Back when I was working construction, at the time in my life when I was trying not to hear God’s uncomfortable call to me, my goal was “to see God in the ordinary.” I asked my covenant prayer group to pray with me that I could see and experience the sacred in everyday life, even on the construction site. Low and behold, the prayer was answered! I remember where I was standing and on which job when I realized that God was present, even in conversations about how to install glazing blocks. I was shocked. Pretty soon I was seeing the sacred under every drywall scrap and concrete form. My original thought had been to manage God’s call, to get me off the hook for any deeper life disruption, but God wasn’t buying that. But this is not to say God is always disruptive. The women I was praying with at the time had the same prayer for themselves, and things pretty much stayed the same for them. One grew to love her job more, another became a mother, another was elected elder, another changed jobs but not careers. The same prayer, but God’s particular call, to different women, in the midst of ordinary lives.

Gideon and Simon were both interrupted in their ordinary day-to-day activities. Gideon was engaged in covert activity—diverting food away from the oppressors—but it was the workaday way to feed his family. Simon was minding his own business as a fisherman, loaning out his boat to some guy to use as a speaking platform. Innocently going about their own business, interrupted by God.

What’s with this interruption? Is it Divine Trickster stuff? God letting us get established on the rug before pulling it out from under us? One hates to think ill of the Creator, but sometimes doesn’t it feel as if God uses a life jolt to get our attention? As if the most important things that happen in life come because everything has been thrown up into the air? Death of a loved one, divorce, sudden unemployment, a bad diagnosis from the doctor, admission to a study program denied, you don’t make the team.

As your pastor, I’m here to tell you that when God interrupts, it’s not for the sake of annoying us or throwing us off stride. Although sometimes it’s the only way God can get our attention. Sometimes “being in stride” also means “stuck in a rut,” and as near as I can figure, God does not advocate lives lived in ruts. God’s intention in interrupting our lives is encounter. As if God, dying to be known by us, interrupts in powerful ways, not to intimidate but to transform. Not “fix,” as if we are broken, but to “complete,” as in life with meaning—a meaning that reveals we are precious and essential and loved.

One of my life interruptions was the death of my mother. It was not a good event by a long shot, and I don’t think God said, “I’ve gotta get Eileen’s attention. I think I’ll let her mother die.” As I’ve listened for God’s call and meaning in that event, I’ve come to understand that God’s intention is to be revealed—to be known by us. In that revelation is God’s invitation to us: Live! God’s “call” to us isn’t because God needs someone to pitch in and save God the effort of having to work. It is that God desires to be known, and in relationship, in coming to know God, we live into the meaning and purpose of our own lives. How “living” is it to have to sneak your harvest like Gideon? Where is the dignity, and where is the meaning of life, if you have to be invisible? There is a difference between living life with a small impact on the earth, and living so as not to be noticed. The one is “live simply so that others may simply live” and the other is “pretend I’m not here.” There is a difference between humility and bad self-esteem. One is about the Giver of the gift, the other is about the gift. When God calls us, it is to be ourselves. Like Gideon, our call comes to us in the second person singular. But like Simon, the meaning in our calls is found in community with others.

Man, that is a grandiose sentiment. It’s the sort of thing that stirs a sense of mission, lifts the hope that the world is a better place because of your contributions. In the recesses of my heart nurtured in high school civics classes, that’s the sort of rhetoric that I hope motivates the people who run for public office. It’s the sort of language that sends people into the Peace Corps and to live with Mother Teresa and to become social workers. This sense of meaning and purpose always comes at personal cost, and maybe that’s why it is so critical who steers that purpose and to what end the personal cost is directed. In our case, to be a disciple is never comfortable, safe, or easy.

I’m told that one of Harry Truman’s charms as president was that he thought “the buck stops here.” Sometimes it seems that our legal system aims to get the buck to stop anywhere but “here.” People in auto accidents sue the manufacturer of the car, trip and falls are about the owner the sidewalk, lung cancer is about cigarette manufacturers. When Gideon’s righteous indignation about the Midianites makes him cry out that “somebody oughta do something about them,” God calls Gideon’s bluff and says, “that somebody is you.” Why are we surprised when Gideon tries to weasel out of being that somebody? People who say that Sunday School isn’t relevant don’t offer to teach it. The folks who leave churches because there aren’t enough people their age don’t invite their friends to come to church with them. The parents who say the youth program isn’t active enough for their kids are the ones who don’t bring them to the meetings. It is easier to complain about a situation than it is to pay the personal cost of resolving it. I don’t know how to organize a committee. I don’t know enough about the Bible to teach. I’m too busy to help with the summer lunch program. I don’t like meetings, so I can’t help with mission.

The thing is, God’s call comes in the middle of our everyday lives. My call to ministry started innocently enough. I knew for a fact that I could not share my faith. I could not do “God talk”—even with my own kids. But I knew construction, so I consented to help remodel a group home basement and lead the construction part of a mission trip to Mexico. When I started seeing sacred space on construction sites, I knew God was up to something, because God was using language I could understand. True, I was like Simon. Jesus suggested something different: “try fishing now—at the wrong time of day.” Like Simon, I was the first to say, “This is the world I know, how it works and what succeeds. You can’t just come in and turn it upside down.”

Our immediate response to God’s call is not always trust. We may have already tried fishing with nets—all night long. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We always have Sunday School during church. We only have one class. We never have mid-week prayer or worship. So why should I trust you that a different way of doing this is going to work? Oddly enough, God doesn’t call us to success. God’s call to us isn’t a call to be winners. God’s call is to trust, to know God. The call is to be open to God’s revealing, to allow God to change us. In the hands of God, that is discipleship. That is what constitutes “success.” Knowing God. Letting God transform you. Is it to change how you see the world around you? Is it to think of yourself differently? Is it to give yourself away in a new way? God only knows. But God invites you to find out. Amen.