My take on the notion of "call"

What follows is something I wrote during the parish discernment process when I was asked to talk about how I understand what it is to be "called."

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It’s an occupational hazard of philosophers to get caught up on a word. Instructed to write about my sense of call, I started thinking about what a call is. It is not (it occurs to me) something one feels. We so often talk about what we "feel" called to do or to be — I used that language in my spiritual autobiography — but calls are not the right sorts of things to be felt. Calls are not sensations or emotions; they are not divinely ordered shivers running down the Christian’s spine. A call is a divine summons; it is not felt but received. And when I look at Scriptural discussions of calling, I notice that the means by which they are received is some divine activity in the recipient. In 1 Peter 1, God calls his people by acting mercifully in their lives:

But 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. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

In 1 Corinthians 1, God acts by incorporating the Corinthians into Christ, who becomes for them the variety of gifts that (Paul says rather undiplomatically) they had lacked before they were called:

For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and
the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that he may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. But by his doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord."

Both these passages, and many others like them in the New Testament, speak of call chiefly as a matter of God’s activity in all Christians. It is not only a select few in whom God acts; it is not only a specially privileged elite whom God summons for his service. The writer to the Ephesians connects this general call, made in baptism, with the specific and diverse graces offered for different roles within the Church:

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were also called to one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says, "When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train, and gave gifts to human beings." (What does "he ascended" mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.) It was he who gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for works of service, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Thus the call that is upon all Christians in virtue of their baptism is God’s work within them. And although this work has the same end for all — that of building up the one body of Christ — it encompasses a variety of means. Christ apportions grace to each of us, giving the gifts that are his to give as the ascended King and High Priest who fills the whole universe. As Christopher Cocksworth puts it, what emerges in these passages is a "definition of the people of God as a priestly community, within which certain members of that community are called to exercise different ministries . . . with certain people called from within the community to shape and to form its life."

It is explicitly within this context, having identified his whole audience as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood," that the writer of 1 Peter goes on to address a charge specifically to those within the community who are presbyters (or, as we would say now, priests):

I exhort the presbyters among you — I who am also a presbyter, and a witness to the sufferings of Christ, and one who has a share in the glory that is going to be revealed: Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not because you are forced to, but because you want to, in accordance with God’s will; not for sordid gain, but eagerly; not lording it over those allotted to your charge, but proving to be examples to the flock.

Just about every word of this little passage bears reflection (again getting hung up on words!), but I will concentrate on four: shepherd, oversight, want, and example.

To shepherd is to provide good pasture, nourishing food. For the presbyter, I think this encompasses teaching, preaching, and the Eucharist. We think of the Scriptures as food ("Grant us so to hear them, to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them"), and certainly nothing is more central to priestly ministry than making available the "Food to pilgrims given." In speaking with another member of Trinity who is discerning a call to the priesthood, I came to realize even more emphatically how inseparable these two are for me. "Your teaching ministry cannot be complete," she said, "unless you can call people to the altar." Words to that effect, anyway: the idea is that the kind of teaching that God is calling me to offer will seem stunted and truncated if it cannot find its culmination in the spiritual feast that is the Eucharist.

When we think of shepherding, of course we think of the Good Shepherd. It is clear that the writer had that association in mind as well, since he goes on to say, "And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away." All Christians are called to be the image of Christ; presbyters are specially called to image Christ as "pastor and teacher" (‘pastor’ being the Latin word for ‘shepherd’). I suspect this is part of what 1 Peter has in mind with the word example. The Greek is typos, and certainly the most obvious meaning of the word is a pattern to be imitated, which is how we usually understand ‘example’ in this passage. But typos is also used in Greek to describe children who are, as we would say, "the very image" of their parents. The presbyter is made not only a model for another but a model of Another. Thank goodness the writer talks not in terms of an accomplishment, an already achieved status as image, but in terms of development: "proving to be examples for the flock."

Another aspect of Christ’s shepherding that this passage calls on presbyters to model is that of exercising oversight. Shepherds not only feed their flocks; they keep an eye on them and supervise them. An overseer in Greek is an episkopos, from which we get our word ‘bishop’; but here presbyters are invited to share in overseeing the flock entrusted to them. And there is a great deal here about the spirit in which they ought to exercise that pastoral oversight: not grudgingly or under compulsion, not in the pursuit of money ("for sordid gain") or power ("lording it over the flock"), but eagerly and because they want to. I think somewhere in the back of our minds is a vague impression that it’s a bit unseemly for anyone to express an eagerness for ordination. I suspect it’s because we too often suspect that anyone who is positively eager to be ordained must in fact be some sort of careerist who desires to "lord it over the flock." By all means, let us test the spirit in which people present themselves for ordained ministry. But if it does not appear that someone is drawn by money or power, then I think it is wise to assume that such eagerness is a work of God, part of the divine activity that is, I have argued, the mode in which God’s call is received.