shrine of Shiloh.

The boy Samuel is confused when he hears God’s call. Three times he hears a voice calling his name. He thinks it is Eli calling for him, but it is not. At last Eli realises the voice Samuel is hearing must be from God. He prompts Samuel to respond, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’ – only then can Samuel open himself to God and understand his vocation. He will grow up to be a great prophet and a leader of Israel.

Notice Eli’s role in the story, helping Samuel to understand what is going on. When we are trying to discern what God is saying to us, we often need someone else to encourage, support and guide us, to enable our discernment.

I have experienced this personally. I began to ask myself whether I should offer myself to lead worship, at a time when otherwise there would be no one to lead services. I had watched a diocesan reader I admired and trusted do so. But it was not until a priest recognised that God was calling me, and encouraged and guided me, that I could begin to understand my call to diocesan reader ministry. Fostering discernment is an important role in ministry.

Psalm 139 marvels at how completely God knows and understands us.

In beautiful poetry the psalmist tells us that God comprehends us completely, we cannot escape him, even if we wish we could. This is because God has made us: ‘I thank you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made’, says the psalmist.

Indeed, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. We have been made as souls with conscience and intelligence, capable of love, able to tell good from evil, truth from lies, beauty from ugliness. And it is these innate capacities which enable us to hear God’s call and discern what it is he wants of us.

In the Gospel reading (John 1:43-51) Jesus calls Philip and Nathanael to follow him.

Notice that Jesus calls Philip directly, but it is Philip who then invites his friend Nathanael to meet Jesus. This is the way that many disciples of Jesus were made at the very beginning, by one disciple passing on Jesus’s call to follow him to another. And it is the way that disciples have been made ever since.

Notice also how Nathanael initially resists the call from Jesus, passed on by Philip.  ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’, he asks cynically. I suppose the rivalry between Bethsaida and Nazareth must have been a bit like that between Tipperary and Kilkenny in the hurling! It is only when Nathanael accepts his friend Philip’s invitation to ‘come and see’, and spends time in conversation with Jesus, that he gives in, finally confessing, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God’.

How like the way that many of us try to evade God’s call when it comes! But God does not give up on us – he knows us from the inside out, and he will not let go of us easily if he wants us for a purpose.

Philip goes on to be a great apostle, the first apostle to the gentiles, even before St Paul took on the role. Acts tells us that he was the first to bring Samaritans into the Church, and he goes on to baptise an Ethiopian court official. But what of Nathanael? We hear nothing else about him in the Bible - though perhaps he is the same as Nathanael of Cana to whom Jesus appeared at the Sea of Galilee after the Resurrection. We do know that Nathanael responded to Jesus’s call. As Jesus promised, he must have seen ‘heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending’. But God calls only a few to great things, and Nathanael may not have been one of them.

I said at the start, I believe God calls every one of us to be the person he means us to be.

There may be some here who are called to be priests, or perhaps even bishops – maybe even prophets or apostles, God help us! But almost all of us are called to much more modest things in ordinary places. Yet these too are things which God needs us for in order to build his Kingdom of peace and justice.

They may be official jobs in the church, jobs like being a church warden, or serving on select vestry. Or they may be specific ministries in the parish - there are so many, aren’t there? - reading, singing, church cleaning, washing linen, helping with flowers or refreshments after services – even volunteering for the Christmas tree festival! God calls different people at different times to different ministries to build up Christ’s body, the Church, to continue his ministry in the world.

But just as important there are tasks of service to others in the secular world. Tasks like being a carer, teaching children, healing the sick as doctors or nurses. Tasks that build and protect community, or conserve the beautiful planet we have been given. Tasks that feed the bodies and nourish the spirits of our neighbours. God needs people who will carry out all these tasks, and so many others, to build his Kingdom.

I suggest that each and every one of us should ask ourselves these questions: How has God called me? and How have I responded? We should do so often, because who it is God wants us to be, and what he wants us to do, is ever changing through the course of our lives. The beginning of a new year is a good time to do so.

And we should pray that God’s Holy Spirit will help us to discern what he wants of us. Because it is precisely when we respond to God’s call, that like Nathanael we will see ‘heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending’ and experience the joy of his Kingdom.

Let me finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Eternal God,
whose Son, Jesus Christ, is now exalted as lord of all,
and pours out his gifts upon the Church:
grant it that unity which only your Spirit can give,
keep us in the bond of peace,
and bring all creation to worship before your throne;
through Jesus Christ our Redeemer,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen

Reflection for Epiphany on Matthew 2:1-12

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th January 2024

Matthew’s Wise Men from the East are on a quest, following a star. In a quest, heroes follow a long, hard and dangerous journey to find an object of great value before returning home. The Wise Men are learned astronomers, who have come to pay homage to the king of the Jews, because they ‘observed his star at its rising’, we’re told. The learned chief priests and scribes of Jerusalem direct them to Bethlehem. The star leads them there, to the Christ-child with Mary his mother.

At the culmination of their quest, they are overwhelmed with joy. They kneel in homage and present their gifts, signifying that the royal king they seek is in fact this baby. Now that’s amazing, isn’t it? They have travelled so far, suffered such hardships, to find what? A tiny, vulnerable, human child, just like so many they could have found without stirring from home!

After finding what they seek, the Wise Men return home – the proper end of any quest. Matthew does not tell us what they made of it. But in his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’, T S Eliot imagines the response of one of them, years later in old age. I can do no better for a reflection than read it to you.

Journey of the Magi, T. S. Eliot

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I am sure we are to take Matthew’s story as fable, not history. The great truth buried in it is this, I believe - the Wise Men’s quest is our quest too. The light of the star represents all that is good and true and beautiful, all that is worthy of God. If we have the tenacity they had, to follow the light of their star, like them we will find that baby, who is, as St John puts it, ‘the true light, which enlightens everyone’. And like the aged Wise Man, what we have found will change us, we will no longer be at ease with the ways of the world we knew before, the old dispensation.