To Whom Are You Sent? – Br. Lain Wilson

Br. Lain Wilson

Reflection given at The Table, hosted by the Lutheran Episcopal Ministry at the MIT Chapel, on the theme of vocation.

1 Corinthians 12:1-13
Psalm 139
Luke 4:16-21

When I began discerning my own vocation, I was stuck between pursuing ordained parish ministry in the Episcopal Church and the vowed religious life. Much of what I focused on and prayed with came down to questions broadly in the category of self-knowledge. What was I good at? What did I find enlivening, or draining? Where did I feel myself most connected in prayer with God?

Now there’s nothing wrong with this. These are important questions. But there’s more, and our readings tonight help to reframe these questions.

“Lord, you have searched me out; O Lord, you have known me” (Psalm 139:1). I really love Psalm 139. It’s the one I go back to time and time again when I reflect on my vocation. It reminds me that even when I try to hide, or run away, I am not hidden from God. And it reveals that in knowing ourselves—in all our self-knowledge—we discover that we have already been fully seen, known, and loved by God. We participate in God’s knowing—we are invited to see ourselves with God’s eyes as “marvelously made” and as one of God’s wonderful works (Psalm 139:14). Who we are is who God has created us to be—we can’t affirm that often enough.

Who we are includes all our giftedness: “All these [gifts],” Saint Paul writes to the church of Corinth, “are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses” (1 Corinthians 12:11). We are given our bodies, our intellects, our creativity, and our capacities not just for ourselves, for our own self-fulfillment, but as members of the Body of Christ. We have been gifted so we may use those gifts for others.

This gets at the core of the question you all have been asking this week: “What is God calling us to do?” If we take as given that who we are is who God has created us to be, and that what we have been given has been given to us to use for others, then what God is calling us to do is to find where our gifts and our deepest, authentic selves find their fullest and most joyful expression in service to God’s creation. The question “What is God calling me to do?” may be put another way: “To whom am I being sent?” Vocation and mission are two sides of the same coin. For us Brothers, a quotation from the fourth-century desert father Evagrius of Pontus gets at the same idea: “A monk is separated from all in order to be united to all.”

Jesus is our primary model here, in his reading from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). Jesus will later point to this passage, and his fulfilment of it in his miracles, when John the Baptist’s followers later come to ask him who he is (Luke 7:22).

Now, this is all just a long way of saying what Frederick Buechner has already said so elegantly: “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” So as you consider and discern your own call, your own vocation, I invite you to ask this allied question: To whom are you, the beloved of God, uniquely gifted by God—to whom are you being sent?