My husband’s name is Russell Morris. Now if you’re of a certain generation, you don’t think of my Russell, when you hear that name, you think of the Russell Morris who sang the Johnny-Young-penned and Ian-Meldrum-produced hit song of the late 1960s, “The Real Thing”—very funky, very 60s, very mellow, very psychedelic. In fact, when I tell people my husband’s name, they often say, “You don’t mean the Russell Morris, do you?”; and my standard response has become, “No, but he’s the real thing to me.” “He’s the real thing to me.”
But, at least from the words of the song, you wouldn’t have thought “The Real Thing” was the real thing, that is, that it would be anything like a hit song in the reading. It actually only has 5 statements in the whole song:
1. “Come and see the real thing”
2. “Tryin’ hard to understand the meaning that you’ll see in me”
3. “There’s a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn’t really mean a thing”
4. “I am not seeing you”
5. “I am the real thing”
These 5 statements are repeated a number of times in succession, interspersed with the 1960s version of scat “oo mama mow-mow, oo mama mow-mow” and extending for 6 minutes—the 1960s’ equivalent of Michael Jackson’s 13 minute Thriller film clip. And perhaps it wasn’t the real thing in its original acoustic guitar version either, but by the time $10 000 AUD had been spent on studio mastering it, the song “The Real Thing” was destined to be an “Australian rock classic” and one of the limited number of Australian popular songs which has found success in the US market, particularly in the cities of Chicago and New York. In 2001, the Australiasian Performing Rights Association named “The Real Thing” as one the top 30 Australian songs of all time. It may not read like the real thing, but “The Real Thing” was and is the real thing in terms of being a hit song; and it continues to draw attention when covered by artists as diverse as Kylie Minogue and Midnight Oil; and is a must-have in regular post-mortems of Australian popular music during the end of the 20th century. Who would have thought that “The Real Thing” was the real thing? Apparently, at the time, it was just a handful of people who saw it through to the legendary status which it enjoys today.
Now as we regularly hear from pop music gurus and as we regularly witness through shows such as Australian idol, although there’s a formula for success in popular music to be followed, that formula doesn’t always guarantee that any particular song or any particular artist is destined for the success of legendary hits such as “The Real Thing”. Choosing stand-out performers and performances isn’t as simple as we’d like to think; and there are few people who can claim any record of discerning what the real thing is and where it will come from, and most of them are successful because they have had success with a few pieces out of a whole basketful that they have shepherded through the production process over a lifetime. It’s not so easy to put your hand on the real thing every time.
Which in a curious kind of way brings us to our readings for today: the reading from 2 Samuel where the people of Israel finally acknowledge David as their leader following the deaths of Saul and Jonathan and the defeat of Abner and the remnant of the House of Saul; and the reading from the Gospel of Mark where Jesus is rejected in his own hometown and subsequently sends out the Twelve to face the same possibility of rejection where they go. Both of these readings raise questions about how we discern what is real, what is acceptable, what is true; and for us, that question is not about making hit records, but about discerning the will of God. How do we and will recognise the real thing when it is in our midst or outside our door, or on the other side of the world?
Now often that question is posed for us as we consider future directions for ourselves and for our community. Certainly it is posed for us when we seek to elect representatives or leaders in our society. We know that what we like isn’t always necessarily what’s best for us. We know that the best-willed people in the world will still get it wrong sometimes; and even their best-willed intentions will have unintended consequences. And we know that we don’t have a direct line into the mind of God to know exactly what is required of us in the detail. We are not God (as much as any of us might like to wish we were). So how is it that we say we seek to discern and to follow God’s will, to travel the path of the real thing?
Christian theologian and ethicist, H. Richard Niebuhr, suggested that when the Christian community was discerning the call of God, it had to be aware of at least 4 important elements of that call on any person’s life (and particular on those who are called to the ordered ministries of the church). In The Purpose of the Church and its Ministry (1956), Niebuhr spoke firstly, of the most general and fundamental call or vocation of every Christian person: “the call to be a Christian … the call to discipleship of Jesus Christ, to hearing and doing of the Word of God, to repentance and faith, et cetera”. This is our primary vocation and it is the primary location out of which we seek to discern God’s will—the call to follow Christ.
For Niebuhr then, against this general vocation of Christ’s followers, when the specific vocation of a Christian person was being considered there were three aspects to consider. The first aspect was the “inner persuasion or experience whereby a person feels … directly summoned or invited by God to take up the work of the ministry”. Niebuhr described this as the “secret call”; and perhaps that a clue to what it’s like. God’s still small voice or silent promptings in our hearts to take up a particular yoke offered to us in the name of Christ. I’m always a bit suspicious about those who regale us most loudly about their personal call by God; and perhaps Niebuhr was too. This aspect of discerning God’s will is about tending to the personal, implicit call of God; and perhaps for our best leaders, that call is found in the secret places of their wrestling with God. We might think about the psalms of lament, of calling out to God attributed to David, the Shepherd King; and the wrestling with God by Jesus depicted in the Garden of Gethsemane and in the face of his rejection in his own hometown.
But Niebuhr was aware that a personal sense of vocation was not enough, just as the general vocation of the Christian was not enough for someone called to be a leader in Christian community. In relation to personal vocation, a “secret call” needed to be supplemented by a “providential call”, that is, by the “invitation and command to assume the work of the ministry which comes through the equipment of a person with the talents necessary for the exercise of the office and through the divine guidance of [that person’s] life by all its circumstance”. Saying that you have a call to a particular ministry and believing that you have a call to a particular ministry is not enough. In order to discern whether this perceived call is actually the call of God, attention is required to the gifts we have, the talents we exercise and to the opportunities for education and development of those raw gifts and talents to be moulded by God for God’s purposes. The story of David that we read today comes 18 chapters after Samuel anointed David as King; and 17 after the story of David’s defeat of Goliath; and in the meantime, a number of exploits and situations are recorded through which David is challenged and moulded. We may wonder what Jesus was like before he turns up being baptised by John. What does the response of his hometown suggest of the potential they did or did not see in this boy from Nazareth? And what had happened in the meantime for him to be received by so many outside his hometown as a special minister of God? What brought Jesus out of Nazareth and set him on the path to Jerusalem? And what was the purpose in sending out disciples and receiving back their reports?
But again Richard Niebuhr reminds us that the general call and the secret call and the providential call are not sufficient if we are truly to discern the call of God. The fourth aspect that requires attention is the “ecclesiastical call”—“the summons and invitation extended … by some community or institution of the Church to engage in the work of ministry”. We might also call this the corporate or the communal call. It concerns the recognition of the personal and the providential aspects of Christian vocation by the community of Christ. It is the communal call that we see very much in the story of David read today. Samuel may have anointed him; he may have defeated Goliath and been challenged by many other exploits, but it is not until this moment, when he is recognised by the people and makes a covenant with them, that David is finally declared King. The story of Jesus read together is not yet there. In that story, we still hear something of the testing of the communal call—of Jesus’ seeing how he is received in his hometown; and how his disciples are received when he sends them out. There is a long and difficult road ahead before a community affirms Jesus’ call and proclaims the most audacious political and religious claim that “Jesus is Lord!”
How do we discern the call of God? How do we know the real thing to which God is calling us? We attend to the general call to all Christians to follow Christ. We listen to the personal, secret call God plants in our hearts and minds. We heed the discernment of others in recognising our gifts and talents; and in providing opportunities for us to test and develop those strengths. And we listen to the voice of the community when it asks us to respond and recognises us for a particular role. And maybe, just maybe we will find ourselves surprised to discover that that which we weren’t quite sure was the real thing, is the real thing to God.
(H. Richard Niebuhr The Purpose of the Church and Ministry 1956 http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=407&C=152)
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