LAKE JAMES

NORTH CAROLINA

Lent II + 3/4/07 + St. Paul’s Church, Lake James

+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
 

This morning, we consider the phenomenon called “election” – the idea of being chosen and called by God to a state of life, a vocation, or even to a particular job. In the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, we heard God address an elderly Chaldean, telling him that he had been selected for a special vocation. He had been chosen. What does it mean to be “chosen?”

When I began to write this sermon, I asked myself what that word “chosen” meant to me. You may laugh at the image which immediately came to mind. It was of being a youngster on a Saturday morning in early Spring on the local sandlot playground waiting for the usual pick-up baseball game by the kids of the neighborhood to begin. We were a motley group with a wide age-range, mostly boys but also a few girls. There was an unwritten law that the two oldest (but only boys of course) would be the opposing captains, and it was their privilege to choose who would be on each team. They would alternate their choices until all the team positions had been filled. Since there generally weren’t that many of us, everybody usually got to be on a team.

As a youngster, I was always the shortest, most underweight boy in my school class. As I remember those long-ago baseball Saturdays, I was not only small, but one of the younger kids wanting to play, and so was generally ignored in the early choices of players. In today’s athletic vocabulary, I was definitely not one of the “first-round selections!”

We “lesser lights” would stand there, trying to look both athletic and desirable while others were being chosen. “I’ll take him” one captain would say. “All right, I’ll take him” the other captain would answer, and two lucky youngsters would proudly walk over to stand behind their new leaders. One of the worst moments might come when a captain would point in my direction and say “him” – because my great rush of joy would be dashed as I realized that he was pointing not at me, but at the bigger boy standing next to me. At last, a captain would pick me and I was in – I was among the chosen!

As the game went on (lasting an indefinite number of innings), it would become clear that not all the selections had been wise. A boy, chosen because he was taller, might turn out to be so ungainly that his contributions to the team, to put it kindly, were less than minimal. A girl, who due to our unquestioned sexism, had been among the last to be chosen, might turn out to be the star of the game. One or two players always seemed to be called home for lunch while the game was still going on, leaving the rest of us in the lurch.

It was generally obvious that the original order of selection had little relationship to what turned out to be the quality of play. To put it mildly, a vocational psychologist, or experienced human resources manager would have serious qualms about the adequacy of the screening procedures used in the choice of team members used on our playground!

Sometimes, it seems that God’s selections are not much better! In the reading from Genesis,

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