Isaiah 25.6-10 and Matthew 14.22-33
A Sermon Preached by Dave Shull
University Congregational United
Before
So I want to say, “I do, and I am.”
I do love you. You have given me the gift of over eleven
years with you. You have called a depth
of love out of me I didn’t know was there.
You have challenged me and forced me to grow. I do love you.
And I’m okay. Both Peter and I are. Our relationship is strong – strong enough to
embrace this huge change in our lives.
Strong enough to support a three-month separation as I study Spanish in
So I love you. And I’m okay.
As Don would say, “Thanks be to God.”
Let us pray.
May the words of my mouth and the
mediations of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, O God. For You are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
During this past week, a number of
you have asked me, “How do you know you’re being ‘called out’ to something
new?” My first response has been to ask
them, “How did you know when it was time for you to make a change
in a job, a relationship, or a location?
It’s probably pretty much the same with me. I feel ready to do something very
different than what I’ve done the past 11 years.”
But as I’ve talked with some of you
further, you’ve told me you want to know how call works. How do we hear God’s call? And you’ve told me you want to know what
process I’ve gone through to come to this decision. So that’s what I’m going to talk about this
morning. I do so with the hope that I
can help explain this decision. And with
the hope that it will help you in hearing and following God’s call. I believe God is always in search of us; and
God’s will is that we allow ourselves to be found (quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel, in I Asked
for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology of Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Samuel Dressner, editor, NY: Crossroad, 1983. By talking about my sense of call, I hope you
will discover ways God has found you, or maybe for the first time
believe God is searching for you.
This has been a three-year process
of being called out to something new.
There are four experiences I’ve had during that time that, looking back,
I see God’s hand at work carving out this new road for me to walk.
The first was almost exactly three
years ago. I was sitting in a basement
chapel in National Cathedral in
In the Magnificat,
the song Mary sings when she hears she will give birth to the Messiah, Mary
praises God: “You have filled the hungry with good things, and the rich You
have sent away empty” (Luke 1.53). I
felt like God was sending me away empty.
And for the next year, my prayer time was sitting with Jesus by a desert
fire, dying. I had no words to say. All I could do was listen
to Jesus. Because I didn’t know what he
was calling me to die to. What, Jesus, are
you calling me to let go of, and stop trusting in, and risk opening myself
to?
Looking back, I believe Jesus’ call to me
on that Thanksgiving Saturday began the process of being called out. Because I had nothing to say, all I could do
in prayer was listen.
So I listened more deeply to Jesus in the sounds of silence. And I started to hear things I hadn’t heard
before.
Nine months later, in July 2003, I was
talking with a member of this church about our experiences of God’s call. After I’d spoken, she looked at me and said,
“I think your call is changing. For a
long time you’ve felt called to be a pastor. Now it sounds like you’re called to be a disciple
of Jesus.” And the ground shook with
the truth of it. God was expanding my call
beyond a particular job to a way of living and being in the world. So I began to open myself to imagine serving
God outside a parish. I believe I will
serve a United Church of Christ congregation again at some point in the
future. Right now, however, I know the
gift this parishioner gave me assures me I can also follow God’s call in other
settings.
Listening more deeply to Jesus, and
opening myself to this broader sense of call as a disciple of Jesus, I go on a
study trip to
The floor of the worship space was
covered with photographs of Latin American men, women, and children. It looked like someone was organizing a scrap
book. But these were faces of Guatemalan
and El Salvadoran people who had been tortured and killed in war. Tortured and killed by military and political
leaders who had received my tax dollars.
Tortured and killed by military leaders trained at the School of the
And then I had to read a prayer. The prayer was a love song from God to
creation. Sister Rosario nodded to me,
and I began.
I, who am the beauty of the green earth,
and
the white moon among the stars
and
the mysteries of the waters,
I call upon your soul to arise
and
come unto Me.
That
was as far as I got. I started
sobbing. Seeing those faces, knowing my
country’s complicity in death while we claim to act as one nation under God,
and
then speaking for the God who is the beauty of the green earth, who says
to our souls, arise and come to Me. The
suffering was too much. All the
suffering, all the deaths, the losses, the endings, came rushing back to me.
The God who came to me in the faces of
those murdered is not the nice, gentle grandparent God whose sole desire is for
us to feel loved and happy. This is the
God who rages in the face of injustice and cruelty and wants us to feel Her
rage so we do something to stop what is immoral from being done in our names
and with God’s blessing. This is the God
who called Peter out of the boat in the middle of a storm because he knew Peter
was getting too comfortable in the familiar and safe surroundings of that
boat. This is the God who, when the time
has come, calls us out, to abandon ship and surrender fully to Mystery (Ruth
Burrows, Living in Mystery, London: Ward and Sheed,
1996, p. 14). After this experience with
those Latin American faces, I can see my Jesuit friend asking me with a smile:
“Dave, do you really think it’s a coincidence that the only thing you’re sure
God is calling you to do next is to go to
A final experience
came last November when my mentor in parish ministry died. I worked with Bill Hobbs at the Spring Glen
United Church of Christ for two years as a seminary student. I have many memories of him. In terms of helping to explain my sense of
call today, I think about what he told me were three necessary ingredients for
a healthy faith. First was regular
exercise. Second was active
participation in a faith community. And
third was daily prayer. All of these are
important. And I know that if I
hadn’t been doing my daily prayers for the past 16 years, I don’t think I would
trust Jesus enough to obey his invitation to come out of this boat into the
water. But my daily prayer practices
have blessed me with a strong relationship with the Christ who is alive and who
calls us to walk with him along whatever road we’re on. I trust Jesus Christ to walk with me. I trust his call. I trust he will offer the strength, courage,
patience, and imagination I need.
Because I have felt his love. I
have known his presence. I know he has
searched for me, and I have allowed myself to be found by him. So, as hard as it is – and deciding to resign
this position is the hardest decision I’ve ever made – I am confident Jesus has
spoken to me. He has called me out of
this dynamic, faithful, welcoming boat in which I have found such a home . . .
into the water, where Mystery meets me and has plans for me I cannot even
imagine.
I will be grateful every day of my
life for my time in this boat, for my companions on these journeys. I love you.
And I look forward to hearing about the new roads God will call you out
upon. Amen.