One main temptation for many of us Christians is to seek the end result of a life in Christ. We look for various ways to utilize the gifts that God has given us; we look toward a life that has been freed from sin; we look for the ways that we can become the people God "intended us to be." Somewhere in our subconscious, we believe that we are Christians as a means to self-actualization. Of course, we shroud this in language about "being open to the call of God" or "seeking the will of God." After all, we are told by Christ himself to pray, "Thy will be done." These are all important parts of the Christian life, but they are hardly the point. What we must remember is that, foremost, God has called us into relationship with himself through Christ. This is the nature of our Christian life.
One of my New Year's resolutions was to read through the Bible this year, and as I have been making my way through Genesis and now Exodus, a certain pattern of human/divine interaction has been showing up all over the place. Time and again, God calls out to some particular human (be it Abraham, Issac, Jacob, or Moses), and his response is, "Here I am." He does not ask God, "What should I do? Where should I go? Who am I?" When God calls to him, the only response is, "I'm here." He gets present before the Lord, and the Lord doesn't hesitate to give instruction and guidance.
Even in the New Testament this happens. When Christ calls Matthew, he follows. Matthew hardly finds himself in the middle of an existential quandary, but rather, he is merely who he is before the Lord, yet he hears the call of the Lord and responds. This is not because Matthew reasons within himself saying, "You know, this tax-collector gig is alright, but somehow I'm just not fulfilled. I'll bet if I follow this guy, he'll show me who I really am and what I'm meant to do." None of the apostles had any paradigm for such thought. Indeed, they were some of the most simple people to exist in society – fishermen and tax collectors. What capacity for philosophical or religious thought do they seem to possess? To me, the answer is pretty clear: little to none. Matthew, as well as the rest of the apostles, responds to the call of Christ simply because it is Christ who is doing the calling. They live their lives for what they are, and Christ meets them in the midst of it. The Pharisees, on the other hand, do not hear the call of Christ because they have become obsessed with their place in the religion of their fathers. The Pharisees were the educated men who should have been the first to identify Christ as the Son of the Living God. They knew the Scriptures inside-out, yet the love of God passed them by (it did not exclude them, they simply missed it) because they were constantly searching for the fulfillment of their lives. They were looking to climb the ladders of religiosity in the eyes of men (and perhaps thereby become impressive to God (as if anything we do could ever make God say, "Oh, wow! Check out that guy!")), and as a result, they missed out on their own humanity and true lives. How fitting it is, then, that the Lord would call people who are nothing more than what they are. After all, it is hard for a fisherman to appear to be anything but a fisherman; if nothing else gave him away, the perma-stench of fish would. The call of the Lord comes to all, but those who hear it are those who try to be nothing more than who they are before the face of God. As I've said before, this is humility; humus means "ground; low, lowly," and what else can the ground, the earth be but what it is? The apostles do not heap judgment on themselves, nor do they exalt themselves before God, but they hear the voice of Christ say, "Follow me," and they do so just as they are, covetous, smelly, and uncertain. The response of the Old Testament saints and the apostles is, "Here I am."
The nature of our response to the call of the Lord must be the same. We must come before him without any pretense, and we must stand, sit, kneel before him as we are. We don't have to put on a show for God. We can bring before him all our uncertainty, our anger, our irreverence, our disbelief, our love, our pain, our joy, our fear, our ugliness, our beauty, our beer-bellies, our overdeveloped biceps, our lethargy, our ambition, our desire, our despair, and he can handle it. The call is always coming forth from him, "Christian, Christian!" (not me "Christian," but the word for the disciple of Christ...sometimes it really is confusing to be named such), and the only fitting response is, "Here I am. Here I am with all my doubt. Here I am with all my desire. Here I am." We must come before the Lord as we are. Broken. Confused. Hopeful. Our religiosity will not save us. We can get so obsessed with the implications of the call (i.e., go to Africa, become a priest, get married, etc., etc.) that we neglect the Caller whose chief desire is to enter our lives as they are and transform them from the inside. The call is there, our trouble is showing up for it. When Moses asks the name of the Lord, the Lord responds, "I AM WHO I AM," not, "I will be who I will be." The Lord IS. Present tense. If the Lord exists in the present, where else will we encounter the call of the Lord but in the present? What else can we be in the present except for what we are? When we get present before the Lord who is, we show up for our lives for real, and responding to the call of God is no longer a worry about "what I'm going to do when I grow up," but it is a true relationship with and a true response to call of the eternally present, loving God.
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