The epistle for today from the opening verses of chapter four of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians challenges each of us to build up our Christian lives—in St. Paul’s words: “Walk worthy of the calling to which you were called.” When St. Paul refers to a “calling” he does not mean consider becoming a priest or a nun. On the contrary, the challenge before each of us has three stages. Focus on the Lord; find your calling and live it.

I am now 76 years old. I am growing old, but I am also still growing up—growing in knowledge of myself as a human being and as a Christian. My experience is that if I wish to find my own calling in life and to live it, I must first focus on the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me try to explain how each of us, whether we are young or old, might in our own ways focus on the Lord.

The verb “to focus” means to concentrate on something, to direct our prayer and energy toward a particular goal. The noun “focus” refers to the point at which light rays come together in such a way that the image is sharp—that you can see the picture really well. Now, that’s the primary goal of this sermon today—to help each of us see the picture of our own lives really well, to consider the question: How can I find and grow into my own calling as an Orthodox Christian? Our pretend scientist-in-residence, Father Gregory, is going to talk now to both children and adults about how to focus.

Let’s look at the meaning of the noun “focus” in geology, where the focus of an earthquake is the centre of the earthquake—the point where the fracture of the earth begins underground and radiates up to shake up many buildings and roads and structures above the ground. With a big earthquake, a lot of buildings can fall down and people can be killed unless the buildings are well constructed and able to withstand the shock of a major earthquake. How then can we build our lives so that we are ready for the problems we are going to face? How can we make ourselves ready to face the challenges of life especially when we do not know precisely when and where those challenges will occur, when the earthquake will happen at a particular place or with a particular person or in a particular job? My wife Sylvia has suggested jokingly that we just ignore the possibility of an earthquake in our lives. Indeed, that is precisely what I sometimes do—ignore the possibility of a major change in how I pray or how I live as a Christian.

However, St. Paul takes a different approach. According to the book of Acts, Chapter 28, when St. Paul came to Rome, he was placed under house arrest for two years. This gave him time to preach and teach and write, but he was still being guarded by a Roman soldier all that time and was unable to leave his house. Just imagine not being able to leave your house for two years! That would indeed be an earthquake in any life, confronting you with having to stay at home all the time. The impact on St. Paul was to think of others and to urge us, as I have said to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love.” St. Paul did not presume to know the precise calling of those whom he saw and those to whom he preached and wrote. He left the decision of the precise personal calling to the free will and prayer of each person, so as to grow into a full relationship to Christ.

St. Paul did offer some important further advice. He wrote in this epistle for today from the fourth chapter of Ephesians that “there is one body and one Spirit.” Those words are open to different interpretations. “One body and one Spirit”, preached St. Jerome in the fourth century, “can be taken most simply to mean the one body of Christ, which is the Church. Or it could refer to the humanity of the Lord, which he assumed from the Virgin.” However, St. Jerome proposed, and I quote, that “one body can also refer to life [itself] and the works that are called in Greek, ‘the practical life’” which he “distinguished from the oneness of the Spirit in the heart that finds its unity in a deep and abiding prayer life.” St. Jerome suggests that the reference of St. Paul to “one body” stands for our practical lives as Christians, while the reference to “one Spirit” refers to the unity with God that can be found in mystical prayer. Surely, it is good in all of our lives to be aware of the needs of our bodies as well as the help of the Holy Spirit that dwells within each of us. We each have a practical life and a mystical life.

In the last line of today’s epistle, St. Paul’s reminds us that “to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” The fourth century Orthodox theologian Marius Victorinus reflected: “Grace has been given to each of us according to the measure in which Christ grants it. Since therefore different people have different gifts there is no cause for envy or refusal. One should not grieve over what another [person] has, nor should any[one] refuse to give what grace he has received. . . . We should all embrace one another in love. . . . ”

A few years ago I heard a headmaster of a Christian school in Norfolk tell his pupils that their task at school was to find out what they were good at and to work to improve that talent; and at the same time to find out what other pupils were good at and to help them to improve their talents. However, in many of the same words as that fourth century Orthodox theologian, the headmaster pointed out that each of us receive different gifts; and we should not become upset because someone else was better at some particular task than we were. As Christians, we all need to support and to help each other find God’s will for our own very different and unique lives.

All of us are works in progress, growing in human competence, growing in the experience of divine grace and growing in our ability to find and complete our callings from God. I have been immensely encouraged by the words of St. Gregory the Great who said: “I have appointed you for grace. I have planted you to go willingly and [to] bring forth fruit by your works. I have said that you should go willingly,” said St. Gregory the Great, “[because] to will to do something is already to go in your heart. . . Your fruit is to endure. . . What we do for eternal life remains even after death. Let us work for the fruit that endures.” In other words, when we decide to serve the Lord Jesus Christ, when we “will,” when we decide to grow as Christians in our prayer lives and in our service to others that decision that we each make in our minds is, as St. Gregory the Great says, already in our hearts. We move from earthly time to eternal time. Our faith in Christ places in our hearts what we desire in our minds. Therefore, with the guidance and the calmness and the confidence that we receive from the Holy Spirit as we find and live out our callings, we can each bring forth “the fruit that endures.”

And so we ascribe as is justly due all might, majesty, dominion, power and praise to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen

Deacon Emmanuel Kahn