God's Calling Card--May 16, 2022

God's Calling Card--May 16, 2022

"Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God." [1 Corinthians 1:26-29]

You and I are evidence of the table-turning ways of God.

Wow. You. Real, actual you. And real, actual me. God's call to us--not just people in Bible times, or halo-marked saints from oil paintings, or famous heroes from history, but us in all of our ordinariness--shows the world how God operates. And God's ways are always to take the foolish and the frail and the forgotten in order to let some of the hot air out of the puffed-up, the proud, the pompous, and the powerful. Paul says that the very fact that we have come to faith in Jesus is evidence to the world of God's upside-down ways.

You could say it's God's calling-card--this divine habit of taking the ones looked down on by the strong, the powerful, and the elite and calling them to belong in God's Reign. Like the old Zorro stories where the masked vigilante hero leaves behind the letter "Z" slashed into the scenery to "sign his work," or like the two robbers in the movie Home Alone who always leave the water running in the faucets of the houses they break into, so that people will know they've been hit by "The Wet Bandits," God has left a calling card, a way of working in the world, by deliberately NOT calling only the so-called best and brightest, but intentionally calling anybody and everybody "beloved". That's you and me. We, just in the very fact of our belovedness without riches or political power or social influence, we are how God deflates the arrogant and turns the usual order of things upside down. We are the way that God shames the strong and shows the world's "winners" that they are not nearly so special as they like to tell people they are. We are the evidence that none of their accumulating, blustering, fist-shaking, or intimidating really had any sway in the big scheme of things--because here we are, ordinary and unassuming, and Christ has called us--chosen us!--to belong to his movement.

Think of it--it's really quite a beautiful design on God's part, how God both lifts up the people who have been told they are nobodies and silences those who have puffed themselves up as "somebodies." God does it by picking... us. And God calls us without auditions, without being impressed by our skills, our charm, our net worth, or our job titles. God calls us and loves us in all of our wonderful ordinariness, as a way of telling the Big Deals of the world that they aren't such big deals after all. And that turns out to be part of how God is changing the world--by creating a totally new kind of community, in which we no longer fuss over who has more money or who wields more influence. God is creating a fellowship of the ordinary, so that we will understand that our belonging has everything to do with grace and nothing to do with our raw talent or even our greatest achievements.

It's a bold--and I dare say risky--plan on God's part. Risky, not because God can't do amazing things through ordinary people without having an elite team of the smartest, strongest, richest, and most successful people... but because we still keep missing the point of how God operates and we Christians keep falling into the same old thinking that being a Big Deal is important. We do it institutionally as "The Church" when we play games like, "Whose Congregation Is Bigger?" or when religious-sounding hucksters on TV sell the message that "God wants you to be rich." We do it when pastors give up on their call to be Elijahs to the Ahabs of the day because they (we) would rather have a seat at the table of power rather than risk being called "irrelevant." We do it, each and every one of us, when we try and puff ourselves up to make ourselves feel better, or more significant, than our neighbor down the street. Day by day, followers of Jesus miss the point of the fact that we have been called, just as we are, in all of our ordinariness--and that this is God's choice. We fail to see that this is part of God's surprising way of redeeming and restoring the world--by calling the nobodies and telling them they are beloved somebodies... by choosing the ones who have been overlooked or unseen in order to send a message to the ones who want to keep putting themselves in the center of attention. We miss the sheer surprising genius of it, and instead so often we still play by the world's rules that you have to convince people you are a "winner" or a Big Deal in order to matter... when God has actually bent over backwards to show us that we are beloved just as we are.

And yet, for all the ways we miss the point, God does not give up on working with--and through--us. That's one of the risks, you could say, of not going with only the best and the brightest and the most well-skilled and charismatic: God deliberately runs the risk that we will miss the point of what God is doing by having called us in the first place. God chooses to work through us, despite how dense we can be, even when our dense minds miss the beauty and the wonder of a God who loves and works through people who are not necessarily the brightest bulb in the bunch.

We, in all of our thick-headedness, are the calling card of a God who deals in reversals.  And any time you see the weak lifted above the strong, the outcasts welcomed while the elites and celebrities drop their jaws, or the last put ahead of the first, it is Christ "signing his work" like Zorro and his rapier.  The turning of tables is God's signature move.

So even when I have missed the point and give in to the old thinking that says only the Big Deals, the "strong," and the "winners" matter, God doesn't "uncall" me because I don't "get it." God chooses and claims and calls a world full of us who don't "get" it on our own. And that is the wonder of grace--the God who calls us doesn't select only from the Varsity Team, the Honor Society, or the Homecoming Court. The God who calls us in Jesus doesn't get impressed with any of them. The real living God who calls you just loves... you.

Own it today. Know it. And know that nothing else is needed but that love, that call, that Christ.

Lord Jesus, help us to hear that you have claimed us as we are, and help us to see the ways you love us despite our drawbacks, limitations, and frailties.