Called to Service, Part 1

This series is for all those who are called to service in the church – in other words, every Christian. I’m addressing deacons, but these truths will benefit any follower of Christ.

God is raising up men and women who are willing to serve him all over the world. When you’re ordained, part of the sense of what that means is that you’re ordained for the whole church. You could end up anywhere on this planet, because God has a passion to reach the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ, to let the whole world see and know. Let’s look at three elements of being called to service.

Raised in Faith

One of our collects says that the “things which were cast down are being raised up, things that had grown old are being made new and that all things (not just what we like, not just our culture, not just our friends and acquaintances, but all of it) are being brought to their perfection by him.”

That’s what we get to be a part of, to be a channel that somehow God uses to express that work, of things being raised up as a witness and sign, not just to us insiders who have already said yes to Jesus, but literally to the world that something new is happening. It starts in the heart of each one of us: “I once was lost, but now I’m found/ Was blind, but now I see.” That we who had, according to 2 Corinthians, been blinded by the god of this world, to keep us from seeing the light of the gospel, God broke in and said, “No. Satan does not have the last word; I do.”

And God breaks in with his light. So that in a whole new way, we see that the whole question about who God is and how God operates is literally manifested, as the Scripture says, in the face of his Son, that he is God’s final answer. For all theology, for all questions about what it means to be both God and to be human, that he is, as he said, “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6b).

Appointed by God

And therefore, we say without reservation that our allegiance to him is more than just the allegiance of the will, the allegiance of all that we say, all that we are, because we are his and because he has bought us with such a dear price, literally the blood of His Son. The death and resurrection of Jesus are applied and made manifest here. And we would say, “never” to any invitation to walk away from him. We understand that no matter how sweet the voice of that invitation may seem, it finds its source in the god of this world, who is committing to blinding us to the authority of the gospel. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood” (Eph. 6:12a, KJV).

Instead, God by His mercy has pulled the curtain back. He has shown us the unseen in a way that we would never, ever have known without him first coming to us, breaking the bondage of that darkness, opening our eyes and creating room in our hearts to hear the very voice of God. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and … appointed you” (Jer. 1:5a, NRSV).

We thought we had a plan for our lives. We thought we knew what we were going to be doing. When asked as children, “What are you going to do when you grow up?”  very few of us ever said, “Oh, I’m going to be ordained.”

My kids now laugh about this, but we would often have people at our dinner table. And so here we are gathered in the dining room with all of our kids, all five of them, and two or three guests. And inevitably, the question would come up, “Well, are any of you going to follow in your father’s footsteps?”

They just stared at their plates.

It’s not on our screens. In fact, I still remember when people started coming to me and saying, “Have you ever thought of being ordained?” I thought that was the silliest thing I’d ever heard of, I must confess to you, I did not have a high view of clergy. What I didn’t know was that God was laughing.

Opposed by the World

But you see, I couldn’t see. I had my mind on entirely different things, not knowing that the lure of those things was in fact, the work of the enemy in my life, to draw me away from faithfulness to Jesus. Nobody told me that. And in fact, because Satan is the god of this world, our world applauds virtues and values those things that are in complete contradiction to the gospel of the kingdom of God. And there is always that temptation to find a way to somehow lessen the inevitable friction between what it means to be a Christian who is committed to living out her or his faith in a world that stands in fact, in opposition to it, though they might hunger for it.

That’s why we find the warnings that are in the Scriptures and again and again, including the one that says we must dress as if we are ready for battle. Not ready for battle so we can be combative, but ready for battle knowing that the work in the unseen is a work primarily of intercession, and then out of that intercession expressed in a life of abject servanthood. In fact, whenever the church has tried to claim power for herself, inevitably, she comes under the influence of those values that look like the god of this world rather than the radical servanthood of Jesus.

In part 2, we’ll examine more about what it means to be called to service.

What does being called by God mean to you? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on Sept. 8, 2018, at the Cathedral of St. Luke in Orlando, Florida.)  

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.