James 24:7

Sermon preached at Atlanta Christian College.  Winter Convocation, 2006.

            Thirty plus years ago, I sat where you students are sitting and wondered…

            I wondered why I was here.  Although I had grown up in a Christian church in Carrollton, Georgia, I had only recently returned to the church.  I had been away for several years playing rock and roll all over the Southeast and generally patterning my life after the Beatles. 

            In the Spring of 1971, Jesus came crashing into my life in such a way that I could do nothing but drop everything, including my senior year as a music major at West Georgia College (now the State University of West Georgia),  and come to Atlanta Christian College and pretty much start my whole college experience all over again.

            When I showed up here I was a long-haired, hippy freak…actually ACC’s first long-haired, hippy freak,  a pioneer of sorts blazing the trail for some of you I see.   Dr. Redmon, then the college President, told me the day I graduated that he almost fell out of his chair when first he laid eyes on me and learned that I had come to be a student..  Even after I started here, at least for the first semester, I continued to live off campus and secretly play music in Underground Atlanta.  Most nights I was coming in at 3:30 a.m., sleeping a bit and then creeping in like a fog into Dr. Roy McKinney’s Old Testament class at 7:30 a.m. 

            It was not too long after that first semester that I gave up the rock n roll life and moved into the dorm.  Jesus had radically changed my life.  Before Jesus I had been playing gigs in seedy night clubs, seedy frat houses, and other seedy venues.  After Jesus, I was in by 10, up by 6, and making sure to keep my room in shape.

            I did not look like, think like, or act like any of the other students here.  I certainly did not fit the image portrayed in the school’s recruitment brochures.

            When I was in your pew, I wondered why I was here.   

            I not only wondered why I was here. I wondered what God was going to do with me after I left here.  Back then, the question on my mind was this:  “What is God’s will for MY life?”  

            “What is God’s will for MY life?”

            I questioned God.  I questioned friends.  I questioned faculty.  I questioned myself.  I knew I had given myself to God as best I knew how (although I still hung back a bit whenever we sang, “Where He Leads Me I Will Follow” for fear that he lead me to one of the 4 corners of the globe and too far from home.)  I knew I wanted to serve God.  I just did not know how or where or when.

             I wanted God to tell me, flat out, as clearly as possible what he intended to do with me. 

            “Why am I here?” and “What is God’s will for my life?”

            I wonder how many of you are asking those questions today.  I wonder how many of you got up this morning, facing the beginning a new semester of study, and wondered why you are here and wondered what is it God intends to do with you when you leave this place. 

            Sometime during my years of being in college, leading a campus ministry at the University of Georgia, and teaching students in college, it struck me that all college students, and especially Christian students, often feel like trapeze artists.  You have let go of one swinging bar (the security of home, familiar friends, familiar places)  and are for a time suspended in air waiting for the next swinging bar to arrive.  And you feel the discomfort associated with being suspended in mid-air and waiting.

            The Bible has a name for that period of waiting.  The Bible calls it “the meantime”.  When the Bible speaks of that time it is usually speaking of that era between the ascension of Jesus and the time when Jesus returns and God will finally consummate all things.   We all live in the meantime but I think you feel it most intensely when you are in college having decided to leave the familiar behind and wait for the future to arrive. 

            While the meantime can be a time of excitement and joy and friends and fun…as you all know “the meantime can be a mean…time”- a time when you get your mettle tested, a time when you must ponder why you are here and where you are headed.

            I do not think that mean time is experienced any more severely than when you are genuinely seeking to answer those questions “why am I here” and “what is God’s will for my life.”

            If you are asking those questions of yourself today, I want to suggest a change of thought- one that I have found to be so helpful to me and one that I believe will be helpful to you.  But first we are going to have to do some tinkering with the questions themselves.

            First, I want you to change the second question.  The second question is “what is God’s will for my life”.  I think if you will change that question you will find an answer to it and automatically answer the first question, “Why am I here”.

            I want you to change the second question “what is God’s will for MY life” to this: “What is God’s will for God’s life?”  What is it that God wants?  What is that God is seeking to achieve?  What is God’s purpose?  What is God’s intention? 

            “What is God’s will for God’s life?”

            Now, on the surface, I know that sounds like an odd question.  But let me ask you: “Have you ever prayed the Lord’s Prayer?”  Of course you have.  And what is it that you have said when you prayed the prayer that Jesus taught us:

            “Our Father who art in heaven.  Hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

            Within the first few lines of the Lord’s prayer we are taught something very important: that God’s will, God’s reign, God’s rule is pre-eminent- that what matters in this world is that God has God’s way.

            When Jesus came preaching, his central message was this: “Repent!  The kingdom of God is at hand!”  And, I think, what he conveyed was that this God has a habit of breaking into human history and that this God is still breaking into human history because this God is moving right now toward realizing His ends, His purposes, and His intentions.

            And the Bible is full of imagery suggesting what that looks like.  It looks like “the blind receiving sight, the lame getting up and walking, the binding up of the broken-hearted, the release of the captives.”  It looks like the block walls of human enmity crashing down as God’s creatures are reconciled to God and to one another.  It looks like a community of faith wherein the interest of the other person is more important than your own; a community where each contributes to the other’s wholeness and health and shalom.  It looks like a day when there will be no more suffering, no more mourning,  where the tears are dried from the eyes of the hurting because God has made his dwelling among us. 

            You see the pre-eminent question is not “what is God’s will for MY life” but “what is God’s will for God’s life?”

            The second question follows naturally from it.  If the first question is: “what is Gods’ will for God’s life?”  the second question is “how can I give myself to help God get what God wants?”

            Do you hear what I am saying?  I am saying that God’s reign is breaking in on us, that God is moving in our history to realize God’s ends and ours is to get on board and become what Paul calls God’s “with workers.”  God’s “co-workers.” 

            You see, because of Gods’ revelation in Jesus Christ and in his word, we do know something about God.  We know God has come and is coming.  We know that God is a God with a vision of the end that He intends to realize, We know something about what end looks like.  We know that we have been called to be God’s co-workers in contributing towards those ends. 

            When we ask “What is Gods’ will for MY life” we act as if we are primary and that God is secondary.  We act as if there is this profound mystery about which we have no clues; as if there is this puzzle that we have to figure out before we can even take one step forward; as if it is somewhere out there in the distant future; as if God plays games of “hide and seek.”  So we sit and we wait and we ponder and we look and we fret and we question “why am I here” and “what is God’s will for MY life”   and we wonder what God is going to do with us tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. 

            Listen…

            God is acting today.  God is moving today.  God is making straight toward those ends that God wants to realize.  The kingdom of heaven is upon us! The reign of God is breaking in!

            I have told you what that looks like and I have told you that you have a part to play as God’s co-workers.

            Now you may ask, “Where do I begin?”          

            Well, let me ask you: do you know anyone, right here, in this room right now, who is hurting?  Do you know anyone in your residence hall, in your dorm, who is lost or about to go missing? Start there.

             Do you know of any resentments that are festering between friends?  Do you know of anyone who is throwing up barriers even as God is seeking to break them down?  Do you know anyone whose life is organized around fear rather than trust in the living God?  Do you know of any jealousy?  Any greed?  Any backbiting?  Do you know of any hostility?  Is anyone depressed?  Is anyone grieving?  Start there.

             Is anyone worried about their parent’s marriage?  Is anyone fearful for the fate of their brother and sister who just cannot seem to resist going off the deep end?  Is there any stranger standing on the outskirts of acceptability? That’s where you begin.

            Is there any comfort to be given?  Is there any peace to be made?  Is there any hand to be held?  Any hospitality to be shown?

            Here, right now, in this place and on this campus…today?

            Start there, right now, right where you are.

            When you recognize that God is moving today in our history, in your history, in your world.  When you confess that you at least have an idea of what it is that God wants for his creation.  When you step up and say “TO-DAY, Oh God, I am your with-worker”, then you will not have to wonder why you are here and you will not have to fret over that unanswerable conundrum“,What is God’s will for MY life”.

            Rather you will begin to see with new eyes that God is working in your midst and calling you to be God’s with-worker.

            The Kingdom of Heaven is upon us!  The Reign of God is breaking in!

            I implore you:   Embrace this new semester asking not “what is God’s will for MY life” but “What is God’s will for God’s life and how can I be God’s with-worker today, here in this place?”

            Amen.