Today is called World Communion Sunday. I’m not sure who called it that, but I am calling for a new nuance to it: on this Sunday of the year when Christians all over the planet meditate upon our common calling to salvation in Jesus Christ, let us move on to meditate upon our common calling to vocation in Jesus Christ. The words of the Apostle Paul should guide us: … join me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace. Did you hear it, or did it slip right past you? God—who saved us AND called us!

Baptists have done a consistent job of emphasizing the saved part. We call people to accept the grace of God, to receive forgiveness of their sins, to answer the call to put their faith in Jesus Christ. We start when they are young, and we look forward to every child and adult that walks the aisle to make a profession of faith when the Holy Spirit makes it plain enough to that salvation is God’s gift for each of us and for all of us. We make a point that the gift begs to be received, that salvation commands response. We celebrate that when a person wades into the waters of baptism and identifies with the story of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. We offer an invitation to accept the gift of salvation at the end of every worship service, and we call one another over and over again never to take salvation for granted.

When we gather at the Lord’s Table, we reflect on the communion we share with God and with one another in this great salvation community of the gospel. But is that all there is to it? Is the point only to remind ourselves that we are among the saved? What does our salvation imply if not a new vocation? We are called as well as saved; we have a holy calling not just to be but also to do. This is a holy calling, Paul says. It is holy because it comes from the Holy One himself and because it seeks to make everything that comes from it holy, too.

Before I take you to vocation for the rest of the sermon, let me pause for a Baptist moment and put the question of salvation to you first. I am quite sure there are some of you sitting in this room today that don’t know who you really are. I don’t mean that you have lost your mind and forgotten your name. I don’t mean that you have lost your way and forgotten where you came from. But in a way, I do mean just those things. Some of you have lost the sense that God has dreamt of you since before the ages began, as Paul says to Timothy. You were fearfully and wonderfully made, as the psalmist put it. You were not an accident of birth; you were the purposeful work of a skilled artist. God did not allow you to come into the world as a flawed and fated sinner and only as an afterthought sent Jesus to rescue you from the trash heap of history. God made you, and called you good, and saw to your salvation in Jesus Christ before you even needed it.

If you have never heard this good news in your bones, if you have never let the truth of it sink into your soul, if you have never immersed yourself in the redeeming life of Christ, answer that call to salvation today. Say yes to the God who has been saying yes to you before you knew there was a you.

But once you do, remember that the call to salvation is also a call to vocation. When I touch salt to the lips of a person who has just been immersed, and when I hand a votive to that wet sinner-saint soaked now in the Spirit, that points beyond salvation to vocation. Go now to love and serve the Lord. This is the beginning of your ministry in the world as a saved person. You can stop worrying about your salvation and get on with the matter of your vocation.

Robert Benson is a good friend of this church. An Episcopal laymen, Benson writes about the spiritual life in beautiful ways. In his first and favorite book, entitled Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, he talks about his bouts with depression and his concern over his salvation. The breakthrough came for him when he realized that salvation was truly a gift and not an achievement, that once given, it was not going to be taken back. God has a dream for each of us, and we live between that dream and its coming true. The holy calling we live, we live between that dream of God and the coming true of it in our lives.

Our holy calling is to accept that we have been dispatched here for a reason. That we each of us and all of us have something to do for God and the world, and that that something is nothing foreign to our making. It is how and why we are made.

Consider the odd little teaching of Jesus to his apostles. The Twelve want Jesus to increase their faith, presumably so that they can do great things for God with their larger faith. They are just carrying over the lie of this world into the spiritual world—the lie that size matters. Jesus tells them that faith the size of a mustard seed is enough to move mountains and transplant a mulberry tree. It’s not how large your faith is, Jesus says; it’s how you use what faith you have.

Then he illustrates that by the story of the slave who tends the field and cooks the meal and serves his master without regard for when he eats or what his standing is. It’s enough for him to do what he has done, because that is who he is. He has acted according to his nature.

And this is true for every one of us who seeks to understand how to answer our holy calling to serve the Lord. We ought to expect that what God calls us to do will be consistent with who God calls us to be. When you find your calling, you ought to be able to say about your work something more than just that this is the work you have chosen. You ought to be able to say that in some mysterious way, this is the work that has chosen you.

We say this in the Shire with our pastoral residents all the time. When we are called away from our schedules to attend to something or someone we hadn’t planned on, this loss of personal sovereignty is a small suffering of sorts for the sake of the gospel. We have a phrase we use in those moments to remind ourselves: This is what we do. But it is not a burden to us, because our calling matches our nature. This is what we do because this is who we are. We cannot imagine doing something else because we cannot imagine being someone else.

What about you? Do you have a sense that your life is connected both to the purpose and grace of God for you and to your very created nature? It may be that some of you are made for the church ministry as a full-time vocation. If you have any stirring in you about that, pay attention to the Spirit and pursue discernment about it. For any young people who are curious, let me just say that this is a wonderful and rewarding life, if God is calling you to it. But for others it might take a simple shift in approach to the way you are living or making a living already.

Kim and Cameron had an unfortunate e-mail exchange this week. Seems Kim got an e-mail from the online photography site Pictage that Cameron had ordered numerous photographs from her wedding and had them shipped special delivery. So here’s the exchange … Kim: The purpose of the CD is so you don’t have to spend $$ on pics. We’ve already spent so much!  78.00?  Shipping of 15 more and put a rush on it? What’s the deal there?  Sorry but just confused. Mom (hard not to act like one even if your daughter is married). See, it’s just her nature to be nosy … I mean, helpful.

Okay, that is kinda funny, especially since it’s at Kim’s expense. Being a mom can be a holy calling, but of course it is a calling with boundaries. What if, after a child is married, that same maternal makeup is directed toward caring for other children for the sake of the world? I told you last week about Kim’s mentoring commitment with a local elementary school child, and she teaches one-year-old kids in our Sunday school, too.

But what about your calling? Do you sense that what you do grows out of who you are, and that all of that is directed toward serving the world for the sake of the gospel?

We lost one of our ushers and deacons a few weeks ago. Willard Bishop was one of our cherished saints. He was a shoe salesman all his life. And he took great umbrage when he heard a fundamentalist preacher once say that if God had not called him to preach the gospel, he might as well be selling shoes. Well, Willard believed that God had called him to preach the gospel, so to speak, by selling shoes.

In 1951 Willard was sent to Mobile, Alabama, to run the children’s shoe department at a major department store. Shortly after arriving, he noticed something he could not live with: black people were not allowed to try on shoes in the department with whites. So Willard called his sales force together and explained that from then on that would change, that black people’s money was the same green as white people’s money. One woman objected, and Willard assured her that her final paycheck would be ready for her by the end of the day. By the end of the day she had accepted his order.

But Willard suddenly realized he had better tell the store owners what he had done. He called upstairs, and the manager said to come right up. Willard told the man what he had done and how he could not work in a store with that policy, that it was wrong. The man sat in silence, staring at him for what seem like forever. Willard was unnerved, thinking about his young wife and infant child. And the man spoke: You have only done what I lacked the courage to do myself. I will abide by your decision.

Well, the word spread quickly in the black community. The store sold more shoes to black customers, and it didn’t lose white business because it had the best shoes. And within weeks, every shoe store in Mobile was forced to change its policy in order to stay competitive.

It wasn’t a politician or a preacher who brought about that gospel change; it was a shoe salesman who knew that his vocation was more than selling shoes—it was serving his Lord. It’s just who he was. And it was a holy calling.