One of the challenges of the many Biblical stories of God calling people to follow is that while we believe God has a call for each person, most of us don’t get to hear God’s audible voice like Samuel. Moses gets a burning bush, and Mary has an angel show up, but often in our experience, God’s call is not that dramatic.
Perhaps one of the reasons we don’t notice God calling is because we’re not listening. If we aren’t paying attention, it’s easy to miss God’s call or mistake it for something else. For us, spending time in prayer, worshipping with other Christians, and becoming more familiar with the Biblical stories of how God calls and acts equip us to recognize God’s call. Then when we do recognize God’s quiet voice calling, we can respond with Samuel, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”
A sermon on 1 Samuel 3:1-10, with portions adapted from my Trinity Sunday sermon on May 30, 2021 on the call of Isaiah, and my sermon Samuel’s call from way back on internship on January 18, 2015. Here’s the sermon podcast audio and the livestream from Living Hope.
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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Almost 14 years ago, I began the candidacy process to become a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I don’t know how many of you have thought about how one becomes a pastor, but in our denomination, it’s an involved process.
If you’re thinking of becoming a pastor, you start by getting a recommendation from a pastor who knows you. Then you have an interview with someone from the candidacy committee. Each of the 65 synods of our church has a candidacy committee to guide candidates in their discernment for ordained ministry.
The first major step of the candidacy process is entrance. Usually you do this before entering seminary—and by the way, before seminary, you usually first need a four-year college degree, so that’s a major step for lots of people. Candidacy entrance involves writing a lengthy essay, passing a psychological evaluation, and interviewing with the candidacy committee.
Then after two years of seminary classes, you write some more essays and go before the candidacy committee again for an endorsement interview, where they decide if you’re ready to be inflicted on a church for a year-long internship.
Finally, after internship evaluations and successfully graduating with a master of divinity degree, the last step is approval, where you again write lots of essays and interview with the candidacy committee before they approve you for ordination and release you to the church for call. There are other routes, especially for second or third career candidates, and there are wrinkles with online learning and extended internships, but that was my basic route.
The whole process has two main purposes. First, this is how the church has prepared me to be a pastor and do the work to which you have called me. And second, probably more important, at least for the first few steps, the candidacy process is intended to help you discern if God is calling you to public, professional, ordained ministry.
Here’s the beginning of what I wrote in April 2012 in my first of those many, many seminary and candidacy essays.
Hello, I’m Daniel, and I believe that I am called to serve as an ordained pastor in the Lutheran church. Ok, great. So what does that mean? What does it mean for me to be called?
I haven’t seen any burning bushes recently, I haven’t gotten a supernatural cell phone call, and last time I checked, there wasn’t a billboard with my name on it outside my window.
And I went on from there for another five pages, laying out basically my entire life story and church history, trying to articulate the sense of call I felt from God.
Fourteen years later, I still wrestle with that. It’s hard, because I don’t have a dramatic call story. I grew up in a family who were very active in the church. I never got a perfect attendance award for Sunday School, although I remain convinced that at least one year, I deserved one – I think it was 5th grade.
I went to all the church youth events and mission trips and retreats, then I went to a Lutheran college where along with computer science, I majored in religion. I stayed involved in church because Jesus is where I find purpose and meaning for life. Many of you have similar stories.
I worked at church camp for a couple summers, then I did a summer internship in computer programming where I realized I didn’t want to sit in a cubicle working on programs for tracking customer complaints about their insurance policies. So, I entered candidacy, went to seminary, and here I am in professional ministry.
Is that a call story? I think so, but sometimes I wonder. There are moments when I’m sure this is exactly what God is calling me to and I can feel the Holy Spirit at work, and plenty of moments when I have no idea what I’m doing. It’d sure be a lot easier if I could point to a particular burning bush or a vision of six-winged angels singing in the smoke-filled temple like in Isaiah’s call story that we heard last week.
In today’s first reading, we hear Samuel’s call story, and this is one of the go-to stories when we imagine what a call from God looks like. And let me step back for a second to say not everyone is called to public ordained ministry, and that’s ok. It’s good.
Your story is different than mine, but I do believe God is calling you. God works through pastors, and God works through teachers and cashiers and insurance agents and counselors and government employees and vet techs and stay-at-home parents. You have a vocation, you live out your faith in the work you do, in your relationships, in the way you live your life. You have a calling from God.
In this particular call story, Samuel is a young boy living and working in the temple. It’s sort of an internship, a step on the way to becoming a priest. Eli, his supervisor, is a priest in the temple.
One night, Samuel is lying down in the sanctuary, and he hears a voice calling his name. Naturally, he assumes it’s Eli, but Eli says, “I didn’t call you.” This happens two more times, and then Eli, Samuel’s mentor, begins to catch on that this voice Samuel is hearing is actually God, and he tells Samuel to respond next time by saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
This time, when God calls, Samuel listens and responds, and God gives him a prophetic message to proclaim. Samuel’s call will eventually lead to him anointing Saul and then David as kings over Israel.
I think when we imagine God calling, we often think of stories like Samuel’s. I imagine a voice from beyond calling my name. Somehow in my head, the voice usually sounds like James Earl Jones, or maybe Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty. This is the example of a call. This, and Moses hearing a voice coming out of a burning bush.
But that’s not the way God generally works. Of course, we believe God can work that way. I believe the story we just heard. But even this story points to how unusual it is. It begins, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”
We can relate, right? It feels like we’re living in a time when the word of the Lord is rare, and visions are not widespread. Maybe it even feels to us like perhaps God is less present than in history. God’s activities aren’t as obvious as most of the miracle stories in the Bible.
Perhaps this is the wrong takeaway, but as we read Samuel’s call story, I want you to realize this is not the typical way God works. God is calling you, but it’s probably not through an audible voice.
Did you catch that the candidacy process includes a psychological interview? Certainly God can speak through visions and audible voices, but if that’s someone’s sole reason for discerning a call, we’re going to be very suspicious of whether that’s actually coming from God.
Even Samuel wonders if the voice he thinks he’s hearing is really God, maybe because he wasn’t expecting to hear God. He didn’t have the Bible chapter heading that says “Samuel’s Call.”
I think this story suggests to us that perhaps some of why it’s hard to hear God’s voice—hard to discern God’s call—is that we’re not usually listening. We’re distracted, we’re busy, there’s a lot of noise in the world, things flashing and grabbing for our attention, and we’re often not paying attention.
Perhaps that’s part of the value of Sabbath, not to be legalistic about it like the Pharisees, but to regularly pause and take time to simply be with God. To be quiet and listen.
Because God is calling you. God’s call comes in many ways. Sometimes it’s a voice from heaven, but usually it’s more subtle, those nudges from the Holy Spirit. In candidacy discernment, that’s a sense of internal call, a feeling God is leading you. Just as important, though, is external call, affirmation of your gifts and encouragement from other people in your life helping you see what you’re good at, where God has gifted you.
And as we talked about for weeks back in the fall, baptism itself is a calling, an entrance into a life of faith, a life of service to others, a life of following Jesus. Whatever your vocation, all Christians are called to faith, to participation in Christ’s body the church, to discipleship.
So I invite you this week to consider your own call story. Consider where God has led you so far, and listen for where God is calling you in the future. Your call doesn’t need to be dramatic like Samuel’s, and you don’t need to know where it’s going.
But what is God calling you to? What word is God calling you to proclaim? What is the One who formed you calling you to care about, to work for peace and justice in the world, building God’s kingdom?
I wonder if part of why call stories are hard is that we can be afraid to claim we have one. We worry we’re imagining things, or misunderstanding. We can be afraid of where we’re being called. But ask God to lead you, to guide you. Pray for the Holy Spirit to reveal the call God has for you.
Trust that the One who calls is faithful, and may we respond with Samuel, “Here I am. Speak, for your servant is listening.” Amen