Worthy of Your Calling

Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis

August 4, 2024

Scripture: Ephesians 4:1–16

This past week, I attended two church meetings, including a meeting of the Campus Task Force and a fundraising and fund development workshop with Plymouth leaders, and the through line for both those meetings was the nature of our call or calling to be church. Also, this week, I will be attending the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries Leadership Conference, where Bishop William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign will be speaking about the moral implications of living into the call or calling of being a person of faith and being the church. In light of recent political happenings, including an attempted assassination of a Presidential candidate and the decision of the President of the United States to end his re-election bid, and the increasing visibility and promulgation of a Christian nationalism that sees no separation between Christianity and the nation, I’ve been reflecting on what is the role of the church in these times. What are we called to do and be in this moment? I know that’s a big question, but if our political fortunes degrade any further, the church will be impacted and implicated in the nation’s future, good or bad. In our time when the church’s call and role have fallen in regard to our culture, perhaps this is the right to remind us to consider our calling, individually and communally.

Too often, we conceive a call or calling to be solely an individual experience in which a person discerns and pursues a vocation that is theirs to discover and honor. A cottage industry spans various industries, careers, and sectors, including religion, to help people find their true calling. And that is a worthy exercise as it makes a difference in our lives to have clarity and joy in knowing who we are and what we have been called to do. But what does it mean and look like for the gathered community to be called, to discover its truest and most meaningful vocation as a collective? What does it mean to consider that we, as a church and congregation, have been blessed with a vocation to which we are called to embrace and live out meaningfully?

And in our case, this is no theoretical issue, even if it’s decidedly theological. We exist as part of a historical and worldwide Christian body that has largely failed in an essential component of the call to be God’s church: what Paul renders as maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There are sectors of Christ’s body that cannot worship together, reason together, or live peaceably with one another because of differences in tradition, practice, and ideology. The existence of different traditions, creeds, and denominations within the Christian movement demonstrates the power of disunity to rend and separate the faithful from one another in dramatic and frightful ways. And yet, Paul speaks directly into the dangers of disunity, reminding the church that our very calling is given form, function, and substance in one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes about the implications for the life of the church of the calling to which the people and the church have been called. The church in Ephesus was made up of Jews, the earliest disciples of the Jesus movement, and Gentiles, later brought to the faith when Christianity spread beyond ancient Palestine. Now a part of the same church, the Jews and Gentiles were divided, angry, and convinced that the other was the biggest threat to the faith. There were some Christians who were forgetting the life and ministry of Jesus and falling back on cultural norms that reflected the faithlessness of the world. There was one set of church folks claiming salvation apart from other church folks who they considered wrong and misguided. It was becoming increasingly clear that so many expressions and inflections of the developing church had the potential to tear apart the church Jesus planted and built.

So, Paul reminds the people how they became the church. He offers a theological and ethical meditation on God’s love and commitment to humanity such that God would act decisively in the life and ministry of Jesus to make them all children of God. Look at what God has done. All of creation was alienated and separated from God, so God made a promise to Israel to be their God and God’s people. Then God saw that the Gentiles were strangers to the promise of covenant, so God revealed God’s self in Jesus, whose very presence brought forgiveness and liberation such that all were adopted as children into the household of God. Jews and Gentiles were reconciled to God and into the body of Christ. Paul praises and thanks God for loving the creation so much that God sets as God’s purpose to liberate and reconcile all things to God.

The church was called into being in light of God’s grace and wisdom and the gospel of Jesus Christ. In light of the love of Christ and the fullness of God that made new life possible for them as the body of Christ, apparently even from prison, Paul is bold enough to instruct them to live a life worthy of the call God gave us. There is no time for self-importance and nastiness toward each other. As part of God’s body and the church of Jesus Christ, they are called to be patient with one another, to love one another, and to put up with each other. They are all God’s children bound together in a bond of peace. They are called to maintain the unity of the Spirit. The Greek renders this “keep the Oneness of the Spirit.” No expression, inflection, or testimony is more important than another because we are all one in God—one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.

The emphasis here is on One. I assure you that oneness does not mean sameness, and unity does not mean uniformity. Our calling as individuals and the church arises from being formed in the Oneness of God, who is One in all, above all, and through all. We have no excuse to live divided, conflicted, and separated as God’s beloved. As the reconciled people of God, we are the church and reveal to the world that love, peace, and unity are possible. As the church, we stand as an explicit rejection of hatred, violence, and division and witness a new way of living and being in the world. As the church, we reveal that God’s work and purpose are to equip our fellow saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ. And it’s worth pointing out this isn’t a call about leadership right now. Those apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers Paul calls out as given by God are not to be seen as individual offices, leaders, or accomplishments but as gifts and graces showered upon us so that others will discern and live into their calls.

To walk worthy, to live worthy of our calling is to embrace the ethical implications of being gathered by the call of God, the implications of honoring the diversity of gifts bestowed upon us for the sake of the others embracing and leaning into their call and building up the body. God has a cause and a claim in the world that is given form and function through the work of called individuals and communities who live, move, and serve in the context of “one body and one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God.”

I know some of you may think that this is just a local church in the Midwest that I joined for personal reasons. In what sense is my presence here a calling? Who are we that it matters in the grand scheme of it all. We are the church, the body of Christ. This moment calls for us to lean into our calling more fervently and faithfully. We are in a time when the certitudes and successes of the world’s institutions have been shaken by war, violence, illiberalism, and autocracy in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time. As a congregation, we are called to live into the ministry and the call to be church amid the tensions of our present life together. We are faced with big questions that cry out for answers but appear to elude our ability to address because of political division, complacency, and radicalization. However, we are not weaker than the forces arrayed against us, nor are we without the tools to serve and minister to ourselves and a world looking for good news.

We have been gifted our callings for this meantime, when many people resist and reject the pursuit of justice, tending to the welfare and well-being of the people, and showing radical hospitality to all people. We are not alone. We have everything we need, starting with God’s generous grace made known to us in Jesus’ gifts. We are not alone because we are surrounded by people with gifts that help us be more of what we have been called to be. We are surrounded by the gift of people who bring all they have to this witness, gathered with us in “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Unity, diversity, and renewal as one body make us strong, ready, and blessed. The gifts we have been given make the gathered community more of a beloved community, spiritually and ethically mature enough to exemplify the love, peace, and unity the world craves and needs.