"LIVE UP TO YOUR CALLING!"
Philippians 3: 4b–14
The Rev. Dr. Russell C. Sullivan, Jr.

Pine Street Presbyterian Church
Harrisburg

March 25, 2007
The Fifth Sunday in Lent

The WB Channel had a series called "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer," which had a successful run from 1997 until 2003. It didn’t originate, however, on WB. For those of you who are devotees of higher culture, the series was actually based on a 1993 movie by the same name. [Warning: it’s not really a family movie or for little children.] It’s a bouncy, wacky, and kind of silly movie about Buffy, a popular high school senior who is focused on things such as cheerleading, buying clothing that is not, as she says, "so five minutes ago," and making sure that she marries Christian Slater before she dies. This is all her world is. This is her life’s only purpose until a serious, dour figure played by Donald Sutherland appears. He announces to her that she is the chosen one – the one who is called to defeat the vampires as they prepare for their final attack against humanity.

"What? Get outta here! Are you crazy? Give me a break. You gotta be kidding?" – is her reaction. But the call has come. She is chosen, and so she sharpens her hidden talents, and Buffy the cheerleader becomes Buffy the champion of goodness against the forces of evil. In several scenes Buffy reflects on her previous life of dances and dates and resists the meaning of her call. Reminiscent of Moses in the Old Testament, who too resists his call to free the ancient Israelites, she says that she is not up to it, that she doesn’t want to be part of a "big holy mission." But eventually she claims her destiny, and accepting this call forever changes her. Her old classmates have a hard time relating to her. They react to her as if she had gained 30 pounds and broken out in acne.

It’s a light, frothy movie on the surface, but it really does portray the experience of being called, the experience of somebody counting as loss all that was important to her before her life had found its meaning and purpose.

In the third chapter of Philippians, Paul describes the change that gave his life purpose and meaning, the transformation of all he once had counted as important into "loss because of Christ."(3:7) Like Buffy, Paul was on top of the world. He was a true winner in his society’s eyes. He didn’t become a Christian in the stereotypical way that is often portrayed: "I was down, miserable, unhappy, unpopular, unattractive. But now I’ve found Jesus, and now I’m happy – and on TV!" No, Paul had a resume to die for. He says: "if anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless."(3:4-6)

His mother and father were proud of him. Paul was on the fast track, you see. He was no loser who found Jesus. He was not a weakling who came groveling to Christ. He was strong and powerful and intelligent. He was highly mobile and climbing the successful rabbinical ladder of his culture. He had ambition, and he had gifts, but I would also hazard a guess that upon meeting Christ Paul found himself in conflict between the ideals that his religion had given him and his personal ambition to make it to the top.

William Sloan Coffin said in his profound little book, Passion for the Possible, that he has a persistent fantasy about what happens to the idealism of college students. It’s like this: College bound students arrive on campus, bursting with idealism. Their parents want them to have ideals. So do their teachers, and so do they. But they also have ambition or they wouldn’t be going to college. Being smart it doesn’t take them long to figure out that what our society promotes as belief and what our society rewards as belief are very different questions. So there arises in students’ minds a very painful question: what am I going to park – my ideals or my ambition? The usual answer reached very quickly is that it would be a terrible shame to give up on my ambition. But now we call that "self-actualization" or "self-fulfillment."

But what about our ideals, Coffin muses? No student wants to throw them in the wastebasket. So they carefully wrap them up and store them in some convenient closet of their mind. They then return to the world of their ambitions. They go to professional school, graduate school; they pack that resume. When they graduate, they join the prestigious firm of Airdale, Airdale, Whippet, and Pug. Their starting salary is really self-fulfilling. Shortly, thereafter, they meet the girl or boy of their dreams, get married, move to the suburbs, have children. And then they remember their ideals. So they go to the closet, unwrap them, turn to their children, and say, "Here, kids, play with these."(Coffin, A Passion for the Possible, pp.76-77)

Is there something wrong with that picture? Yes and no. It’s a realistic picture of what our society says we should do with our ideals. We are all caught up in it. Ideals, dreams of a better world for all, peace in the world, justice for the poor – important, surely, but they sometimes have to take a backseat to "what’s really important." And our ambitions do reflect important things, our dreams, and our gifts. They are immensely valuable. But they are ultimately important or valuable, or what Paul calls "surpassing value."

What is of ultimate value? What really does matter for our lives? What is God’s purpose for our lives? What is God calling us to be and to become?

Someone once said that a career is about making money, but a calling tries to make a difference.

The word "career" and the word "car" come from the same Latin word, meaning "racetrack." And sometimes that’s what a career feels like, driving down the road, in our self-contained little world, going around in circles, rapidly and competitively, trying to get somewhere and making sure we edge the other guy or gal out. The word "calling", though, comes from the Latin word from which we get the word, vocation. The Puritans defined vocation "as that whereunto God hath appointed us to serve the common good." (Coffin, p.77)

Do you hear the difference? One focused on private gain. The other focused on the good of others, the welfare of the world around us.

Could it be that when Paul met the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, following his career track, that his life took on a whole new direction? He was called, the one chosen, to take the Good News of Christ to the Gentile, non-Jewish world. His life had been set free and in motion by this calling. "Forgetting what lies behind" – all that stuff we rack up to look impressive – "and straining to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of Christ Jesus." (3: 13-14)

Paul was no longer resting on his resume; his life was not his own. He was now with Christ and for Christ in an adventure that changed both his life and his world. He had a calling now.

Next week ninth grade youth will say "yes" to the identity they were given in their baptism and the rest of us will re-affirm the faith into which we were baptized. They will confirm for themselves the promises of their baptism. Some of us may say that these youth are "joining the church." If that’s how you define confirmation and commissioning, that’s pretty boring. That’s all we need. More people to join an institution, to park their names on a roll. Instead, I want to think that they are answering a call, a call not to be what their parents expect them to be or what others expect them to be, but to be and become what Christ wants them to be and to become, his followers in a world that cries out for his love, his justice, and his peace.

And God needs people who are called. Calling people is God’s peculiar way of bringing his healing to the world. God chooses men and women to be his light, his beacon of hope, to share with him in the mending and healing of a broken creation.

At this moment God’s children are slaughtering each other in the Middle East. Who will be his peacemakers there? At this moment, genocide stalks Sudan. Who will tirelessly advocate for those suffering?

At this moment people are dying of AIDS in North India. There is no medical treatment for them because the dominant Hindu culture believes that they are untouchable and not worthy of help. Who would train in medical school to serve them?

At this moment there are poor in the city who cannot read or write. Who would be willing to teach them? There are poor who cannot afford attorneys. Who would be willing to be assist them?

At this moment we are destroying our environment with global warming. Who will become a scientist to resolve that problem or an activist to encourage the adoption of laws to protect the natural order?

Somewhere and someplace in this world people are victims of bigotry and hatred. Who will speak out against such hate crimes?

I know who. You and I, that’s who. For we are claimed in Christ. We are washed and cleansed by his sacrifice and the waters of baptism. We bear on our brows, the hymn says, the mark of him who died. We are not our own. We do not belong to our parents. We do not belong to the culture around us. We do not belong to the government. We belong to Christ. We are ambassadors of his reconciling love in a world that embraces death. And we are commissioned by him to be his people wherever he calls us.

Pastor Joseph Ton decided to return to his native Rumania after spending many years in exile in England. His fellow students urged him not to go back. If he returned, he would be harassed and persecuted. But Pastor Joseph Ton knew that God was leading him back to his home country. His friends were right: the police did hassle and threaten him. One day a particular police officer threatened to kill him, and Pastor Joseph responded by saying, "Sir, your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying. Sir, you know my sermons are all over the country on tapes now. If you kill me, I will be sprinkling them with my blood. Whoever listens to them after that will say, ‘I’d better listen. This man sealed it with his blood.’ [My sermons] will speak ten times louder than before. So, go on and kill me. I win the supreme victory then." After that day, Pastor Joseph never doubted again God’s call on his life. He preached without fear. As he said, "for years I was a Christian who was cautious because I wanted to survive. I had accepted all the restrictions the authorities put on me because I wanted to live. Now I wanted to die, and they wouldn’t oblige. Now I could do whatever I wanted in Rumania. For years I wanted to save my life, and I was losing. Now that I wanted to lose it, I was winning it." (Quoted in Dynamic Preaching, vol.16, No.2, April-June 2001, p.7)

Jesus’s teaching is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is always there on the horizon of our lives, and he says the same thing to boys and girls and men and women, "Come, follow me." To do so will mean losing ourselves along the way. And only when we do that are we truly found of him. For what the world counts as gain, we count as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ.