In this Issue:

Who will bear my light to them? Whom shall I send?

Archbishop Tutu and Bishop Sauls call Berea graduates to action

From the Bishop

News and ideas form across the diocese

People, Parishes and Passions across the Diocese

Part of the Heart of our Mission

Faith Matters: St. George's Day

Love First, Knowledge Second: Baccalaureate Address to Berea College Class of 2005

Commentaries

Reflection: As others see us

X-ercizing: What causes revelry?

Editoral: The 'use and abuse of the Bible'

Who's in charge here? One bishop's perspective

Diocesan Calendar

Past Issues

Who will bear my light to them? Whom shall I send? is God calling?

By Kay Collier McLaughlin

The telephone had been clearly visible throughout the service — a white telephone sitting incongruously on the edge of the dark wooden pulpit on a pre-cell phone Sunday morning. As the preacher approached the pulpit, the phone rang — loud and clear. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. “Hello?” the preacher said. “Who? Yeah, sure. And I’m John the Baptist.” Silence. “It’s really God calling? God calling? God calling me?”

The phone prop came into play several additional times that morning. When it comes to hearing God speaking to us personally, the preacher said, responses range from disbelief to deafness. To make matters more difficult, the message is generally not heralded by a ringing telephone — or an angel. The call of God is a different kind of call, which requires a different kind of listening.
On Sunday, June 18, a man and a woman who heard God’s call and responded to that call by entering the process for Holy Orders will be ordained to the diaconate at Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington. The word “call” is often only associated with a call to ordained ministry. Yet the calling of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – or vocation of any individual is, *in the New Testament, “invariably to the acceptance of salvation and new life in Christ. There is no suggestion that God calls anyone to enter a particular profession or occupation; all those who are called are expected to show in and through their daily life and work that they are witnessing to that salvation and new life.”*

The idea of “call” moves throughout the Old and New Testaments, associated with fulfilling God’s purposes for his people — from Moses, Samuel and the prophets, to the people of Israel, and those called to the particular tasks of apostleship. In post-biblical times, “calling” was reinterpreted as “vocation.”** Both call and vocation have been so closely associated with the religious, that they are often missing from the lives of modern men and women.

Martin Luther maintained that “all stations of life in which it is possible to live honestly are divine vocations,” including those to be found in family, those which belong to economic and commercial life, those which belong to political life. “All of these vocations are ‘masks’ of God, by which the work of God in human life is both revealed and concealed. Through those whom he calls, God rules the family, governs the state and milks the cows. There are callings both in the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, and the calling to the ordained ministry is one among many. Each Christian in his/her calling is to ‘look for God’s right time for doing his Christian task.” ***

Bonnie Quantrell Jones was busy running an automobile dealership when the call began to nudge her. In 1997, it became clear to her that she was being called to the priesthood. “It felt like an idea out of the blue, and became my heart’s desire…sometimes with a 2 x 4 thrown in the middle, if I was not paying attention.”

Cynthia Webbstock was 10,000 miles away from Covington, Ky., in South Africa — “yet with God, space and time mean very little, and He is in the business of creation when He calls. Filling in the intricate colors of the masterpiece. The call might be dramatic or just a small whisper or through the patterning of our lives. My call to America came through three things: a Mexican meal with Stacy, an e-mail and the carrot or fleece being able to bring my animals. (Call is about) the people we meet, the circumstances and happenings of our lives and the assurance that God cares.”

Sally Boelter remembers hearing a speaker talk about having a “call from birth.” The former school teacher doesn’t remember as far back as her birth, of course, but recalled the words resonating with her awareness of being drawn to sacrament and liturgy from very early childhood. “My friends didn’t have the same interest and neither did my sisters. It was something beyond inheritance, or genes or rational explanation. It was a pull to come before God and to be God’s servant through the Church.”

Pearl Rutledge’s sense of “call” led her from the role of stay-at-home wife and mom to completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology, and attending seminary before she was able to discern that she was being called to live out God’s call as a psychologist, not an ordained person.

Stacy Sauls was a corporate attorney who was not looking for a change in his life when the call came to the priesthood. Some years later, he was a parish priest who was thoroughly invested in his congregation when the call came to enter the process to become the Sixth Bishop of Lexington. Each time, he was “aware of possessing some of the gifts needed for the job” about which he found himself discerning.

“I never experienced a chorus of angels or anything mystical in terms of a call,” says Michael Ralph, who was ordained to the priesthood at Trinity, Covington, on April 2. “More than anything else, my call to ministry had to do with a hunch, a series of wide open doors, and affirmation from my Christian community that this was a godly decision. The last component, says Ralph, who became an Episcopalian during the course of completing his seminary training to be a United Methodist pastor, was very important “when I made the decision to change church traditions.”

Carolyn Witt Jones, Executive Director of the Partnership for Kentucky Schools, believes that opportunities to do the types of personal and professional work that “challenge, create excitement, foster enthusiasm, build on commitment and restore our souls on a daily basis” do not come by “chance.” “Were they callings? As I reflect, I think that they must have been or I would not have given them a second thought in terms of accepting the level of responsibility, the amount of stress and the deep commitment each has required.

“I know that I was called to be of service to as many as possible in my lifetime. This service has taken many shapes and ‘turns in the road,’ but without a commitment to the ‘call,’ I fear that I would be a very unhappy person wondering why life had passed me by.”
“Call is for right now,” says Bonnie Quantrell Jones. “God calls you for today, and tomorrow, perhaps. But there may be another call. We have to be willing to listen. It’s like the Paschal Mystery. It didn’t just happen 2,000 years ago. Sometimes things have to die so there can be a resurrection. If we hang onto last year’s call when God has another for us, we can’t hear this year’s!” Jones believes that she was “clearly called to the priesthood, and to St. Peter’s, Paris, where she has served as Associate Rector and priest assisting since 1997. “And it is the process of discernment that determines the direction of the call. Sometimes you have to close a door to see what is ahead of you.” An internal sense of doors both opening and closing began before

St. Peter’s rector announced his impending retirement. “I don’t know what I am to do next,” Jones says. “I’m listening.”
Johnnie Ross believes that he has experienced “Holy nudges” throughout his life — calls which demanded deliberate responses from him — from moving to eastern Kentucky, majoring in biology, becoming a state employee, marrying his wife, Kay, bringing children into the world, developing particular ministries, entering the priesthood, and retiring as an environmental scientist to become Canon Missioner and then Canon to the Ordinary. He recalls that he had struggled to answer the questions the Commission on Ministry had of him regarding his “call” to be ordained.

“How I had hoped I could tell them the story of God speaking to me as I was lying down to sleep, like God did Samuel, or a burning bush experience, like Moses’s, but that simply wasn’t in the cards for the way God called me. In my frustration, I turned to my spiritual director, who said, ‘Johnnie, God doesn’t waste buckshot on sparrows.’

“So I came to understand call as a ‘Holy nudge’ — an uneasiness in my soul that beckoned a deliberate response. A response much like that witnessed by the prophet writing in Isaiah when he heard the voice of God asking, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’ A response that caused the prophet to write and me to say, ‘Here am I; send me.’

“My most recent experience with God’s call was the struggle with the decision of whether or not to retire from state government and become canon missioner for the Diocese. All I wanted, again, was ‘clear and convincing’ evidence of just what it was God wanted me to do. Again, all I received was a ‘Holy nudge’ — an uneasiness within my soul that begged a deliberate response. The one thing common to all times of discerning call was the nagging question, ‘am I adequately prepared for what lies ahead, regardless of my response.’”

(What I have come to) “The one thing that seems clear to me in all of Holy Scripture is that God doesn’t always call the prepared, but rather, promises to prepare those who God calls. Should this be true, then the people of God have no choice but to enter into a deliberate prayerful dialogue with God knowing that it may result in a deliberate response.”

Jim Fitzpatrick’s call to be a music teacher and organist – at different times in different ways — began in a small town in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s, with a series of “favorite teachers who all happened to be music teachers,” and a particular choral rehearsal when he was introduced to the music of American composer Randall Thompson in the haunting melody which accompanied Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” “I always knew it was my call to follow in the footsteps of those teachers who had shaped my life, to inspire students just as they had for those in my generation. The road to being a music teacher was certainly the one less traveled at that time; however, there was never any hesitation on my part to take it.” In his early years of teaching, Fitzpatrick was also the organist of a large Methodist Church — another part of his call as a musician. It was a “dream position – the minister, choir director and I shared the same ideas on church music. Several years later, as Methodists frequently do, our minister was reassigned and the ‘dream’ turned into a nightmare” as the new minister took the church in a different direction. A few years later, Fitzpatrick believed he was called to “permanently retire” from holding any organist position. For 25 years, he continued his organ studies, practicing at home for his own enjoyment, singing in his church choir and substituting in churches “only occasionally” for close organist friends.

In February, Jim Fitzpatrick was asked by such a friend to substitute for him following minor surgery on his hands. The friend died quite unexpectedly before the surgery could take place. “As difficult as it was,” says Fitzpatrick, “I substituted just as I had said I would. After the service, without giving it any thought, I told the rector that I would continue as long as he needed me. Since then, Lent and Eastertide have come and gone, and the season of Pentecost has arrived. I still find myself at that organ console every Sunday morning helping others, as well as myself, get a little closer to God through music. Again, I didn’t have to stop and decide which road to take, as the road less traveled just seemed to pull me in its direction just as it did 30 years ago.”

If a sense of “rightness,” inevitability and relief often follow the turmoil of discerning a response to call, whatever the field, an experience of “blurting out” or “someone other than me saying those words” can accompany the move from private to the first stage of public assertion. Sally Boelter, now the rector of St. Raphael’s Church in Lexington, was raised a Roman Catholic for whom the idea of priesthood was simply not a possibility. “I was often as bored as the next child, wishing I were outdoors playing in God’s other cathedral. Certainly the idea of priesthood didn’t enter my good little Catholic mind. I knew that women were not meant to be priests! And yet, I was often at the altar in whatever way I could be from childhood on. And when I “left” the church in my rebellious college years, I yearned for the liturgy and sacrament of the worshipping community, even while I deeply experienced sacrament in a variety of other ways. And so, it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise when, after becoming an Episcopalian, I found myself sitting in the rector’s office talking about the diaconate. And it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, in that same conversation, I found myself blurting out, ‘Well, what if I really wanted to be a priest?’ But it was a surprise. My Roman Catholic upbringing argued with me rationally, but the cry came from the depths of my soul. And that, after all, is a call – a cry from the depths of our soul — God’s voice – saying, ‘Come here, my beloved child. This is where I want you to be at this time.’ And to respond with a ‘yes’ is a sacrament of its own.”

Skeptics, self-made moguls, pragmatists and non-believers may question or ridicule the idea of “call.” “One way to excuse institutional ‘climbing,’” says one, who declined to be identified. “Lay it on God. Makes it hard for critics to come down too hard — if you believe that kind of stuff.” Little wonder that experiences of call and discernment are manifested more privately than not. Like dreams which sock the psyche and the soul, the experience is no less real in its mystical nature. And like dreams, there is a desire to protect that which can be life-changing from the inside out. Indeed, it is the internal to- external nature of call and response which may make them most difficult to express and to understand. Markers of advancement and positive change in millennial America have to do with corner offices and other tangible assets. Call is about internal markers of defining proportions, which may remain unseen while driving subsequent choices and behaviors before they may lead to such external manifestations as job changes.

The Episcopal services in which an individual is ordained as deacon, priest or bishop offer those who are called to the ordained ministry an opportunity to publicly vow to be true to that call, to receive symbols of their vocation and the support of the community they will serve. Few explicit opportunities exist for lay vocation to be acknowledged, charged and supported in any meaningful way. The Education For Ministry program and its graduation ceremony are dedicated to assisting in this process of hearing God’s call, and discerning how gifts and talents may be used to serve the Kingdom of God every day — whatever one’s career might be. On Tuesday evening, May 17, Jane Hansen and Charles Seabrook became the two newest graduates of EFM in the Diocese of Lexington, joining many others who have completed the four-year study course. In his homily, Bishop Sauls encouraged the graduates to go “out the door” of the church to the mission field, where God is calling them to serve.

“And then we sang that hymn,” said Hansen. “It said it all.”

“I the Lord of sea and sky
I have heard my people cry…..
Who will bear my light to them?
Whom shall I send?

Here I am, Lord; Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night
I will go, Lord, if you lead me
I will hold your people in my heart.”

“The most important lesson I have learned in this pilgrimage is to listen,” says Carolyn Witt Jones.” Calls come in many forms and over time. Calls stay with us if they are well founded and are not a fleeting thought in a busy world of experiences. I have several that I am excited about pursuing at a future time. I am so fortunate!”
“God has a purpose for each one of us,” says Jim Fitzpatrick. For some, hearing that call is easy, while for others, we have to listen a little more closely. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

*, ** and ***: The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology, Ed. Alan Richardson and John Bowden

Advocate Online Staff

© 2005 The Episcopal Diocese of Lexington

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