God Calls the Ordinary to Do the Extraordinary
1 Kings 19:19 So Elijah went from there and found Elisha son of Shaphat. He was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen, and he himself was driving the twelfth pair. Elijah went up to him and threw his cloak around him. 20 Elisha then left his oxen and ran after Elijah. "Let me kiss my father and mother good-by," he said, "and then I will come with you." "Go back," Elijah replied. "What have I done to you?" 21 So Elisha left him and went back. He took his yoke of oxen and slaughtered them. He burned the plowing equipment to cook the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he set out to follow Elijah and became his attendant.
In our last few sermons, in our Sunday morning Bible study and now in a series of articles in our church newsletter, we are focusing on our vocation. Remember that our vocation is our calling into service to God and to His Kingdom. Last week I mentioned that if you have God with you in your job, then your job – whatever it is – becomes your vocation, your higher calling. But if you leave God apart from your job, then it just remains work.
Farmers, tentmakers, fishermen. What the Lord did then, He still does today. He uses the ordinary things to accomplish the extraordinary. He takes everday people, calls them to serve in His eternal Kingdom.
It shouldn’t surprise us that God wants to use the ordinary to accomplish the extraordinary. Look at what He did with some dirt and a rib or with some loaves of bread and a few fish. Or how He had His Son become one of us with our human flesh and blood to bring salvation to us (John 1:14).
The Christian faith is all about trust in a God who uses the ordinary to bring about the miracle of salvation. Ordinary blood dripping from some Roman beams to provide a cleansing from all mankind’s sin. Ordinary water taken from the tap, combined with the Word of God to remove a child from hell’s existence and place her into God’s holy family. Ordinary unleavened bread pressed into wafers and ordinary grape wine purchased from the store are combined with the words of Jesus so that we might receive the body and blood of the Son of God for the strengthening of a saint’s faith. Words spoken by a pastor during a worship service are really the words of Christ being heard in the invocation, absolution and benediction.
Just as the Lord uses ordinary things to accomplish His mission of salvation, so He also uses ordinary people to carry around the extraordinary. “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). And so God calls the farmer Elisha, a tentmaker and Pharisee like Saul, and fishermen like Peter and Andrew to be jars of clay to carry around the treasure of the Gospel. He uses the ordinary to do the extraordinary.
When Elisha set out to work the field that morning, he surely had no idea what or who was headed his way. Just another workday, it seemed, when out of the blue a man walked up to him and tossed his coat on him. But this was no ordinary man who walked up – it was Elijah, who had recently come down from Mt. Carmel Jordan River . Placing the cloak upon Elisha passed on the prophetic office from one to another, much the same way pastors lay hands upon the head of a new teacher or pastor. An ordinary man called into extraordinary service.
In Antioch Cyprus Cyrene Northern Africa , Saul was a former Pharisee and persecutor, and Manaen was the foster brother of Herod the Tetrach, who had beheaded John the Baptist. Ordinary men called into extraordinary service.
As Jesus walked along the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee , who did He handpick to be His disciples? Fishermen, mostly. Then later a tax-collector, a doctor and a zealot thrown into the lot. A bunch of blue-collar, everyday, ordinary, working-class people. The extraordinary Son of God called ordinary people to follow Him.
But whether we serve the Lord as ordinary office personnel, factory workers, housewives, teachers or pastors; we are called into the extraordinary service of our Lord. It is important for us to remember that we are to follow the Lord and serve Him no matter what our vocation.
And yet, how do we often find ourselves following our Savior? Jesus calls us to follow Him closely, but we wander off this way to taste the forbidden fruit and then go off the other way to enjoy other ungodly pleasures. The Good Shepherd invites us to stay close to Him, yet we get bored and stray off into “greener” pastures or get scared run away because roaring lion of Satan and the ravenous wolves of the world are on our heels and we no longer trust the safety of our Shepherd. Jesus doesn’t seem so Good them. The Son of God says “Follow Me,” yet His path seems dark and difficult, filled with hard work, illnesses, heartaches and persecution. How many times don’t you find yourself praying in essence, “Lord, your way is fine, but if you’d just let me lead for a little while, I can avoid all these difficulties.”
Or how many times do you find yourself unhappy with your ordinary gifts, in your ordinary job, performing ordinary service? We want to be extraordinary, amazing and powerful. Do you ever notice how minor clerks or municipal workers enjoy their small ability to make people wait, to follow their official routines and procedures? They enjoy the power to issue tickets and levy fines and make us wait in line. How often aren’t we like that in our respective jobs? Whether as a CEO or a mom or a pastor. Power corrupts, Lord Acton once said. We think God owes us a better life and if He’s not going to give it to us, then we’re going to take it.
Because we fail God in our respective callings, we need to hear the Lord’s call to worship. For Lutheran worship is the medicine that carries the antidote of Christ to us who are Jesus’ lambs and sheep. We follow Jesus to the Lord’s altar for it is in the Lord’s house where God’s saints hear everything we need for our justification before God and our sanctification among our peers. In the Confession of Sins, we bring our ordinary, everyday sins and lay them before the altar of Christ. Then we hear the extraordinary forgiveness of Christ in His Absolution. In the Kyrie, we ask for the Lord to have mercy upon us for our failings as a spouse or single person, a parent or child, an employer or employee. We hear the Gloria to the Triune God who won mankind’s salvation so that we may keep the cross always before our eyes, both in the workplace and in the home.
In Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God, we join with that great sinner, King David who was both an adulterer and murderer, as we ask God to create in us clean hearts to overcome our innate selfishness. As we sing O Christ, Lamb of God, we lay our sins on Jesus and pray for Him to cover us with His blood-bought forgiveness. In the epiphany of the bread and wine that is Christ’s body and blood, Christ gives us forgiveness and strength to go on another week in our vocation. The Song of Simeon is the believer’s “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer, so that we may confidently close our eyes for the evening or for death.
As the Divine Service begins with the Invocation, asking for the Lord’s presence, and ends with the Benediction, asking for the Lord’s blessings, we begin and end each day with the Lord. And as we come into church, we see Christ’s baptismal font reminding us that it is Baptism that makes us justified saints and heirs of God’s Kingdom and it is Baptism that keeps us as sanctified saints and heirs in God’s Kingdom here on earth. It is in our Baptism where the Holy Spirit initially called us from an ordinary life of sin to an extraordinary life of salvation.
We need Lutheran worship for what ails us. It is before the Lord’s altar where justification flows into sanctification – both for the pastor in the pulpit and the people in the pews. Allow the glowing sacred to bring light into the dreary mundane of the merely secular. We preach Christ crucified so we may constantly live under the cross (1 Corinthians 1:23 ; Matthew 16:24 ). Life organized around the forgiveness of sins, this is Luther’s idea of the calling to follow Jesus. It is through the gentle whisper of the Gospel, the remembrance of dripping water, and the taste of body and blood, that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength (Philippians 4:13).
Lutherans have a particularly keen focus on the doctrine of vocation, that is, that no matter who we are – stay-at-home mom, factory worker, carpenter, retired engineer, teacher or pastor – God uses the gifts He gives us to serve our neighbor and the world. God works through what we call “First Article” gifts. What does that mean? Luther in his explanation of the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth” asserts that God has given to each of us all our abilities and talents, and that everything we are and everything we have is a gift from God to be used in service of others.
Look at what our Lord Jesus did. Jesus learned and taught as a child in the temple courts, but He almost certainly worked in His foster father’s carpentry shop. He preached on the Mount, but He also relaxed and ate at the home of Mary and Martha. He fed the multitudes, but He also went off on His own to pray. He gave His disciples the Holy Spirit as their Counselor, but He also fried up fish on the beach for their breakfast.
Martin Luther King, Jr., never sounded so Lutheran as when he proclaimed in a speech, “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” I like that.
In the Middle Ages, our Martin Luther was battling the concept that only priests, monks and nuns were doing godly service. That’s why he said, “The idea that the service to God should have only to do with a church altar, singing, reading, sacrifice, and the like is without doubt but the worst trick of the devil. How could the devil have led us more effectively astray than by the narrow conception that service to God takes place only in a church and by the works done therein. … The whole world could abound with the services to the Lord, Gottesdienste – not only in churches but also in the home, kitchen, workshop, field.
There are no second-class citizens in God’s Kingdom, for we were all called to faith and then given a purpose as heirs and priests. Our purpose is to praise God with our lips and our lives. “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9). Again, Luther said, “What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. … We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and the work flow.” I like that, too.
Jesus came into this world in human flesh, in a humble way, looking like an ordinary man. While in reality He was the almighty Son of God. He rode a lowly donkey, died a criminal’s death and was buried in a borrowed tomb. Yet, it was through those humble means that Jesus won our glorious salvation! He took our ordinary, everyday sins and nailed them to His cross. He took our ordinary, everyday lives and buried them in His tomb. Now He rides triumphantly into our hearts through the humble means of Word and Sacrament so that we might now live extraordinary lives of service to Him.
The Lord who formed Adam from ordinary dirt has formed us from sinners and made us His saints. The Lord who called ordinary people into His service has called us to serve as His holy ones with a vocation and a higher calling that He has planned for us. The Lord wants us to see the big picture of what following means in our respective callings. We are ordinary jars of clay … carrying the treasure of extraordinary Christ. Amen.
3rd Sunday after the Epiphany on January 22, 2012
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