on hitch-hiking

 

SERMONETTE at St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 
and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
ORDINARY SUNDAY 2
(January 14^th) 2024

 

READINGS        

1 Samuel 3: 1-10
Psalm 139: 1-15, 12-18
John 1: 43-51

 

 If you were to read through the Bible, as some brave people do, from Genesis 1 to the end of Revelation, you would find there are many passages depicting what we have come to know as the calling of a servant of God.

We are all at the very least by dint of our baptism, servants of God. It is not a term that should be reserved to those who wear their collars back to front (an aberration in any case that crept in in the 19th century and to which I rarely subscribe these days, liturgical and pastoral rolls excepted).

What scholars call the “calling narratives” are highly stylised versions of the encounter between a fallible human being and his or her Creator and Lord, a moment at which God nudges a person in a way that normally results in the redirection of the person’s life. The depictions are highly stylised in a way that I don’t think is quite so familiar in New Zealand as it is in everyday conversation in Australia.

There, though, I was struck for the best part of 30 years by the unchanging existence of little formalised conversations. The main one that comes to mind is a throwaway comment about eating or buying seafood, or more especially being on a seafood diet, to which a respondent will say “see food and eat it,” all present will knowingly laugh politely.

In ancient literature, especially oral literature such as much of the Bible was, the formulae were widely accepted. They were a kind of narrative punctuation by which the narrator could bring his or perhaps her audience back to a central theme. They punctuate, for example, great myths, or the works of Homer. Again: perhaps the closest we have in our culture is when a classroom teacher engages in a clapping routine together the students’ attention and regain, it is hoped, some semblance of order. Clap clap clapity clap – you know the routine.

I say all this because calling scenes such as those we have her today can give the impression of some quite freaky encounter with a divine voices, or writing in the clouds. Perhaps this is the experience of some. More often it is a way of describing something that is all but beyond description.

At the risk of being narcissistic may I cite an example from my own journey? I may have told you this before. You may have better examples of the nudges of God in the narratives of your own life.

Nevertheless I am often asked how I experienced the call to ordained ministry, to priesthood as I would now tend to call it. It began as a very clear momentary experience as I hitchhiked from Tauranga towards Palmerston North. I remember little else of the journey; it was one of countless (after all I had a girlfriend or two in Tauranga!). I remember clearly an already somewhat decrepit Holden Belmont pulling over to pick me up.

Soon the almost inevitable conversation ensued. “Where are you heading?” obviously. “Palmy.” “What do you do there?” “Student.” “What are you studying?” “English lit.” Perhaps I’m superimposing countless different lifts, but the next response was usually something like what on earth (or some stronger epithet) are you going to do with that? I declared that I was going to be a secondary school teacher.

That by the way is something that I have never ceased to thank God that I did not become. I would have been a terrible teacher. That does make me wonder why I became for a while the diocesan ministry educator, but that is an entirely different story. Maybe. 

Somehow as an afterthought, totally without precedent, I added “or a minister,” the word I would have used in those days. The smell of alcohol was reasonably heavy around the trusty Belmont, and the driver’s navigation skills on the left-hand side of the road were a little arbitrary, but for the next 40 or 60 kilometres this didn’t seem to worry me for once.

My benefactor spent those kilometres telling me of his greatest regret in life, that he had had six sons, and as a somewhat lapsed Roman Catholic, he lamented still that none of them had entered the priesthood. Seeds of a new consciousness entered my head.

In fact I even thought of becoming a Roman Catholic priest. It wasn’t the dreaded spectre of celibacy that put me off, but the sheer terror of spending several years in a place as cold as Mosgiel. It has occurred to me in more recent years that God has had the last laugh on that one.

In the end in any case I discovered that the Anglican church officially used the term “priest” for its clergy once they had, most of them, completed a training year as a deacon.

You’ve probably heard that story before, because it is one of the most vivid connections I find between the story of my own life and that of the scriptural characters. I was no saintly Samuel holy enough to receive the voice of God in the middle of the night. I was a somewhat lackadaisical student bumming my way around the country by courtesy of generous government allowances, long gone because my generation got rid of them, but that’s another story.

Over the next few years, several years, that first dawning of a priestly vocation was sternly tested in several ways. Those are neither here nor there. And of course, as an aside, I have had at least one parish in which a small cabal were more than willing to assure me that my drunken Catholic friend, making his way home from the races in Tauranga, was clearly not a voice-piece of God. That’s not for me to judge.

I was at the time in a parish, All Saints’ Palmerston North, in which any sense of a call to ordination was not seen as particularly important, and the real deal was a call to missionary service. But somehow the impetus continued and several years later my priestly career began in the Cathedral of St. Paul, in Melbourne. I may of course be deluded, but on the whole despite some wobbles, I've seen enough signposts on the way to suggest that my drunken Catholic friend was katiaki, custodian, in that moment, of a significant message from God.

Another time I may tell you about a horse that helped me gain Anne’s hand in marriage, but I suspect you may fear I’m already Lulu enough. The more important point is that while some of us are at this stage of our lives unlikely to experience new and unexpected calls to full time or specialist ministry, the knowledge of God in other ways is never far from our lives. My vicar in Palmerston North often used to use the mantra that we should not give reason why God is calling us to missionary service, but reason why not. In his hands that slogan was more of a recruiting call for CMS, but there was something deeply profound in it, and perhaps he knew that all along.

Because in the strange serendipity of your life and mine God is never far away, nudging us to show love even in the form of a slightly timid smile, or to show willingness to serve perhaps by picking up a tea towel, perhaps by pausing to speak to a lonely person, if not each day then each week or month or lifetime. And sometimes, and I truly mean only sometimes, you will have got it right, and sometimes you will again.

And whether I got it right is not the issue. The issue is that somewhere, mysteriously, our God is knitting our lives together in an incomprehensibly vast tapestry of creation and redemption for us and for all with whom we rub shoulders. We may not often be sitting under fig trees or lying on a cool hard floor in the middle of the night, but those little nudges of God are always floating around for us to notice and respond to.

May God help us so to do.