A long time ago when I was first telling my friends that I’d been accepted into the formation program for deacons, one of my particularly good friends wasn’t at all happy about it. He wasn’t impressed with the deacons he’d met up to that point, I guess, because his response was, “What do you want to do that for?”
He stumped me there for a minute with that question, and I mumbled something or other in response, but he wasn’t having any of it. “What do you get to do, at the end of mass you say, ‘The mass is ended, let us go in peace’?” I said, yeah, I thought that was maybe one of the things, but he still shook his head in disgust. But then suddenly his face brightened up and he asked me, “Can you say that at any point during the mass?”
He’s come around now, at least I think he has, but he asked a good question when he said, “What would you want to do that for?” Why do any of us end up doing the things we wind up doing, with our lives, or our careers, or our resources? What happens that leads us to make the choices we make?
This gospel reading with the famous line about the harvest being abundant, but the laborers being few, is a long-time favorite people use to talk about the idea of vocation. Jesus calls disciples to come forward, and forward these 12 disciples come, ready for anything. It’s an inspiring scene, and in fact it does tell us something about how vocations happen.
Now don’t worry, I’m not going to take this opportunity to put in a long plug for the priesthood, although as Fr. Tim would confirm, a plug now and then wouldn’t hurt. I’m not going to make a pitch for being a deacon, either, although you know, I have to say this: We could certainly use two or three more deacons here in our parish as the years go on, and I can say with confidence there are at least two people sitting in here today who would be marvelous.
But enough about priests and deacons. Too many people still think that is what a vocation is — being a priest, or a nun, or a missionary. And since that’s what people think of when they hear the word vocation, that could be why so many people have decided they don’t have one. “I don’t think I’ve been called to anything like that,” people say, as if God only asks certain exceptional people to do heroic work, and expects the rest of us to just go get a regular job.
What’s interesting about this so-called “vocation” gospel, though, is that the story doesn’t start with people being called, it starts with people seeing something. Look at the beginning of this gospel reading, Jesus sees the enormous, messy crowd that has been following him around, and just imagine what that might have looked like. They’re all following Jesus because they need something, they’re sick, they’re mostly poor, they need healing, they need food, they’re confused, they need to be put on the right track. It’s a mess. If we saw a crowd like that we’d see overwhelming problems that we wouldn’t know how to attack, and we wouldn’t think we’d be the right person to fix all that.
But Jesus flips that kind of thinking on its head. It’s not a mess you are looking at, it’s a harvest. It’s not something that will wear you down, it’s something that will give you life. It’s something that will feed you, not eat you alive. Jesus as always wants us to see the things we usually avoid seeing the way God sees them. When we look at a problem, we think of how much we’ll have to give to fix it compared with how much we’ll receive in return, and we usually think the odds aren’t good, that it won’t be worth the cost. Instead, Jesus looks at the same picture and sees nothing but possibility, what the fabulous reward would be if it all worked out. Thinking like that turns receivers into givers.
That transformation, seeing ourselves as givers and not receivers, is really what vocation is about, not waiting for the telephone call from God drafting you into some radical career, but seeing the world as a harvest that just needs to be brought in. It takes practice to see the world in this rather mystical way, but when we do, that’s when we find out something about our vocation even if you thought you never hard one.
We usually choose our careers for all sorts of reasons, we do things because we’re good at them and we enjoy them, and that is one good reason, we choose them because we can make money at them, which is a second good reason, although one with a bitter aftertaste if that is the main reason. But the third reason for our choices, if we believe this gospel, is that for each of us there is something that needs to be done, someplace where we can be a giver, something that to other people looks like a mess or a losing situation but we don’t, because we see it differently. Other people see a church that has problems and needs too much work to fix, we see a church of promise that only needs people like us to transform it. Other people see poverty as an endless cycle, we see how it is a privilege to serve people who have less than we do. Other people pull back from a world getting more and more violent, more and more polarized, we see a world that needs Christians to turn swords into plowshares, so that the harvest can be brought in yet again.
We all need this way of seeing that Jesus has, not being detached from problems, feeling too weak to solve them, but seeing something that we are privileged to work on, because the reward, if we succeeded, would be so great. That’s vocation, and we all have one. Without that way of seeing, we find ourselves working too hard at something we don’t care about, or being busy with things that we know aren’t important, or sitting on the sidelines holding back from something that our heart tells us is where we need to be. And holding back like that from seeing possibilities to give, holding back from your real vocation — What do you want to do that for?