Do you ever wish someone would just call?  Not because they need you but just because they want to see how you’re doing? 

It’s nice to be needed.  But, what is this obsession?  We gripe about always being needed but then we scarf up the latest wireless technology and even pay extra for a clip so we can wear the thing around on our belts.  No matter where we are, we are connected to those who need us because we can’t imagine not being needed.

When my good friend Don was forced into retirement twenty years ago, it literally nearly killed him.  First time in his adult life he didn’t feel needed.  It’s nice to be needed.  It’s actually very important to be needed.  It’s even more so to be wanted.  Do you ever wish someone would call just to see how you’re doing?  “Hello.  Glad you called.  What do you need?”  “Nothing.  Just wanted to see how you were doing.”  Three of this generation’s most important words certainly must be, “You’ve got mail.”

Rewind twenty centuries.  Was there life before “you’ve got mail?”  How did they survive?  Twenty centuries ago, this was one person’s confession.  “One thing I do, forgetting what is behind, and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  If you’re a Type A personality you’re already hooked.  A goal.  A prize.  Straining toward what is ahead.  It’s all there.  You can’t miss the challenge.

There is challenge here, whether you’re a Type A or Type Z personality.  But, we’ll get to that in just a minute.  Whatever you’re personality, if some of your other most favorite words are, “How are you doing?” then listen again.  We’ll distill the text a little to hear them better.

“God has called me heavenward in Jesus Christ,” Paul writes twenty centuries ago.  Distill a little more.  “God has called . . . me.”  A little more.  “God has called.”  If you are like a dear friend who emailed just this week to say, “I wish sometime someone would just call not

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because they need something from me but just to ask me how I’m doing,” here it is.  Right out of the scripture.  “God has called.”  And, it’s not all just about duty.

I’ve been preaching for over thirty years and I saw it just this week for the first time in this text.  “God has called.”  Not that I hadn’t seen “the call of God” in other texts.  But, in this particular passage, for some reason, my middle-child conformist mentality always leapfrogged right over the words, “God has called me” to those words of duty, “Heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Heavenward in Christ Jesus.  Like, Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war (Sabine Baring-Gould, 1864)!  Or, Words of life and beauty, teach me faith and duty, (Philip P. Bliss, 1874).  Duty is part of faith.  And, words of duty are in this text.  But, they follow, “God has called.”  I’m absolutely convinced that if we don’t get the beauty of the words of being called first, of God calling you and me personally, not because he needs us but because he wants us, if we don’t get the beauty of the words of being called first, we never get the words of duty right, either.  Duty is nice.  Duty is vital to meaning.  Love, being wanted, is essential to breathing.

It’s nice to be needed.  Better to be wanted.  The best marriages are those where two people know how much they need each other but know how much they want each other more than they need each other.  Can you imagine not being wanted?

When I was a student at Hardin-Simmons there was the janitor who worked in our dorm who was rather simple-minded.  He was always acting in strange ways, acting out, even, as though he wanted to socialize with us college boys many years his junior.  We made fun of him behind his back.  Looking back, we were so busy preparing for ministry we missed the ministry right in front of us.  It’s so clear to me now.  His weird behavior was his way of saying, “I want to be – wanted!” 

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Why is it that we miss the being wanted part so easily?  Maybe it’s because it’s really, really hard to do what Paul said first, which is about letting go.  Do you hear the words about letting go?  They sound like accounting words – like taking account of his life.  Taking stock of his investments and their meaning.  “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss – I consider everything a loss – I consider them rubbish.”

What’s he writing off as worthless?  What profits had he gained that he’s willing to cash in?  What difference does it make?  It’s not Paul’s question anymore.  It’s yours and mine.

The point is that Paul had obviously come to realize that you cannot say “yes” to one thing without also saying “no” to something else at the very same time.  You cannot say “yes” to God’s call without saying “no” to whatever lesser things are calling, too.

Did you see the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue debut this week?  Unbelievable.  Among all the truly extravagant gifts, a private photo booth for $20,000!  That sounds like lots of fun, doesn’t it!  I mean, how many times could you invite people over and say, “Let’s take our pictures again tonight,” and actually expect to have people show up?! 

One of the most extravagant, I thought, was a $50,000 piece of tree art that looked like a giant beehive!  $50,000 for tree art?!  $50,000 would build not one but two community centers virtually anywhere on the African continent and transform not one but two villages where the children have been orphaned by AIDS and are dying because there are no adults left to care for them.  In a world where 20,000 a day die because they don’t have enough to stay alive, $50,000 could literally save thousands of lives!  Or, it would all but build one Habitat for Humanity House!  Or, give an inner city kid a college education who might not otherwise have one.  Instead, $50,000 for tree art!  Please!

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It occurred to me while I was doing all this calculating.  It’s not only easier to stand in judgment of the extravagance of others.  It also occurred to me that, how other people spend their money is absolutely none of my business!  And, if I spend any time judging them, I’ll miss at least two things.  I’ll be so busy thinking of the obscenity in the lives of others that I miss the call of God on my life.  I’ll also miss the obscenity, the tree art in my own backyard, that keeps me from hearing God’s call.

We don’t have to spend $50,000 on tree art to invest in things that, by comparison to the vast majority of the world’s population, is opulently obscene waste.  Like, $50 for golf.  Where’s the tree art in my life?  I remember Jesus’ words now, “You hypocrite, first remove the log from your own eye before you play ophthalmologist trying to remove the speck in someone else” (Matthew 7:5, my paraphrase).  If you aren’t hearing the call of God, is there any chance it’s because of other callings you won’t turn away from?  Like, the call of materialism?  Or, the call of guilt?  The call of guilt?

Just this week, standing on the golf course, I suddenly heard the call of guilt from some old sins in my life.  Sins long gone and long forgiven.  Where’d that come from?  For just a moment, the call of old sins had me paralyzed in guilt.  I actually had to go through a mechanical process of celebrating God’s grace so I could move on.

Paul is to Christianity what Mozart is to music or Rembrandt is to art or, depending on your tastes, what Jeff Gordon is to NASCAR.  But, Paul was that to Christianity.  He was a Type A personality, an overachiever in his own right.  So committed to Judaism that he helped kill some people who opposed his ideology.  When it’s guilt of sins long past and long forgiven, he knows what he’s talking about when he says something about forgetting what lies behind.  He knew what it meant to be paralyzed by guilt when old sins came calling.  He also knew that when what is calling is old sin long forgiven, the voice we’re hearing is not the voice of God. 

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We cannot say “yes” to the higher calling unless we are willing to say “no” to the lesser callings.  For all of us, learning what is lesser is the most personal of all spiritual journeys. 

Simon Wiesenthal died week before last.  He was a Jew, born in the Ukraine in 1908.  Professionally, he was an architect.  He and his family were caught up in the Holocaust but somehow he survived.  After the war, he devoted the rest of his life to hunting down Nazi war criminals.  Some 1,100 war criminals were eventually brought to justice because of his work, including the SS officer responsible for arresting Anne Frank.

Some years after the war, he met with a fellow survivor one Sabbath.  The conversation reportedly went something like this.  “Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire.  Why didn't you?”  “You're a religious man,” replied Wiesenthal.  “You believe in God and life after death.  I also believe.  When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?’, there will be many answers.  You will say, ‘I became a jeweler.’  Another will say, ‘I built houses.’  But I will say, ‘I didn’t forget you’ (Clyde Farnsworth, New York Times Magazine, February 2, 1964, as reported on the Simon Wiesenthal Center web site, www.wiesenthal.com).  He said “no” to personal fortune in order that he might say “yes” to those who had been denied life and justice.

The significance of our lives will be in many ways measured by what we chose to forget and those whom we chose to remember.  Unless we are willing to do some very significant forgetting, we will never hear God calling.

A rock group, Green Day, has produced a new song, Wake me up when September ends.  The song is about a young couple in love.  The eighteen year-old young man joins the Army because he’s broke and ends up in Iraq, leaving the love of his life behind.  The song is her cry.  She wishes she could just go to sleep and someone would wake her up when it’s over, when September ends.  It’s also about

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two young people wishing they could hold onto their youth and

innocence.  About how they are afraid of letting go, of each other

and of life as they know it.  I can appreciate their sentiment.  Let me just go to sleep and wake me up when all the hard stuff is over!

This has been a rough September.  Roughest I remember in a long time!  Two hurricanes.  Gasoline doubling in price overnight.   Dire economic warnings.  And, it’s been HOT!  Wake me up, when September ends.

It’s all a dream, though.  September has ended.  Is life that much different just because we slept?  Life is not made of the stuff we sleep through.  It’s made of the tough choices, in the moments when we transact the business of the soul, when we take an accounting of what we’ll choose to forget, what we’ll choose to write off, and what callings we choose to answer.  It’s happening right now, in the tug of war between the sacred and superficial in our own souls.  Life isn’t behind or before us.  Life is what is happening right now, while the tug of war is pulling on us from every side and in how we are choosing to respond.  This is life, now, while we are awake!  That’s the way it is.  The meaning of our lives is shaped not so much by who is calling, but by whose calling we choose to answer.  To this all, Paul has said, “God is calling . . . me.”

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Fred Craddock is an old, Disciples of Christ preacher.  One of the best

I’ve ever heard.  He tells of growing up in the rural South.  On summer days he and his brothers and sisters would be playing outside when their mother would come out onto the porch and call them to lunch.  Craddock said that, if they were really hungry, they would go running home to eat.  But, if they were having a really great time, they would hide when their mother called so it would look like they didn’t hear her.  Craddock said that what he came to learn later in life was that whether they hid when she called or came running had nothing to do with mother. 

We are all being called by many voices.  One of them is God’s.  Whose we choose to answer, well, that’s everything!  Like the old song.  Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling.  Calling for you and for me.  See on the portals he’s waiting and watching.  Watching for you and for me.  Come home.  Come home.  Ye who are weary come home.  Earnestly, tenderly Jesus is calling.  Calling, O sinner, come home (Will L. Thompson, "Softly and Tenderly," 1880).

Do you ever wish someone would call?

Guess what!  Someone has!