EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

The whole summer before my senior year in college I had a recurring dream in which I kept missing the train. There were lots of variations on how I missed it: I’d show up at the train station just as the train was pulling out; or I’d wake up (in my dream) and realize that I was supposed to already be at the train station; or I’d get to the train station and discover I was a day late. However it happened, I’d arrive and find out the train had left the station.

I’d just come back from living in Paris, otherwise I’m sure I’d have dreamed about missing the boat. But folks travel by train in Europe, so trains it was.

This was not a subtle dream. Even then I knew exactly why I was dreaming about missing the train. I was about to start my senior year, I was going to finish up a little early in January, and I had no idea what was going to happen next.

I was a little anxious about that.

My anxiety didn’t have much to do with how I was going to earn a living. I wasn’t that practical, although, now that I think about it, my parents might have been a little curious about how I planned to pay the rent.

I was anxious because I didn’t know what I was going to do which was really anxiety about who I was going to be.

“What do you do?” is the most frequently asked question at every party I’ve ever been to, right after introductions. Your answer conveys more about you than just where you spend weekdays from 9-5. Our language, our culture, and our history shape expectations about who we are and what we do. So to say we’re a teacher, or a student, or a lawyer, or a janitor, or a stay-at-home parent—let alone a conservative, or a liberal, or a white person, or a black person, or a college graduate, or not a college graduate—to say we’re any of those things is to say we’re a particular kind of person who acts in a particular kind of way. Our identity gets bound up with our work.

We tend to use the words ‘vocation’ and ‘career’ interchangeably, but in Scripture and in Christian tradition ‘vocation’ sticks close to its Latin root, vocare, which means ‘to call.’ Vocation is a call. It comes from outside of us and isn’t something we initiate. Vocation is a gift—our vocation is our call from God.

‘Career’, on the other hand, is derived from the medieval Latin word for ‘race track.’ And since I tend to fall off horses and have zero interest in riding one in a race, it’s hard for me to think of being plunked onto a race track as a gift from God for anyone except jockeys. ‘Career’ is something busy humans do. It’s primarily about human initiative and human effort.

‘Vocation’, on the other hand, begins with God who calls and invites us.

The place where God’s call and our response first meet is in Holy Baptism. In Baptism, we’re sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. We’re received into the household of God and commanded to confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share in his eternal priesthood. We are, in other words, given our identity and our job description. Our vocation begins with our baptism.

Today is the day we celebrate Jesus’ baptism and God shows us what it means to be called by God. Jesus wades into the Jordan to be baptized by John, and as he comes up from the water the heavens open and God’s Spirit like a dove flies down to him and a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

You’ll note that God doesn’t say, “Now you’re my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” God says, “This is my Son.” Jesus’ identity as God’s beloved Son begins before he does anything.

That’s what God says to each of us in our baptism: “You are my child, you are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” See? Those are the words that tell us who we are. Those are the words that set us free from worrying about who we’re going to be. God has claimed us as God’s own and that’s it. All that we have and all that we are is rooted forevermore in God’s love for us. Whatever scripts the world would assign us, whatever identities are supposed to go with categories like ‘banker’, ‘chef’, ‘teacher’, ‘student’, or ‘priest’, God has already given us our true identity. We are God’s children, cherished by God.

The good news is that our baptism sets us free, free from the categories of work, of success or failure, free from the need to derive our identities from something on offer at the Career Counseling Center. Our baptism sets us “free for the unique adventures of vocation in response to the Word who calls us.”

And, God willing, there will be adventures. In our baptismal covenant we agree to “proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ,” to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves,” and “to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”

That’s quite a job description, isn’t it?

What will those adventures look like? I don’t know—it’s up to us to work out the details. I do know that although we have one continuous vocation, we’re likely to find a variety of different ways to respond to that vocation over the course of our lifetimes. We are baptized into the Body of Christ, made members of the community of saints. Each of us is given different gifts to use for the good of the whole Body and each of us may find different ways of using those gifts in different jobs and different places at different times. Our understanding of what God is asking us to do is likely to grow and deepen and change as we learn to live into our baptismal covenant.

But what binds all those professions and jobs together is that we take them up as responses to our vocation—responses to God’s call—rather than than as responses to the scripts and demands society offers and makes of us.

What I didn’t know the summer before my senior year is that it’s not what we do that determines who we are, it’s the other way around. We are God’s children, disciples of His Son Jesus Christ. All else follows from that. This is how the Church of South India puts it in its Covenant Service:

We are no longer our own, but yours. Put us to what you will, set us with whom you will; put us to doing, put us to suffering, let us be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you or brought low for you; let us be full, let us be empty; let us have all things, let us have nothing; we freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

That is the wonderful and wonderfully freeing life to which God calls us.

The Church of South India service continues:

And now, 0 glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are ours and we are yours. So be it. And let the covenant that we have made on earth be ratified in heaven.

So be it. Let our lives, our work, our rest, our waking, and our sleeping, be a proclamation of what we know to be true: God is ours and we are God’s. So be it. Amen and amen.

***I am grateful to Milner Ball for permission to draw on a sermon he preached at Trinity University October 7, 1996 throughout this sermon.