Do Choir

If I were going to do a sermon series during these 4 consecutive weeks that I will have been preaching this summer, it might have been called a summer of miracles. You heard about the 5 apples and 12 loaves last week. This week I want to tell you about another divine encounter I had.

It was toward the end of July, sort of 2/3s of the way through the summer after I had graduated high school and my scholarship letter arrived. In the letter, I found out that I was awarded an almost full scholarship (like 90%) to attend Hardin-Simmons University Caldwell School of Music and that I had a two choices: I could enroll as a Voice and Piano major, or a viola and piano major. (Those of you who know of my less than stellar skills at the piano will want to hear the rest of that story later. Anyone can play a Beethoven Sonata, if one practices enough.)

So there I stared at the letter. I was surprised to get the voice scholarship. I had only auditioned simply so the faculty would know I was well rounded, but my whole family was full of singers and I rebelled against it. I didn’t want to be like the rest of the family. That was boring. I was different. That’s one of the reasons I had chosen to play viola in the first place. So checking the voice major box was just silly, and out of the question. But being the good baptist that I was, beach the great-grandson of a regionally famous Baptist evangelist, I put the paper down and prayed. Then I went out and took a walk and contemplated and tried to listen for God to tell me which box to check, even though I knew the answer was viola, because voice was crazy. I had worked all these years on viola, and voice was just a thing my whole family did. It really was crazy that I got offered that voice scholarship.

So I arrived back home, sat down, and looked at the boxes again. With resoluteness, I grabbed the pen and went to check the viola box and right before I made contact with the paper, there came a phrase across my dream screen, a concrete sensation of awareness almost like a voice in my head, or a ticker tape across my eyes, “Do Choir.”

NOT do voice, but DO CHOIR.

There was no choir check box. There was a voice checkbox and so I could only assume that choir was obviously related to voice. I sat there, stunned for a moment, to seriously roll that around in my head for a second and then, like the rational person that I am, who had spent the last 7 years of his life preparing for this moment, I said to myself, out loud, “Well that’s just stupid,” and I determinedly and dismissively checked the viola box. And that was that.

But here’s the thing. I started school, and viola lessons at college, and orchestra, and two months later, there was a problem. Playing viola is hard on you. It’s a big instrument that you have to reach way around to play. It’s larger than a violin and is almost big enough to play like a cello. And the stress of that proved too much and I got chronic bursitis, which I still deal with from time to time today, (If you see me stretching my hands, that’s what that is.) and I had to stop playing and enter physical therapy. I took incompletes in my instrument and orchestra, and went to therapy for the rest of the semester. When the next semester began, I started playing again and within six weeks, I was back at the doctor. This was not going to happen. I had a major life crisis. I thought about quitting school, and going home. But I was there to be a composer so I said to myself after a few weeks of depressed contemplation, “Fine. I’ll just be voice major. My fingers don’t work, but my voice does.”

The next fall I entered the semester as a newly minted voice major and EVERYTHING CHANGED for me. My compositional career took off. Friendships and relationships like I had never experienced came to be and my life and spirit blossomed in to new glowing creations. It’s almost as if, THIS IS WHAT GOD’S PATH WAS FOR ME ALL ALONG. And I thought about the moment I got that scholarship letter. And it all became clear. God was telling me something really important in that moment and I didn’t listen. That one change in checkboxes eventually led me to you, right here this morning, via twenty-five years of winding paths that run through the choir loft over there and that office across the way.

Just before our the Old Testament passage, we heard this morning, where Elijah goes annointing, 1 Kings says this about God talking to Elijah:

“A very strong wind tore through the mountains and broke apart the stones before the Lord. But the Lord wasn’t in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake. But the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake. 12 After the earthquake, there was a fire. But the Lord wasn’t in the fire. After the fire, there was a sound. Thin. Quiet. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his coat. He went out and stood at the cave’s entrance. A voice came to him and said, “Why are you here, Elijah?”

God set Elijah on his path not in booming thunder and earthquakes but a still small voice.

In the gospel this morning, we encounter some of the more uncomfortable moments. They seem pretty harsh. I mean, Jesus tells a one guy to ignore his family and another to abandon his father’s funeral. It certainly doesn’t seem very empathetic or compassionate. But it is human. Remember, Jesus, the incarnate word of God was in fact in-carnate. He became human to join with the human struggle and therefore join us all into the foreverness of God. And for that to work, he had to feel and experience all the things we do. On this day, after all the miracles and teachings, Jesus started a bee line to Jerusalem right through hostile Samaritan territory to Jerusalem, where he knew he would, be, crucified. Let that set in for just a moment. Let that resonate with your souls. Put yourself in his shoes. Go back to a time where you knew you had to face something inevitable that you didn’t want to do but had to. Jesus just starts towards Jerusalem in obedience, and asks the disciples to follow. When they want to call on hell fire and brimstone (recalling Elijah) when they are rejected by the Samaritans, when the Samaritans don’t want to go along, Jesus has harsh words for the disciples because he knows God comes in the smallness not the fire and earthquakes. Make your invitaion, and move on.

God’s call is often quiet, persistent, and not what we expected. But it changes everything.

So what about these people that Jesus asked to do uncharitable things to their families, not burying a father or not saying Goodbye? These are logical things. Jesus’s point here is that there is no time. He was headed to Jerusalem. Jesus needed them now. And yet, they resisted.

We often resist the call of God—out of fear, logic, family ties, or weariness. Yet God persists.

Jesus references the Old Testament reading from today when calling out these reluctant disciples who aren’t quite ready to follow. When Elisha gets the call he leaves his old life behind. He burns his plows and sacrifices his oxen. There would be no going back. If you look back, the plow line will go crooked and you will mess up the field. Sometimes, God has plans that countervene our preparation, that seem illogically to go against all of your training and work.

True calling requires letting go—burning the plow, leaving the familiar, and trusting the unknown.

In calling for those potential followers to drop everything and go with him, Jesus was calling them to radical trust. Radical trust to go with him to behold his own crucifixion. The foolish endeavor. The illogical, nonsensical, moment in time where God went to die a criminal’s death and in doing so produce the greatest victory in all of history.

Trust that God’s way is the right way, even when societal rules and logic say otherwise. Maybe, like a church stepping out into the public realm on a warm, Saturday morning to say to a world, that often says no-way that in this place, God loves queer kids also. That gay kids, trans kids, non-binary, straight kids all are known, beloved and welcome. All people are beloved of God. The same. No distinctions. Illogically. Counter-culturally. And absolutely.

We don’t always have the right answer when Jesus calls on us. We don’t always check the right boxes. We don’t always drop what we are doing and burn our plows to follow the will of God. But God doesn’t give up on us. God keeps calling. God keeps lovingly reaching out for us.

It was a windy painful path from that check box to this moment in front of you this morning, but eventually, I checked the right box. I eventually saw the wisdom that I should have trusted in all along.

God is ready at every moment to embrace us, to rejoice in us joining in the journey of wonder and miracles that come with living in the will of God. We just have to stand up and go.

Amen.