Being known
Thumbnail image by lhfarms, used under Creative Commons License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
May 8, 2022—Easter 4C
Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30
What is it, to be known?
I love that in this passage, Jesus puts the emphasis on his knowing us, rather than our knowing him. Honestly, that’s helpful, because our ability to know Jesus is limited, and I have to hope that Jesus’ ability to know me is boundless.
Boundless. I love that word. I love it so much that it’s part of St. Luke’s identity statement: A welcome without bounds, to a God without limits. And I love that because it invites us into an expansiveness that sets us free from the constraints that so many in our midst have encountered in this world. Our God is bigger than the god you were afraid of; our God is bigger than the one you were told needs you to believe certain things in a certain way; our God is big enough to receive the whole person of who you are (and then make of you what God might want to make of you).
That’s the first step, of what it is, to be known. You need to be free, to be safe, to bring your whole self to be known. The other needs to be willing to accept it, and you need to be willing to share it. Which is admittedly hard. It’s so tempting to show only your best parts, the things you consider to be your gifts. Oh, the shiny parts. The award-winning parts. But the truth, those parts don’t look as good as we think they do, without the whole picture. Because so often we underestimate the beauty of a full humanity. Forget that a quilt is more lovely and interesting and functional than a single piece of fabric, even if that single square is the prettiest piece of fabric in the quilt.
To be known is to be seen as a whole person. To be known is to allow your whole self to be seen. To be known is to be claimed, and know yourself to truly belong (“no one will snatch them out of my hand”). To be known is to allow yourself to be claimed in such a way, and to choose to belong.
Which is exhilarating, and beautiful, and risky.
With other people, being known is risky because it opens you up to being hurt. You might be rejected, you might be disappointed, you might be betrayed. With Jesus, which is to say with God, the risk is different. With Jesus, the risk of being known is that you will not only be brought into community (which brings all the risks I just mentioned) but you will also be called into the work of the kingdom. You will be given a vocation.
Too often, we only think of vocation as ordained ministry. After all, the word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and a calling sounds pretty fancy. But in the Biblical stories about discipleship, the rhythm of calling and following assures us that any of us who follow Jesus do so because we have been called. Jesus calls to us, somehow, some way, and we follow. As such, we have a calling, a vocation. And it really doesn’t need to be ordained ministry!
Frederick Buechner’s language might help here: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Which I understand to mean that vocation is any moment in which something in you responds in a real way to a needs in the world. To take bottles of water to Midland or pay for a well in Africa, for instance (“you gave me something to drink”); to write letters to, and pray and sing with, the people in Oakridge Manor (“you visited me”); to get food to people who don’t have enough to eat (“you fed me”); to help schools and parents who are trying to educate children with insufficient resources (“you bore my burdens and gave me a future”). And on and on.
There are so many needs in the world: some of them material, and some of them less tangible. When we have the ability to meet those needs, that’s a calling. That, for a moment or for a lifetime, is a vocation.
We see a wonderful example of it in the passage from Acts, in which Peter has been brought to the house of a deeply beloved disciple named Tabitha, or Dorcas in Greek. We’re told this woman was devoted to charity and works of mercy, and then the widows show us the incarnation of that truth. They crowd the room, bringing the cloaks and tunics that Tabitha made for them. She clothed them, quite literally. She had the skill and she had the means to love them in this incredibly tangible way. That’s what they are showing to Peter: “See how she loved us!”
And we don’t know which part of the making of clothes Tabitha did. But I put that image of the woman spinning wool into yarn on the cover of the bulletin because I loved the way it combined so many different threads from today’s readings. There is her skill in spinning (her talent, perhaps her vocation). But there’s also something there for me that connects to the image of us as sheep, and how Jesus is able to work with our rough wooliness, and make something new. Because we are called to the use of the gifts we have, for sure. But vocation can also be more disruptive and transformative than that: there are times that Jesus calls us into new places, into strengths we hadn’t even imagined or believed we had. Those are the inner promptings that surprise us, and perhaps scare us. And still, there is something there that feels right. Something in us feels drawn to respond to this particular need in the world, even if we don’t quite know what’s prompting us to step forward.
That’s vocation too. It’s what happens when we are known better than we might even know ourselves, by the One who always seemed to be able to see beyond the fear, beyond the self-doubt or the physical limitation or the social rejection faced by the person across from him, to see their true self and see the person they could be. This is our shepherd, who will never allow us to be snatched from his hand. And he knows our strengths, and knows our oddities. And he knows it can all be used in the work of the Kingdom.
May we all find and embrace the many vocations our shepherd calls us into in this world, for a moment, or for a lifetime. May it be so, Amen.