Second Sunday in Lent - Eucharist & Vocation

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

Vocation. The word vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, which means “to call.” This Lenten season, we are exploring our vocations or our callings?

One of the pithy ways I’ve heard of describing the differences between evangelicals and catholics is that in evangelicalism, God calls you to do something, God calls you to do some kind of work, a mission. Whilst, on the catholic way of viewing things, God calls you to be someone, to a way of being in the world. This, of course, like any easy contrast, is far too simplistic. Evangelicals do of course care about formation, and catholics care about mission and work, but the contrast perhaps speaks of what might be more instinctive for each group when thinking of “calling.”

What I want to say is that I think our vocation, our calling, is a “making present of the covenantal faithfulness of Christ in the world.” That faithfulness in which the person with power says, “I will be who I said I would be to you.” This doesn’t mean that we can be everything to everyone; we are only finite creatures and hence we all have different sorts of callings. But it means helping those we have commited ourselves to by being who we said we would be so that that person can flourish, and that they might have a belief in humanity and relationships which leaves them with hope and not dispair.

When I was 16, I went on a trip to Uganda and Kenya, and one special memory I have of that trip is of the stars at night. There were a few nights where we were sleeping in tents in a very remote location, far away from light polution, and I hadn’t seen anything like it before. The sky at night was literally full of stars; there wasn’t a space of the sky which wasn’t completely filled, pixelated, with thousands of distant stars. That was a moment for me of unveiling the light which is always there, which is calling to us, but is veiled by the noise of our own lights.

Similarly, the Eucharist is an unveiling of the calling that is always there. The Word of God which says, “I will faithfully be the God I said I would be unto the end.” That faithfulness of God which transforms very ordinary things so that they might be an offering we are even pleased to offer unto the God of all things. We come back to the Eucharist to catch a glimpse of that eternal Word of God that is always there and then we go out into the world to participate in that faithfulness; to be imitators of that light; to be even more commited to that faithfulness of living in the world; to live in that place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

But it is important to remember that we are not God. There are times where we struggle to be faithful in a world full of broken promises. In the Genesis scroll, God makes a covenant with Abram in enterring into the ancient ritualistic practice of his time and culture. In ancient middle-eastern custom, one of the ways of making a covenant, or cutting a covenant as the Hebrew has it, was by walking together with the covenant partner through the body of an animal which has been cut in two. It’s not clear exactly why this was the case but it was possibly something to do with physically saying “This covenant we are making today is really important.” “This covenant is so important that if it is broken, it would tear our life, our relationship, perhaps our community, apart.” “We are called to take this covenant seriously.”

In the story, God enters into this ritual way of cutting a covenant but in doing so God puts Abraham to sleep and walks through the two halves of the animal alone. Is this the story’s way of saying that God knows Abraham wouldn’t be able to stay faithful to the covenant and that therefore God was going to make this covenant with Godself? Or at least God was going to take on Godself the full consequences of the covenant being broken?

This life is a school of love where we begin to learn how to be the faithful people God has called us to be; our vocation, our calling. The Eucharist is a re-membrance of the cost of broken covenants; the cost which Jesus makes himself one with. But the eucharist is also a re-membrance that those broken covenants will be restored in God. As Tom Wright says, “The eucharist is the moment at which the past event comes forward to live again in the present, and the future moment of the Lord’s return comes backwards in time to challenge us in the present.”

It is here, at the eucharist, where our vocations are nourished. It is here where we witness the seriousness of faithfulness but it also here where we witness the tranformation of the seemingly unimportant and thus we are encouraged in our own vocations to be who we are called to be so that we can bring this joy to others. Our particular callings as a sign of new creation.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.