Our Calling
Date: January 18, 2026
Readings: Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42
Preacher: Fr. Travis O'Brian
Epiphany 2 ,
OUR CALLING
John the Baptist is speaking with Andrew and one other of his followers. Seeing Jesus pass by, he points to him, saying, “Look, the Lamb of God!” Curious, Andrew and his friend follow behind Jesus, who turns to them and asks, “What are you looking for?” Good question. What are we looking for? In life, in faith, what are we looking for? I’d be suspicious of anyone who answers that question too precisely. We are seeking wholeness. We are seeking vitality, goodness, affirmation. We are seeking joy. We are seeking love. Yes, we are seeking love – for love is the way, the truth, and the life. But what is love? No one has ever seen love, though I believe its traces are everywhere. Probably the brokenness of the world – the violence, the greed and malcontent, the despair and the lusting after things and power – is a result of our seeking otherwise than in love the self-affirmation we so desperately seem to need; as we turn away from Love’s way and Love’s call.
“What are you looking for?” Well, of course Andrew and his friend can’t say, exactly. Maybe they are just curious about who this “lamb of God” might be. The next day, after having spent time with Jesus, they will be confident enough to say, “We have found the Messiah!” But even then, those of us who know the rest of the Gospel story know full well that they have no clear idea, and often enough an out-and-out mistaken idea, of what that means. And yet, they aren’t wrong. You could say that they, like all of us who follow Jesus, somehow get it right even as we get it wrong. But in this first exchange, in order to have some excuse for their curiosity, in reply to Jesus’ question Andrew says “we just wanted to ask where you are staying.” Their question, like most questions in the Scriptures, points toward a truth beyond their intention. “Where are you staying?” “Where is your home? With whom do you dwell? Who are you?” And Jesus says to them, “Come and see” – in other words, to those who find themselves following him without quite knowing why, he says, “follow me, follow me and I will show you my home; only by following can you learn who I am.”
“Follow me,” Jesus calls. The invitation has the weight of a command to those of us who hear. The church, St Paul’s says, is made up of all who God calls “into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Paul’s words in turn repeat the prophet Isaiah, who reassures his people suffering exile that it is “the Holy One of Israel who has chosen you.” This way of speaking of the church as a fellowship of those who have been “chosen” by God, makes many of us uncomfortable. We worry that to say “chosen” means selected, set aside over and against others; that God has marked us off, for no discernible reason, for a salvation which he denies to others. “There will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left,” is the proof-text of this way of thinking. Nevertheless, although it may seem to lack the justice we want to ascribe to our God, we are wrong to reject the language of being chosen. We are wrong not just because that is the language Jesus himself uses, but also because – well, how else can I speak of the mystery that I find myself following Jesus when friends and family, people I love, along with most of the world, do not?
So we are wrong to reject the truth of this mystery – in Jesus’ own words, that “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). Nevertheless, though wrong, we may still be closer to being right than a theology that employs this way of speaking to shore up our human need for certainty, which seeks self-affirmation in the hope of being set above and against others – others who have not heard Jesus’ invitation, others God will relegate to destruction. We are more right in our hesitation first of all because I don’t think Jesus condemned anyone – except those quick to condemn others in God’s name. Moreover, we are called into no certainty except the certainty of faith, which means following Jesus though we cannot quite know where he is taking us. I follow him, not because he will give me something he denies to others, but because I love him; and my love for him he promises will lead me into the fullness of Love, a fullness which is beyond all knowing.
Even more to the point, we who shy from the language of being God’s “chosen” are nearer to being right though we are wrong because, although to be chosen may indeed mean to be singled out – yet singled out for what? Not for privilege, at least, not as the world understands privilege. We are not called to riches or positions of authority or even to be saved from suffering, for Jesus calls us to follow him along the road that leads to the Cross. On the Cross Jesus died for the sake of the world, the whole world – the chosen as well as the lost – and perhaps the lost above all. So to follow Jesus is to find, yes, that we are chosen, but chosen not for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world and the lost of the world. To be chosen indeed means to be saved, to know God’s salvation. But if we regard salvation as a gift for us alone, a private good, a private possession – then we too are lost. Even our salvation is given to us for the sake of others.
We are not chosen, in other words, for privilege, but called into servanthood. To be the church is to be a people called out of the world – not for our own sake, but for the sake of the world. Jesus calls us to walk a different way than the world’s way: the way of the cross rather than of self-affirmation, the way of servanthood rather than of mastery, the way of self-spending rather than of accumulation, the way of thanksgiving rather than of self-determination, the way of unknowing rather than of certainty. Why I have been called, why I have been chosen to follow Christ along this way, is a mystery. I can only be humble, therefore, in the face of God’s inscrutable but undeniable reason. God chooses whom he chooses – and what can we say, when he calls us by name, but “here I am?”
So I can’t know why God calls me – I only know it is for His reason, to His glory, and to mine only so far as my life follows in His. Christ calls me to follow him – but who he is, and where he is taking me, I cannot fully know, but discover step by step along the way, to my joy. We are called out of the world for the sake of the world: called, so that the world may not be completely bereft of any other life than the life that ends in vanity. We have been called out of the world for the sake of the world: called so that when the world comes to the end of itself, when its shrill insistence on certainty, its desperate need to be its own self-affirmation, finally destroys every certainty and every affirmation, there might still be one to ask the question, “What are you looking for?” We have been called so that there might still be another way, a new possibility when all possibility is at an end – “Come and see.” The invitation is not our invitation; and the way is not our way but the Lord’s – who, when he calls us to follow Jesus, calls, through us, the whole world home to Himself. Amen.