Searching and knowing

There is a t-shirt that used to be in bible stores with a caption of “Moses was a murderer, Noah was a drunk, Jacob was a con man, Isaiah preached in his birthday suit, Job went bankrupt, Rahab was a prostitute, Martha was bossy, Mary Magdalene was mentally ill and Mary, Jesus’ mom was an unwed pregnant teen who became a refugee.  If God called them, how do we know that God isn’t calling us?

It's a great t-shirt.  We often may struggle with the idea that God is calling us.  How can God call me when I am not whatever I think God really needs?  Surely someone else, anyone else is better than me.  And we put off answering that still small voice, that nagging sense of being lured into a bigger vision, a bolder idea, a stronger stance.  “No, not me! I’m not called to run for town council, join the library board, speak up about racism, knit mitts for homeless people, buy Tylenol for Ukrainians, attend a rally in support of school boards, fill out a survey about pensions, put solar paneling on my roof, drive an alcoholic home, sit next to a hurting person, sign a petition about the environment or get out and vote on a contentious bylaw.  Somebody else is being called to do that.  Not me.  And yet every day people here in this space do exactly this.  They buy that cup of soup on a cold day for some stranger they just met, they buy granola bars for folks who have no homes to go to, they jumpstart stalled cars or push them out of snowbanks.  Ordinary people called to do what seems like something insignificant, yet what may be insignificant to us may be huge to those who see it or experience it.

How do we know we are called?  How do we know what we are called to?  Knowing is complicated, and when we hear the claim that God knows us can be both a gift and a challenge. 

If you have ever tried to study a foreign language, the word “to know” can be tricky. In French, they have two different words for knowing, connais and sais – connais is more about relationships with people and places, and sais is more about facts and skills, knowledge.  Hebrew is the same way, there is “Yada” which is know, and “Bantah” which is understand. So if you hear someone saying "yada, yada, yada", it means, "I know, I know, I know".

It’s one thing to know someone or something, it’s another thing to understand them. When we read Psalm 139, it is both yada and bantah.  God knows of me and God knows me.  In detail.  In depth.  Right down to the dna level and right up to how I will respond to anything that happens.  The thought of God knowing me both Yada and Bantah is, well, quite honestly, more than a little unnerving.  There’s a limit to how much I want anyone to know me.  Even spouses don’t know each other at that level.  Parents find their children to be mysteries, and siblings who have known each other all their lives can be surprised by choices and thoughts.  No one we know are in our lives from sunup to sun down.  No one we know have been in our lives since we were conceived.  It’s an extraordinary claim for an extraordinary faith in an extraordinary God.

That much transparency is uncomfortable.  We humans have been hiding from being known like that as long as we’ve been telling stories.  Some rabbis say that the day God wandered into Eden looking for Adam and Eve and realized that they were hiding from him, trying to cover their nakedness from him and each other, that’s the day God cried.  We even hide from ourselves.  M. Scott Peck wrote a book about people who lied so much they started to believe themselves!  He said that those kinds of people are really hard to help because they are so committed to their own lies.

That’s very different than Nathanael, the one Jesus praised for his honesty and transparency.  Nathanael had no guile in him, which means he was not sneaky or underhanded or manipulative.  He was honest to the point of rudeness when he said, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Nathanael was described by Jesus as a model citizen, the kind of person we would think deserved to be called to some kind of holy ministry.  He’s special, he’s honest, he’s transparent.  And yet, he’s not mentioned again other than that he was in a group that saw the resurrected Jesus.  He didn’t write any books, he didn’t found any churches, he didn’t go on any missions, he didn’t have any hymns written by him or about him.  This perfect paragon of an Israeli disappeared from the bible completely.

Instead, Peter with his wishy washy faith, the big stinky fisherman who denied Jesus before he died, and Paul who hunted Jesus followers down in order to lock them up and torture them, these are the people that were called to turn the world upside down with.  Once again, the perfect people, the beautiful people, the people who had in their yearbook “most likely to succeed” were not the ones God turned to.  God called the ones who didn’t know their own potential, ones with self-doubt and insecurity.

God called, in other words, people like you and me.  Flawed, imperfect, impatient humans.  God still calls us because God knows us and wants to be in relation with us just as God once had a relationship with Adam and Eve.  God sees us just as we are, as beautiful creatures that can share love and hope and joy to everyone we meet.  God calls us to share our light of hope in daily acts of random kindness, to stranger and family alike.  God calls us to tiny acts and large acts alike.  May we have the courage and the faith to trust that God calls us because God sees us as we really are!