I approach the topic of today’s talk with “fear and trembling” to use Kierkegard’s application of St. Paul’s phrase. The topic is “the calling of a layperson.” We are all a bit reluctant to assign to God the reasons for our behavior, and with good cause. We are careful always to present ourselves in the best light, and to say that we are doing something because God called us to do it can threaten the image that we want to project in a number of ways. Instinctively, we know that others, particular persons who don’t know us well, will be very skeptical of such a claim. We tend to identify persons who claim that kind of relationship with God with the fringe element. If someone goes so far as to say that the voice of God told them to do something, he or she is a candidate for institutionalization. It is not just the amorphous “they” who say these things–it’s us! We who profess to be Christians are just as skeptical of claimed calls from God as everyone else. Yet nothing could be more important to us than to know that we are doing what God wants us to do. So how do we discern God’s will in and for our lives?
I trust that you will understand my fear and trembling as I approach this topic–especially since the only real way to delve into the matter is by telling you about my personal experience. Now before you start calling in witnesses as to my mental infirmity, let me assure you that all my still small voices, all my voices from a whirlwind, all my burning bushes, all my visitations from angels have been metaphorical only! I think that in the Old Testament, there was even a dumb ass that rebuked Balaam. Given the nature of my work as a judge, I’m not at all sure that I have missed out on that completely. But before I launch into specifics, let me make a bit of a philosophical point.
When we look to the past, everything seems to be clear enough. We can see, at least in most events, why things occurred as they did. Even in tragedies that cause us to question the ultimate victory of good over evil, we can usually understand causation in some sense. Even as we ask why it was necessary that a good person die or suffer, we can usually understand the physical cause for the suffering. If we can’t explain things, we believe that the explanation is there and we just haven’t figured it out yet. We can explain, or at least rationalize, things that have occurred in the past. Not so with the future. Our vision for the future is as uncertain as the weather forecast. Most of the time, we can’t get it right even one day in advance, let alone for a month or a year or a century. There are too many variables. The future always appears chaotic.
Yet the call of God is the call of the future. More specifically, it is the call of the present–the eternal now as Paul Tillich called it. It is the call to engage the future in the present moment in the meaningful, creative way that is prescribed by God.
Well, I guess that I have beat around the burning bush for as long as I can. Let me be specific. At the first of this month, I attended the first meeting of the Connectional Process Team in Chicago. The Connectional Process Team is a group of 38 persons chosen by the General Conference of our Church to strategize for carrying out the church’s mission in the future. Our work could affect the very structure of the denomination. For me, it is strange that I find myself in this position. Is this work a calling?
Next Thursday, I will chair a meeting of the Board of Trustees of Huntingdon College. If anyone had told Coach Posey and me thirty-six years ago when he recruited me to Huntingdon after finding me out in Shorter in a peach orchard that I would someday be the Chairman of the Board, we would have both laughed. Am I called by God to do this job?
I serve on the Episcopacy Committee for the Southeast Jurisdiction, and will chair a task force that will deal with rules and ethical standards governing the election of Bishops. In the past, I served as Conference Layleader of our conference from 1985-1990, and I currently serve as Lay Leader of the Montgomery District. I’ve written a book, entitled Conscience and Command, in which I attempt to deal with the complex interface between law and faith. I have served the Church in lots of other capacities, at Local Church, District, Annual Conference, Jurisdictional and General Church Levels. It is not necessary for me to bore you further with the details in order to present the question.
How can I be sure that any of this is the will of God, as opposed to my own ego and pride? By the way, I don’t work for the Church full-time–I am very much a full-time Circuit Judge. I tried jury cases last week and will try jury cases next week. At this time, I am riding herd over 12-15 Capital murder trials which I hope to complete within the next year.
I feel an intense call to judicial education. In November, a group of approximately 40 judges will gather at Tuskegee University to study the impact of black history and literature on law. Why? O. J. and Rodney King did not create the racial divide that exists in this country, but their cases certainly evidence that division. The implications for the legal system is ominous. I have spearheaded the effort to have judges explore the differences by studying the available literature. What we believe impacts on our behavior. Faith–beliefs–are recognized through fruits–behavior. I believe that for every lay person, the most important calling of all is our vocation. This is where the paddle hits the water. If the Christian Religion is going to continue to be relevant to the world, it must take to the highways and byways. It must pursue us in our daily tasks, and impact on our day to day activities. It has been in church for too long.
So how did I come to experience my call to these activities? It would be possible to suggest very plausible and rational explanations for all these activities, by looking to the past, but that would be a mistake. It is precisely because of the unlikelihood of the various turns that my life has taken that I feel comfortable in the knowledge that I am responding to the call of God. I suspect that it is only that faith–that belief–that provides the strength and energy for the response. The rational explanation would say that I was born into the Methodist Church, attended a Methodist College, attended law school, maintained a strong interest in the church, and wound up in the present positions. But that is much much too simple. The real reasons are much more complex, and cannot be reduced to principles. They happened in very precise ways.
If Coach Neal Posey had not found me in that peach orchard, I never would have attended Huntingdon. Of course there were many other things that pointed me in that direction. I am convinced, that if Moses had gone around the other side of the mountain, there would have been a burning bush around there. Strangely, I suspect that if George Wallace had not visited Huntingdon in 1963, just when lots of things were happening in my home county of Macon, I would have ended up in medicine rather than law. If T.B. Hill had not left a note on the bulletin board concerning a job opening in Montgomery, my life may have taken a different course. I felt a strong call to remain close to home, and an intense interest in the social order of things and the role of religion in it all. If, if, if.
After I had practiced for a few years, with more and more activity in Macon County, Eddie Mallard, the black circuit clerk in Macon County suggested that I run for Circuit Judge. What a strange call! Then after being elected, and serving for two or three years, there was a letter from Huey Emfinger, from Red Bay Florida, whom I did not know, telling me that my name had been suggested as Conference Lay Leader, and asking for information. I’ve learned since that often there are folks who seek that office, but strangely, I was selected although I had no real prior experience suggesting that I should be selected. I could go on and on with similar narratives of the strange events that have directed my steps to the place where I now find myself. The Connectional Process Team is a particularly strange occurrence. After a couple of days at General Conference, I was a bit down-hearted about the goings- on. By phone, I told Betty that I felt I had to try to do something about it. Donde Ashmos from Texas and I were on the same legislative committee. We visited, and discovered a certain amount of mutual concern. One morning, she pointed out the possibility of the creation of the Connectional Process Team, and suggested that we should try to get on Connectional Process Team, since it would be dealing with some of our concerns. I mentioned it to Bishop Morris and a couple of other folks, and it happened. The interesting thing is that it happened after I had made a commitment to the need, not having any idea how I could serve.
Events that have surrounded my elections to General and Jurisdictional Conferences have been strange. In one instance, I gave up my nomination from the District to allow another person to serve, only to learn that one of the other nominees would not be able to serve, so I was elected anyway. At the Jurisdictional Conference that year, I had a great deal to do with bringing Bishop Morris to this conference.
I wrote an article for the Alabama Lawyer describing the judicial education project at Tuskegee University that I mentioned a moment ago. A judge who chairs the education committee of the Judicial Section of the American Bar Association read the article and invited me to submit a proposal to his committee for inclusion in the Annual Meeting of the Section next August. In his letter, he mentioned Judge Deannel Tacha, who serves on the 10th Federal Circuit Court Court of Appeals, and who is immediate past Chair of the Judicial Division. In the same mail, I received the final listing of the membership of the Connectional Process Team, and Judge Tacha was one of the members! I had the opportunity to visit with her at the meeting in Chicago. I believe there’s a still small voice in that story somewhere, and I’m listening with great interest.
But still, how do I know that all this is the will of God? Last week as I was on my way to court in Lafayette. As always, I drove from Tallassee, across the Saugahatchee Creek, whose long valley cuts far into the piedmont area that embraces most of my circuit. The ridges are in rows like dominoes, and fog envelopes the valleys. Often I see deer, and turkeys, but on this particular morning it was a squirrel that caught my eye. He scampered accross the road in front of me, carrying a pecan. He made it across, and I’ll probably never see him again. He experienced what he was trying to do very directly. He was trying to get across the road with that pecan. I’m not quite as direct in my purposes. I reflect on the meaning of my activities, and he probably doesn’t reflect on his. But the first thing that occurs to me in my reflections is that the squirrel is just as close as I am to the infinite magnificent God who created us both. The only real difference is probably my awareness of the distance between us and the God of the sparrows and lilies and the hairs of our heads. But despite the infinite distance between us and that God, I am sure that God is both there and here. And once you get to that certainty, everything else is neither here nor there. To act, act in the living present, as Longfellow suggested, is all that we can do.
I believe that it is not in the easy, rational explanations of our activities that we find our way to God. It is in the strangeness, the mystery of the circumstances, carefully considered, that we realize that our call could have come from no other source than God. And only armed with that conviction can we really act out the assigned role. The witness within is the Holy Spirit–the Comforter sent by God’s only Son. This is the way of discernment. Every day, in a thousand small and strange ways, the Grace of God reassures us that we are on the right course. That is, provided that we are on the right course. If we are not, we receive reminders of that also.
Even as we sit here, radio waves and television images surround us. But they are not decoded, and we do not receive them. Naturally we do not think about them often. An old country gospel song says “turn your radio on, and listen to the music in the air, turn your radio on, heaven’s glory share.” Jesus often said “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” The reason we don’t hear the still small voices, the voice of God saying “whom shall I send, and who will go for me,” or the voices from whirlwinds, saying “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth–when the morning stars sang together,” or the voice from heaven saying of Jesus, “this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased,” or the voice of Jesus himself saying “go make of all disciples,” or even the occasional well deserved rebuke from a dumb ass, is because we are not tuned in. The circumstances surrounding the call evidence its authenticity as unerringly as the creation itself testifies to the existence of the Creator. The voice of God thunders all around us but we lack ears to hear.
Thank you for indulging me these moments to share my innermost convictions with you. I hope that in some way they will be helpful to you in your faith journey
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