Open Writing

The reading we heard was from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Like so much of the writing in the Bible it is a beautiful piece of literature full of words that put pictures in your head.

"The Lord called me before I was born,
While I was in my mother's womb he named me.
He made my mouth like a sharp sword,
In the shadow of his hand he hid me;
He made me a polished arrow,
In his quiver he hid me away."

All this talk of sharp swords and polished arrows is a bit warlike, but I think it expresses the strength behind Isaiah's calling as God’s prophet. And God says to Isaiah:

"It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
To raise up the tribes of Jacob
And to restore the survivors to Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
That my salvation may reach the end of the earth."

So, God is saying to Isaiah, you aren't just a prophet for Israel, you are a prophet to the whole world. The phrase "light to the nations" is beautiful. If like me you've got a very visual way of thinking, when you hear it, in your head you might imagine a lighthouse or a beacon or even a streetlamp, shining out God's message into the darkness.

It's appropriate that we have this reading during Ephiphanytide because Epiphany is about signs. As you can see if you look in the front of the little yellow booklets we use in the 10am service:

The word 'ephiphany' means 'to make manifest,' 'to make apparent.' It is the time when the church remembers three signs in Jesus's life that tell us he was divine:

-Christ's baptism by John the Baptist
- the visit of the three wise men
- the turning of the water into wine in the wedding at Cana

The church year is arranged into periods like Epiphany, Advent, Lent, Pentecost and so on, as a teaching tool. Each season has a reason. They're times when we think about particular parts of God's message. To be a Christian is to be a thinker and a decision maker. You must think and make decisions if you are to be a Christian. It's not enough to identify as a Christian and believe particular things are true, you have to take action, you have to actively try to live a Christian life.

And I'm saying this as somebody who doesn't live a particularly Christian life. I come to church on Sundays, but otherwise my life outwardly looks exactly the same as it did before I became a Christian. I have a relationship with God now, by which I mean I talk to him – but I don't think that's something you could see in me by looking at me on the outside.

My version of Christianity, simply coming to church on a Sunday and praying to God, usually when I'm angry or sad, is not enough. To be truly Christian, I should be taking some kind of action every single day of my life.

In the reading Isaiah says that God called him before he was born. God called Isaiah to be a sign of his love for the world. As Father Steve said last week, we also have a calling from God. Every single person in this church is called to take action.

When we take action and try to put God's purpose to work in the world, we, like Isaiah become signs for God's love in the world. There are many people who have started coming to church because the actions of Christians have taught them about God's love.

I'm going to really embarrass him now but when I first appeared at St Laurence's a few years ago, one of the reasons I stuck around was because I was really impressed by Father Steve's work with some socially disruptive people. Father Steve stuck by them because he knew that God loved them and God does not give up on people. Watching Father Steve living out his calling to help them, taught me that Christianity was something tangible, something real, something that made a difference.

You all have callings that will show the people around you that Christianity is something tangible and real. The problem is, sometimes it's hard to work out what God is calling you to do. Because your calling is yours and nobody else's. The journey I've taken to work out my calling – and I've still not worked out what it is yet - has been full of diversions and road blocks.

There are some very strong role models in the church, and when you're not too sure of yourself, you can fall into the trap of subconsciously copying them. Sometimes copying can be a positive thing because it takes you onto something else, sometimes it can end in disappointment and stop you acting as a Christian at all.

In my early days as a Christian I was very enthusiastic so I wanted my faith to affect my daily life. I wanted to go to bed each evening knowing that I had taken action as a Christian each day. I didn't really think it through properly because I didn't have a lot of experience of being a Christian, so I tried to copy what I saw Father Steve doing. I didn't know I was copying him, I was just very impressed so that what's I did. It didn't go very well because I'm not Father Steve. I don't have a knack for doing what he does so well, so I had to stop.

After that, I still felt that I should be doing something, so I put all my energy into doing church publicity, like the website, the Facebook page and so on ... I could feel that as a Christian I should be doing something to help other people see that God loves them, so telling people on the internet that God loves them seemed like the most obvious thing I should be doing.

But slowly it dawned on me that I was writing all these things about Christianity, but I wasn't living a Christian life myself. So now I'm in the situation where I have to think about how I can take action to bring God 's light into the world. I've done all that journeying on my road and it's like I haven't walked a single step.

But I've been thinking about it, and maybe there's a really simple way to find my calling, and I've been making it all far too complicated. I've been making it too complicated because we are great individualists here in the secularised West. We all want to be unique and special individuals, we don't want to be like everybody else. I struggled to find my calling because I thought of it in completely individualistic terms as my unique and special destiny. It didn’t occur to me that my calling was a function within the body of Christ and that I could look at Christ to find out what it was.

It is true that each of us has a unique and individual calling from God because we are all different, and as Father Steve said last week, you are the only person living your life, so your position in the world is unique. But Christianity is not supposed to be about individuals all roaming around doing their own thing, the Christian church is like a single human body. The person who is the eye is not the same as the person who is the feet and the person who is the tummy, but they are all together in one body.

The Jews and the Muslims show us how you can follow God's calling as a community rather than as an individualist like me. And they show us that there's no need to complicate matters by pondering over what our own unique special callings must be. They use the teachings of their religion to understand their calling.

The Jews and the Muslims have an attitude to life that you don’t really see in the Anglican church. The Jews and the Muslims bring God into every aspect of their daily lives. They have holy laws about food, clothing, what to do with their money and so on and so on. We don't have those kinds of laws covering our daily lives, and I'm not suggesting we start inventing them. But we can borrow the spirit of the attitude that Jews and Muslims have to their daily lives.

As a church we can bring our belief in Christ into the daily choices we make about food, clothing, financial transactions etc … we can use Christ's teachings to think about what the right thing is to do in the supermarket, in much the same way that Jews and Muslims use their religious codes when they go to the supermarket.

And that's a really simple way to answer God's call and to make a difference to the world that makes us into signposts pointing to God's love.

And we can still be individuals and have unique callings within that. Take this imaginary example:

Imagine that there is a food that we all eat, and we discover that it's been made by child slaves. We know that Jesus wouldn't approve of the exploitation of children, so how do we respond?

Betty is a good cook, so she can find alternative ways of making that same food. I trained as a researcher, so I could find out what happens to the child slaves. Alex is really good at organising things, so she could organise a campaign against that food. We would all be working together and using our individual gifts and showing people what it means to believe in Christ in this world.