I imagine some of you have heard this old church joke. One day in a Sunday School class the kids are gathered around listening to the pastor, and he’s describing something: It’s big he says, and gray in color, it has four legs and tusks and a trunk. The kids sit there looking confused until one bold little girl finally raises her hand and says, “Well, Pastor, it sounds an awful lot like an elephant, but I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus.”
We chuckle, but there’s truth in the joke that is important for adults as well as children, and can open our minds to the mysteries of faith. Parables are stories Jesus tells. In some of them, there is a clear enough sense that the central character is God, and the other parts of the story revolve around that central character. Last week we talked about this parable of the great feast in that way. The feast is the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, and so the host is God, and the ones choosing to come or not come are the people we’re trying to reach.
But what if the central character isn’t God? Or what if details of the story trouble us when God is the main character? In the case of this parable, it’s a question worth asking. If the host is God, I’ll be honest that I don’t know what to do with the angry temperament—is God really so impatient as to get angry the first time guests refuse the invitation, not to mention denying the feast in the end? What about the God the Bible describes as “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love? Similarly, I’m troubled by the presence of the slave. I know that slavery was a reality of the ancient world, but does God have slaves too? And why can’t God go out into the streets and the lanes and hand out the invitations? Maybe sending the slave was part of what turned people off. In some parables, claiming that the central character is God gets us stuck on matters like these. So sometimes it’s a good idea to not be so strict in our interpretations and let our minds wander a bit.
Let’s play with the parable a bit—after all, it’s not meant to be a factual historical account, it’s a story Jesus tells to get people thinking creatively—so let’s think. Last week we talked mostly about this parable as a metaphor for the church; this week I’ll approach the parable from a more personal angle.
One way you might read the parable is to wonder if the host is you, and if so, is this parable might be teaching us about hospitality or about humility—which would be consistent with the two stories Jesus tells immediately before. Plenty of us have had the experience of hosting a party and worrying that no one will accept your invitation. What if no one shows up? Were they just busy and it doesn’t mean anything? Or does it mean something about your cooking, or your friendliness? Sometimes our fears are unfounded and people show up and everything goes fine. Other times our worst fears come to fruition. When that happens, we might get depressed or despondent, or we might learn something really important about how we present ourselves, and over time become a much better friend to the people we seek to invite.
Pastors know all about what it’s like to make invitations and wonder if they are being ignored. Sometimes it’s actually about a feast—a church dinner, an event, Sunday worship, and we spend time handwringing about why people don’t show up. Is it the feast itself, or is it a bad invitation? Am I, the pastor, not the kind of host people want to come and see? We all think about this stuff from time to time. Sometimes a pastor wants to take a church in a direction the people don’t want to go; a change is needed and the congregation won’t accept the invitation to come along. Like the host of a failed dinner, one can get depressed about this, or it can be an opportunity to ask what one needs to do differently next time.
These things aren’t unique to ministry; I’m sure there are leaders sitting out there who hear resonances with your own experience. Every leader has to figure out how to bring people along with their invitations. Sometimes you have to stand firm when you know you’re on the right path. Other times you listen to the objectors and see that you need to change course. There’s so much going on here that we might meditate on.
Another way to think about the parable is that you are not the host, but you are a guest—you are the person who is being invited. And maybe you are eager to come to the feast or maybe you are trying like crazy to stay away. When we insist on making God the host in the parable, we might only think that the Feast has got to be church or prayer or Bible reading. But if the host need not be God, or if God is interested in more than just church attendance, suddenly the invitation might be something else, something less churchy but just as important to your spirit. What if the invitation is about getting sober, or going to therapy, forgiving someone you hate, or deciding to get married, or leaving your job? This parable raises great questions: Why are you accepting the invitation in your life? Or why are you running away? What does this parable reveal to you about yourself?
These questions are all about what we call vocation or calling—what are we called to do, and who are we called to be, and questions of calling are central to Christian life. Let me give you a quick overview of how Christians think about these things; it has changed over time…
In the early centuries of Christianity, calling was reserved for people with some well-known spiritual insight or established spiritual role. At first it was people like Paul with his conversion story, or ancient mystics who gave their lives as martyrs for the faith. Later it became people who were called away from the “normal” life of being a merchant or farmer or soldier to a life fully dedicated to the church, as a priest, or a cloistered nun or monk.
When the Protestant Reformation comes along, much of that understanding about “callings” begins to change. At the same time that the church was translating the Bible into common languages the masses could read, and putting church governance in the hands of laypeople, the idea of callings changed too. People began to talk about how God is active in the lives of all kinds of people. Callings are not just confined to the “professional Christians” but callings can be lived out in medicine, law, teaching, agriculture, parenting, and all kinds of daily tasks—if we choose to see God’s activity in them.
The idea of a calling was challenged once again when the Industrial Revolution came along. While it was easy enough to see that one could live out God’s calling as a small town doctor or shoemaker to friends and neighbors, the modern world of vast hospital systems and assembly-line manufacturing has a way of dehumanizing work. It’s not impossible to follow a calling when you may never even meet your patient or customer…but for many it does seem like more of a stretch. So what now?
There’s certainly more to life than work, and that revelation led to a more expansive understanding of Christian callings. Perhaps we are most likely to live out our callings not through what we do to make money or produce stuff, or even through things that we do, but through how we are going about it, or even more importantly, who we are. Are you someone who feels called to care for people who are struggling, or to forgive people who are experiencing guilt. Do you reflect God’s love in your spirit of patience, or your presence that reminds others to slow down a bit in life, or your gift of humor that makes people feel welcome and diffuses tense situations. Are you generous with your time, or your possessions in ways that help others? God’s calling is worked out in all kinds of ways that may have nothing to do with how we make money or produce goods, it is much more broadly understood.
This evolution of callings is important for us to talk about as a community because in the season that is before us, we are seeing it at work in a very visible way. We are digesting the news that one of our Associate Pastors, Jana Reister, is leaving us as her calling evolves. She has served us faithfully for 16 years. During that time, among us she has been a professional Christian—she has lived into that idea of calling that has been around for centuries. But in this season of life, she is called to something new: to return home to Michigan to be with her parents and her siblings, and to continue in some form of ministry that has not yet been revealed to her, but will be in God’s time; it will be different from the way she has known it up until now.
While we will grieve her departure, her story is continuing to be a gift to us, for we will celebrate not only who she has been among us, but what God is doing next in her life. As we watch her live into a new and more expansive understanding of God’s calling on her life, perhaps some of us might gain a more expansive understanding of God’s call on our lives as well.
In my 20 years in ministry, I’ve seen plenty of colleagues come and go, and I’ve taken that journey myself. I’ve seen the range of responses from surprise and disbelief to outright anger, and thankfully, in most cases I’ve seen a lot of support and encouragement and prayer, even in the midst of sadness. Goodbyes are hard, but we honor callings. We honor what God is doing in Jana’s life as she prepares to leave us later this year, and we pray that God will send us the right person to be here next. We will issue an invitation for some new pastor to join us knowing that the feast here is good, and that many will wish to come.
These are the blessings of breaking a parable out of its usual mold and allowing it to work on us—that through a story, we begin to see God working in ways that we might not have expected. This parable, I have argued today, is one of many invitations. What is the invitation to you? How is God calling? Where is Christ present in your life? How might the Holy Spirit be just starting to get to work—and maybe in ways you don’t expect? Thanks be to God. Amen.