Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Discernment

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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