Greetings to you on this day that the Lord has made; it is a
day for us to rejoice and be glad! Grace
to you and peace from God, our Father, and from his Son, Jesus Christ, our
Lord.
One of the several responsibilities within the Student
Services Division is to work with inquiring and curious people who wonder
whether they should take classes from us, enter one of our programs, or even
whether they are being called by the Holy Spirit for a more involved and a more
public ministry within their local church or their church body. This “wondering” is often referred to as the
process of discernment. Those inquiring
and wondering people are in the process of discerning whether or not they are
being called by the Holy Spirit. In
other words, would their enrollment be of God, or not?
When I was in the parish, I often encountered sincere people
who expressed their greatest desire saying, “I just want to know God’s will for
my life so I can do it.” They, too, were
engaged in the practice of discernment.
Sometimes… most of the time… it overwhelmed them. Putting every decision, every action, up to
such scrutiny as to whether or not it is the will of God for your life soon
proves exhausting. Those sincere people
from the parish and the inquiring and curious ones deciding to take classes
share a similar weariness. The practice
of discernment is wearying. Deciding
whether or not the call is of the Holy Spirit can be exhausting as the
“wondering” drags on.
Popular culture generally confuses the process of
discernment with something often described as “listening to your heart” or
“discovering your authentic self.” These
practices turn your attention inward so that you can hear your inner voice—the
authentic voice of your true self. Such
listening, though, is not the process of discernment. It fails two tests. First, we are not trust our own heart. Jesus has a pretty low opinion of the human
heart and its capacities. The human
heart is the source of all that defiles a person—all evil ideas and
inclinations (Mt. 7:21). Heartfelt
sincerity is not trustworthy. Second,
the Holy Spirit does not work with an inner voice but with an external word,
the Word of God. The fifth article of
the Augsburg Confession testifies to this when it calls the preached word and
the delivered sacraments “instruments” through which the Holy Spirit
works.
Our tradition certainly holds that there is an “inner” call
as well as an “outer” call. The inner
call of our tradition is not the same as the one understood by culture. Popular culture prioritizes the inner call,
making the desires of the person’s heart or authentic self sacrosanct, unable
to be thwarted. It is the person’s
“right” to follow the desires of their heart or their authentic self. In our tradition, however, the inner call is
always subject to ratification by an outer call, an external call. Because the internal call cannot be easily
separated from the ambition of a sinful heart, our tradition ratifies the inner
call with the voice of a neighbor:
brothers and sisters in Christ speaking singly or corporately,
personally or institutionally.
When I work with inquiring and curious people who wonder
whether they should take classes from us, they mostly wonder about their inner
call. I work with them in beginning the
process of discernment. Most of that
discernment is teaching them to hear the outer call. Certainly, we tend to the inner call but we
start to look for all the ways that inner call is being ratified by the outer
call.
Often, the first sign of an outer call is the encouragement
of their pastor to become more deeply involved in the life of their
congregation or church body. Sometimes,
this outer call precedes the actual awareness of the person’s inner call. As our inquiring and curious prospective
student becomes more deeply involved in their congregation, other members more
give them encouragement to take up formal study. This was certainly true in my journey to
seminary. My neighbors… my fellow
brothers and sisters in Christ become so insistently encouraging that I often
joked, “I wasn’t called to seminary; I was pushed.”
Once the prospect student applies, another instance of the
outer call occurs. The application
requires letters of reference. In those
letters, the references speak singly and personally in ratifying the inner call
of the prospective student. As the
application process continues, there are assessments of skills and education by
our registrar. The assessment process
culminates in an admission interview during which several of us converse with
the prospective student in what could well be called a “testing or discerning”
of the prospective student’s inner call.
A successful admissions interview
results in a further ratification of the person’s inner call.
The now-admitted-student’s church body has its own
discernment process for ratifying the student’s inner call. This discernment is accomplished by the
various church bodies’ ministry committees.
They meet with and work with our students as they take classes and
undergo pastoral formation. Eventually,
there will be an expression of an outer call when the ministry committee
endorses the student for parish ministry.
At that point their names go before congregations. The Holy Spirit working through the call of a
congregation delivers the authoritative voice of the external or outer
call. It is the final ratification of
the person’s inner call that may have been experienced years before. This call of the Holy Spirit is the voice of
God setting the newly-called into their particular office.
Discernment is simple, yet difficult—ambiguous, yet
certain. Left to ourselves and turned
inward upon ourselves we have only that difficult task of listening to the
ambiguous voice of our human heart. Yet,
when the call of the Holy Spirit finally comes through the congregation, the
difficulty and ambiguity fall away for we receive the simple certainty that God
has spoken. Between those two events we
wait and learn to listen to the voice of our neighbors as they ratify, or not,
that inner call.
Courtesy of "Word ad Work"--the magazine of the Institute of Lutheran Theology
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