In today’s text Jesus has turned thirty – a former carpenter, he has begun a second career as a teacher. Here are a couple of true first person stories to set the background for us”

A woman from Los Angeles writes: I had wanted to greet thirty at the door of my very own house, wearing a sleeveless linen dress and holding a glass of pinot noir. “Please, come in,” I’d say, and smile warmly. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Thirty and I would glide across my pristine hardwood floors, sit down on
the couch, and laugh together over the worst parts of my life. As we rehashed
each devastating incident, all the pain would miraculously be gone, replaced
by a calm acceptance and quiet thankfulness. “I’m glad all that’s behind me,” I would say, pouring myself another glass of wine.

I turn thirty in a few months. The reality is: I rent an apartment. I look
awful in dresses, and until I lose thirty pounds, sleeves are an absolute necessity. My hardwood floors are scarred and spotted with suspicious dark patches. Sometimes I take Polaroids of the patches, to make sure they aren’t getting bigger.

I have no master plan. I worry. I get depressed. I am anxious much of the
time. I wish I could earn a living and still manage to exercise, eat vegetables,
be creative, practice yoga, meditate, volunteer, socialize, relax. At the very least,
I’d like to be able to get up when my alarm goes off. Why do I drink so much, when it gives me such bad headaches? When am I finally going to switch careers? Why, after I’ve spent so many years in therapy, can one call from my mother send me into a weeklong depression?

Here’s a second story: Dennis Donoghue of Rowley, Massachusetts writes:
I’d had It wIth teachIng. I Worked with “difficult” kids and was never sure how much I’d accomplished. I wanted a physical job where I could see the fruits of my labor and wouldn’t bring the work home with me.

So I took a job delivering packages. I wore a brown uniform and carried a
clipboard. At first I enjoyed the work, especially returning at the end of the day
with an empty truck. But then my supervisor began to time me, insisting I drive
faster and deliver more packages. I also realized that most of the packages contained junk that people would be better off without. I began to miss teaching in particular the look on a kid’s face when he or she finally figured out how to divide fractions or walk away from a fight.

One day I delivered several boxes of textbooks to a junior high school. I was
Standing at the principal’s desk with my clipboard, waiting for him to get off the
phone. “Where in God’s name,” he said into the receiver, “am I going to find a certified special-education teacher two months into the school year?”

I gave him his answer.

So, again, Jesus is 30 when we meet him this morning in Luke’s gospel. He’s been out teaching. Things have gone well for him. Everyone is elated with his teaching. There’s just something charismatic about him.

Then he comes back home to Nazareth – the synagogue there. And he stood up to read;
17: and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
18: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19: to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."
20: And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.
21: And he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

He is saying, “Look, this is my vocation,” I found it and I’m 30 years old. Now, thirty is old in the ancient world. Old Old! In today’s world a young person can go to med school, do an internship, have her residency and begin practice at the age of 30. Jesus is thirty when he starts up his practice. But where’s he been? Mark’s gospel says he was a carpenter. The Greek word there is not the same as someone who makes dining room sets or coffee tables. This is somebody who works in construction projects. Perhaps he helped build the Roman town of Sepphoris, just a hop and skip from Nazareth. -- they have a Roman theatre that may have been built during his lifetime.

Carpentry may have been his career. But preaching, he is saying, is his calling.

It is interesting to note that the root of the words car and career both come from the same Latin word, carrera, meaning "race track." Kind of revealing is it not? The word vocation on the other hand, comes from the Latin word vocare, meaning "to call." A vocation is a calling.

Where a career demands intelligence to learn a skill, to learn how to get from here to there, a calling, by contrast, demands a certain amount of inner quiet. It's about listening to a voice within. This often manifested itself as questions we ask ourselves, quite naturally.

"Is what I am doing really worth all the trouble? Why do I bother? What difference will it all make?"

Calls are seldom loud resounding calls from the heavens: a divine subpoena. They are instead quiet reminders; often they are recognizable visitations-- we sense them in serendipity, a line from a movie that comes back to us for weeks, or a paragraph from a book that says, " Hello?"

T.S. Eliot has written, our lives are "measured out in coffee spoons." These serendipitous visitations come coffee spoon sized, mostly. We sense we need to reconnect with someone, a former teacher, dead or living, an old friend, a wise aunt. We decide to pick up an old book we haven't touched in years but we know it is important, though not exactly why. We look at a class catalogue. These are all minor fire drills that are about larger calls. Minor fire drills.

Wallace Stevens once wrote, "I don't ask for the full ringing of the bell." I don’t ask for a clap of thunder that would rend the veil in the temple. A scrawny cry will do, from far off there among the willows and the cat-tails, from far off there among the galaxies."

Calls are essentially questions. They are not questions that you need to answer outright. They ask us merely to entertain them. Sup with them. Acknowledge them. In fact, you don’t want an answer you will just put in a box a store on the shelf of memory. You want a question that will become a chariot to carry you across the breadth of your live, a question that will offer you a life-time of pondering, that will lead you toward what you need to know for the preservation of your sense of yourself.

Greg Levov wrote a book called, Callings. He says that there are two essential questions for us to ask ourselves in this regard: What is right for me? And, where am I willing to be led?

I happen to believe that discernment demands that we ask these two questions continually and devotedly. That way providence will manifest itself enough times so that the answers will eventually find us.

In sculpting stone, sculptors continually test the stone by tapping on it. If the tone becomes dull you sense a fault in the area in which you are working, which demands imagination lest you make it crack. A clear ring one that hangs in the air means it is true, has integrity and will hold up to repeated blows. This is what we are looking for when we are tapping on our lives.

It takes devotion; lots of tapping; lots of questions:

If you are bored with your work today, does it mean you need to leave it or change it? If you don’t get the job you were looking for, does it mean you weren't meant to pursue that career or, as with the teacher who drove for a while for UPS, is it a test of your resolve, or maybe just a kind of sabbatical?

Two and a half years ago I was given a generous summer sabbatical by this church, something I will always be grateful for. I received a grant from the Louisville Institute to study the lives of two poets who kept their day jobs. One was William Carlos Williams who was a physician. I learned from his friend, Robert Coles, about how Williams got just the fodder he needed to write his poems by making house calls on his patients, and got the energy to stay in the medical profession well into his 70s because every night at 10pm he wound down by writing about his day. His work as a doctor gave him the insight necessary to write his poems and the poetry gave him the energy necessary to go back out and take care of his patients.

Then I took my family to Wales in the United Kingdom to look closely at the life of a dead poet there named R.S. Thomas who had been an Anglican priest.

Here was a man who a priest, served a church on the Welsh/English border for twelve years and then moved into the heart of Welsh speaking Wales in his mid thirties because he wanted to learn the old native language his parents had been too ashamed gto teach him. He thought he’d moved to paradise but ended up terribly unhappy. He thought he was going to a very Welsh church, and there were Welsh speakers there, but the church was run by retired British military that insisted on being called Major. He coped for years by writing poetry about the people who had been in his former parish. He even became quite famous doing it. Then, in his 12th year there he reached a breaking point in his profession He didn’t go to work for UPS, instead he went into the city next door to him and bought gallons and gallon of black paint. He spent the week painting the inside of the sanctuary. Since the church was used only on Sundays he did it with no interruption. ! When Sunday rolled around his congregants came in, their mouths hanging open. He stood there in his robe and vestments and said, “This is how it feels to be your rector.” You can imagine he didn’t stay there very long afterward.

He moved to the only parish that would take him, a little out of the way parish at the end of the Lynn peninsula where he became involved in the nuclear freeze movement. It was a good move for him, but he didn’t need to be so self destructive about it. Still, we all operate our own way.

Sometimes we have psychic agendas that we hide even from ourselves. We find out that what we were pursuing was not pursued for itself but because we wanted to prove something -- to ourselves, to our parents, whatever. When we sense that we are doing something for the wrong reason there is the challenge to get out of it. This is not an easy business, but it can be critical for us.

I remember being in Eugene about ten years ago, at an upscale wine and cheese shop downstairs in the 5th Street Market. Two obviously old acquaintances were in rapt discussion. The man, who appeared to be the owner of the place stood there cradling some Gorganzola. The conversation was clearly winding up when the woman said to him, "Tell me again how good it feels to NOT to be working in mental health any longer." That said it all for me. He was free doing something relatively uncomplicated, and she, apparently was still up to her eyeballs in social services.

But I wonder if he’s still selling cheese now, or has found a new way to say yes to the part of him that went into the helping profession decades before.

18: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19: to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."
20: And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.
21: And he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

Jesus, the carpenter turned teacher, is telling us that the call comes in the act of doing it. You try something out and see how it sets in.

Many times people experience a voice within that calls them to go deeper into a place they already are. There they hope to receive what I believe we all long for: the call within the call. The thing within the wider context that fits precisely with who we are.

Calls and calls within our calls keep surfacing until we deal with them. They are like repetitive marital arguments, or a symptom that recurs and recurs; or a fantasy that won’t go away.

Whatever form it takes, it goes on and on, beckon us to make our lives new at whatever new point of demarcation we find ourselves.

Amen.