Delivered by James Kubal-Komoto, Summer Minister

First Unitarian Church of Portland

August 15, 1999

Opening Words:

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations." - - Book of Jeremiah

I want to start off this morning talking about some of the characters that we encounter in the Hebrew Bible, especially those who are sometimes called God’s chosen ones. In the Hebrew Bible, what we usually call the Old Testament, hardly anyone wants to be one of God’s chosen ones. Hardly anyone wants to be one of the people through whom God works his will. In the stories of the Hebrew Bible, God never receives ten applications for one opening. In fact, God never receives any applications. He always has to go looking for someone to fill the position he wants filled, and when God finds the person whom he wants to fill the position, inevitably the person balks, saying "I’m not up to it."

When God came to the prophet Isaiah, Isaiah said that he was too sinful. When God came to Jeremiah, Jeremiah he said he was too young. When God came to Moses, Moses had all kinds of excuses. Moses said he wasn’t a very important person, he said he wasn’t powerful enough, he said he talked funny and too slowly, he said he wouldn’t know what to say and nobody would believe him anyway.

But Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Moses weren’t the only ones to balk at God’s initial overtures. According to the renowned American Biblical scholar, William Cosby, even the righteous and humble Noah balked when God first came to him.

According to Cosby, one day as Noah as he was working in his workshop, he heard a voice.

"Noah," the voice said.

"Who is that?"

"It’s the Lord, Noah."

"Right. Where are you? Whadya want? I’ve been good."

"Noah, I want you to build an arc."

"Right. What’s an arc?"

"Get some wood. Build it 300 cubits by 80 cubits by 40 cubits."

"Right. What’s a cubit?"

"Well don’t worry about that Noah. When you get that done, go out into the world and collect all the animals in the world by twos, male and female, and put them in the arc."

"Right. Who is this really? What’s going on? How come you want me to do all these weird things?"

"I am going to destroy the world."

"Right. Am I on Candid Camera? How are you going to do it?"

"I am going to make it rain for 1000 days and 1000 nights and drown them right out."

"Do this. You’ll save water. Let it rain for 40 days and 40 nights and wait for the sewers to back up."

The Lord says, "Right."

Eventually, Cosby tells us, Noah agrees to build the arc but later complains about how hard the work is and threatens to quit. God replies to Noah’s complaints about being one of God’s chosen ones by asking him a single question: "Noah how long can you tread water?"

I want to suggest for our consideration this morning that these stories about various biblical characters balking about being selected as one of God’s chosen ones are more than exchanges thrown in to enhance the overall dramatic effect of the biblical narrative. I want to suggest these stories are about universal human experiences and they are valuable to us because they tell us something about ourselves?

What do they tell us? They tell us two things about ourselves. First, they tell us that each of us, not only the heroes and heroines of the Bible, is called from deep within ourselves to live our lives in a particular way, benefitting the world in someway that no one else can. Second, they tell us, and for me this is the more interesting part, each of us will also resist this call. But why? Why is discovering and living out our individual callings, no matter what they may be, one of the most difficult things for each of us to do?

I was talking on the phone with my mother the other day. We were talking about my return to school in the fall, and I explained to her, for what seemed like the one thousandth time, that I would not be taking classes but would be spending most of my time researching and writing a doctor of ministry dissertation.

"Tell me again what your topic is," she said.

"The use of small groups within churches to motivate and sustain participation in social justice activities," I answered.

"Have you already researched that topic a lot?" she asked.

I said that I had.

"And have the faculty already approved your research topic?"

I said that they had.

"Oh," my mother said, somewhat deflatedly.

Now the better part of me knew that I should have left it at that. The better part of me knew that my mother had some idea about what my research topic should be. The better part of me also knew that I should not ask my mother what this idea was. But as so often happens with interactions with my mother, the better part of me did not prevail.

"Did you have some idea about my research topic?" I asked, hesitantly.

"Well what about frozen sperm?" my mother said.

My mind reeled. Usually I am able to follow the occasional leaps of logic my mother makes in conversation. This, however, was not one of those times.

"Well, what about frozen sperm, Mom?"

"I was reading this article in the newspaper, and, you know, there are just so many interesting ethical and religious questions about what should happen to frozen sperm or frozen eggs, especially if one or both of the partners die. It seems like that would make a really interesting dissertation topic," my mother said.

Suddenly, and just for an instant, I imagined abandoning everything I had done during the past three years - - the courses, the papers, the individual research - - so I could write Frozen Sperm: The Unitarian Universalist Theological Response. Then, I said to my mother, as lovingly and as gently but as sternly as possible "Mom, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in researching and writing a doctor of ministry dissertation about frozen sperm."

"Oh," she said. "Well, maybe you can just do a sermon about it someday."

I know my mother loves me. I know that in her heart of hearts she wants what is best for me and wants me to live out my life, not hers. I know that for decades she resented my grandparents because that they did not encourage her in her dream to become a pediatrician but instead pushed her and her sister to both become school teachers, as my grandparents themselves had been. Nevertheless, she thinks I should write about frozen sperm.

Surely one of the things that makes it most difficult for us to discover our own callings is that we must learn to distinguish our own true callings from what families would like us to do with our lives, and this distinction is not always apparent or easy.

A classmate of mine at Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago, a remarkable young woman named Rebecca Cohen was featured in an article on the front page of the New York Times in April because she is following her mother, Helen Cohen, into the Unitarian Universalist Ministry. On May 23, Rebecca was ordained into the Unitarian Universalist ministry at the First Parish Church of Lexington, Massachusetts, where her mother serves.

When Helen Cohen was ordained into the ministry, she was one of very few women ministers. In the New York Times article, the elder Cohen confessed to feeling envy but also satisfaction about the opportunities open to her daughter. At the same time, Rebecca has struggled to make sure the call she is following is her own.

When she was first asked as a teenager if she would follow in her mother’s footsteps, she said no, and it took several years for Rebecca to realize that it was her own call she was following, and not only an extension of her mother’s call.

In my own situation, neither of my parents are ministers. However, after finishing college, my father briefly entered Catholic seminary, planning to become a Catholic priest. Unable to stand the rigidity of the Catholic doctrine or the lack of questioning permitted by his teachers, he left the seminary after a short while.

My father has never strongly encouraged or discouraged me in my call to ministry. However, the desires are sometimes passed ever so silently and unknowingly from one generation to the next. Like Rebecca, I feel very certain of my call to ministry, but I think in both of our cases, asking at some point whether our calls were our very own were valid questions.

As we must distinguish the callings of our deepest selves from what our families want of us, we must also distinguish our callings from what the world or the dictates of religion may appear to want from us. Several months ago a man came to me and asked me, "How do I know that God wants me to be gay?" I asked the man if he could ever love as deeply in a straight relationship as in a gay one, and his answer was, "No."

We talked about a Hassidic story about the rabbi Susya. Near death, the rabbi said, "When I get to heaven, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ Instead, they will ask, ‘Why were you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could become?"

The author Rachel Naomi Remen has also discussed the difficulty in recognizing our true callings, the way in which we alone can help the world. She talks about a book agent responsible for getting many of the most innovative thinkers in psychology and spirituality published during the 60’s and early 70’s, years before anyone else could have gotten these books published. Remen tells us, he seemed to be a "self absorbed and ruthless man." "At the time I met him," she says, "I was studying spiritual paths, many of which emphasized the need to clean up your act in order to be able to serve a universal purpose. Yet here was a man to whom most spiritual teachers would have assigned a million years of practice, who had nevertheless done great good in the work of spreading life-affirming ideas through the culture like Johnny Appleseed. But many spiritual schools would have encouraged people with the same spiritual traits to spend most of their time in meditation, preparing to serve. I just could not understand it." Remen said she later realized, "A ruthless man may be able to open doors that a more kindly and traditionally spiritual person could knock on forever."

But what if we are able to identify those things that our families or the world may want from us? If we can do this, is our true calling then easier to hear?

Carl Jung said that each of our personalities has a shadow side which contains parts of ourselves that for whatever reason exist but are not present to our conscious minds. Facing the negative elements in our shadows is a difficult task, Jung said, but according to the Jungian thinker Robert Johnson, it is ever more difficult to face the gold in each of our shadows. "People are as frightened of their capacity for nobility as of their darkest sides," Johnson writes. "If you find the gold in someone, he will resist it to the last ounce of his strength." But why do we resist so strongly?

In Japan, there is an axiom: "The nail that stands up gets hammered down." What does this mean? Well, first off, it means that Japan is not an easy place for tall people to live. Japanese subway doors are about level with my forehead, and for four years, I walked around half dizzy. On a deeper level however, the axiom suggests that anytime we decide to follow our calling, which necessarily requires us to stand up and apart from others, we face risk, which includes the possibility of being hammered down. I think each of us knows this at a very deep level within ourselves, and it is this knowledge that often creates the resistance to following what is deepest within us.

My wife Hiromi and I were talking the other night. We were talking about moving back to Chicago and our futures after that.

"Do you think it really matters if we try hard in life?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, whether you really try hard to make something of your life, or just try to live as comfortably as possible, in the end, you still die, and it doesn’t really matter does it?"

No more art theater movies for a while, I thought.

"Are you saying we should just try to live as comfortably as possible?" I asked.

"I am only asking," she said. "You’re the minister. You’re supposed to know the answers."

It is a profound religious question and describes the choice we all must face in deciding whether to follow a call. The choice we face is really not like Noah’s, after all- - either follow the call or drown as result of God’s wrath. It’s more a matter of choosing between a quiet, peaceful, perhaps comfortable existence or doing something greater with one’s life, even if this means facing inevitable risks and set backs and perhaps failure.

It’s a choice portrayed in the film The Last Temptation of Christ. Satan comes to Jesus in a final scene as he is dying on the cross and presents him with a vision. In the vision, Jesus is shown what his life could have been like if he had not made the choices he had made. In the vision, Jesus is nothing but a simple carpenter, happily married and with children. At the end of the vision, Jesus is offered the choice of climbing down the cross and leading this life or remaining where he is and dying. He nobly chooses the latter.

I, however, want to argue just a bit with the way his choices are portrayed, for although the price of being a Messiah is portrayed vividly, I believe there is something wrong with the way the other choice is portrayed.

In a short story by Henry James we meet a character named John Marcher. "Marcher," as Judith Viorst tells us in her analysis, "is convinced that there is nothing he can do about the specific fate for which he is destined, a rare and strange and possibly prodigious and terrible fate that will one day spring like a crouching beast in the jungle. While awaiting the arrival of his unknown, inescapable destiny, he detachedly goes through the motions of existence, as his voided days become decades and he becomes old. It is only at the end of his passive, passionless, empty life that Marcher understands the fate he was marked for: that he has been destined to live out his entire life as a man to whom nothing whatever has happened."

I want to suggest the price we pay for not following our call, for choosing what may be a comfortable and safe existence, if that, is the most terrible price any human being can pay. The price we must pay is regret, regret for never knowing what we might have been. When we look back on our lives, we don’t regret most the things that we’ve done. It is the things that we didn’t do that always cause the most regret. The things that we did do, even if foolish, can always be seen as learning experiences.

Let me finish this morning with a story about Michael Kimmelman. Kimmelman is an art critic, but as a child he was somewhat of a prodigy on the piano. Yet like many, he struggled to tell if this was his true calling.

As a teenager, he played to please his famous teacher. "But I was a typical teenager," he tells us. "As I grew older, I increasingly interpreted his commitment to music as religion, and his student seemed to me like cult followers. Wanting to think for myself, I began to doubt his judgments, which included his opinion of my ability at the piano...

"Then there was [my brother] Seth. He had decided he would make his living as pianist. The better I became, the tenser our relations grew. I looked up to him but thought that maybe I had the ability to be a better pianist, a conflict that could be most easily resolved by leaving the profession to him."

Kimmelman stopped playing the piano altogether for many years. But eventually, he was called back to it, eventually entering the annual International Competition for Outstanding Amateurs.

"Why did I start performing again? I didn’t stop to examine it. Now I realize it was a huge leap, but it seemed natural at the time. You don’t play your best without an audience. I knew that. Fear is a powerful motivator, and putting yourself before the public, whether it’s a couple of people at somebody’s house or a couple of thousand people at Carnegie Hall, forces you to concentrate and dig deep. As the saying goes, nothing focuses the mind like one’s own hanging. Performing seemed to me an inevitable step toward polishing up the music I was learning.

"But I had other motivations too. Having been in my job for a while, I was starting to feel restless. Was this going to be it for my career? I loved work but had lost the jitters that kept me going at first, and I worried about mistaking complacency for satisfaction. Complacent writers turn into hacks. The piano gave me a sense of myself apart from being a critic...

"And of course I had unfinished business. Having stopped short years ago, I wanted to find out how good I was."

He wanted to find out how good he was. He didn’t want to leave unanswered that most important question, "What if?"

That each of you has a calling, some gold within you, some gift that only you can offer the world, I have no doubt. Discovering this calling, if you have not already, will require patience. Following it will require risks. Not following it, however, will require a greater price. Find out how good you can be. Don’t leave the question "What if?" unanswered.

Prayer:

Spirit of Life,

Deep within each of us and amidst us all,

Grant to each of us the knowledge of our own deepest selves,

Grant us the courage to follow where these deeper selves call us to go,

And let us be thankful for those who will accompany us on this journey.

Benediction:

May each of you find the gold within you and may you live your life so at the end there will be no regrets. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.

Copyright 1999 by James Kubal-Komoto. All rights reserved.