LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2004, Page 95

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CONVENTION BIBLE STUDIES
and gentleness, the excellencies of Him who has called us
out of darkness into His marvelous light. “For this reason,”
says Luther, “God lets us live: that we may bring other people to faith as He has done for us.” That brings us to the
next connection: the connection between my mission and
my God-given vocation or vocations.

II. My Mission and Christian Vocation
In the divine worship and fellowship of the Christian
congregation, God hides Himself in, with, and under ordinary water and words and bread and wine, to accomplish
His extraordinary work of creating and strengthening faith.
“But there is another place where God is hidden,” says Dr.
Gene Veith in his book The Spirituality of the Cross. He is
also hidden “in everyday life.” “The ordinary routine of
making a living, going shopping, being a good citizen, and
spending time with one’s family, are spheres in which God
is at work, through human means. Luther described the
various occupations—parenthood, farming, laborers, soldiers, judges, retailers, and the like—as all being ‘masks of
God’ ”—ways in which God hides Himself in order to carry
out His work in the world.9
For most people today, “spirituality” means trying to
climb some ladder to heaven or participate in some mystical experience. “In [Luther’s] doctrine of vocation, spirituality is brought down to earth to transfigure our practical,
everyday life.”10 Of course, Luther didn’t “invent” the doctrine of vocation. He simply discovered it in the Bible—in
places like 1 Peter. These struggling, suffering saints to
whom Peter was writing must have been sorely tempted to
engage in an Amish-like retreat from an evil, hostile world.
But Peter says: No—stay where you are, stay right where
God has placed you out there in the world, and transform
those ordinary places into sacred spaces by using them to
exercise and advertise the kindness and beauty and graciousness of your beautiful Savior.
One of my favorite sections of C. F. W. Walther’s classic
work Law and Gospel is his exhortation to seminarians eagerly awaiting their first call. “Dear friends,” he says,
“when a place has been assigned to a Lutheran candidate of
theology where he is to discharge the office of a Lutheran
minister, that place ought to be to him the dearest, most
beautiful, and most precious spot on earth. He should be
unwilling to exchange it for a kingdom. Whether it is in a
metropolis or in a small town, on a bleak prairie or in a
clearing in the forest, in a flourishing settlement or in a
desert, to him it should be a miniature paradise. Do not the
blessed angels descend from heaven with great joy whenever the Father in heaven sends them to minister to those
who are to be heirs of salvation? Why, then, should we poor
sinners be unwilling to hurry after them with great joy to
any place where we can lead other people . . . to salvation?”11
Exactly half of you serving as delegates to this convention do not have a divine call to serve as a pastor or professional church worker. But you do have a divine calling to
serve in a variety of Christian vocations, each of which can
also serve as a missionary outpost for that high priestly
calling of 1 Peter 2:9. “Through holy baptism,” says
Walther, “every Christian has been consecrated, ordained

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and installed into the ministry to teach, admonish and comfort his neighbor. Through holy baptism each Christian has
obtained not only the authority, power and right but also
the high, holy obligation . . . of rousing himself to care and
to help so that others may be brought to Christ.” “It is certainly true,” Walther hastens to add, “that not everyone is a
pastor or bishop in the congregation.” “But just as in the
construction of a church building many workers are needed,
not only the foreman who organizes and supervises the
whole job, so also, in the construction of the invisible
church, not only the called ministers of Christ do the work,
but rather all Christians must lend a hand.”12 Whether it’s
a crowded cubicle in a downtown office building, a loud and
dusty construction site, a Lutheran school classroom or a
public school playground, a military barracks in Iraq, a
cornfield in Iowa, a kitchen or laundry room in suburban
St. Louis—each one of these places can become for us “a
miniature paradise,” “the dearest, most beautiful, most precious spot on earth,” when we offer them up to God as
places in which and through which He can use us to display and declare the excellencies of Him who called us out
of darkness into His marvelous light.
About nine months ago I got a phone call from a woman
in California who said she had some questions about The
Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Our church had attracted her attention because of an article she found on the
Internet that talked about our Synod’s strong and clear position on the issue of homosexuality. The reason this issue
was so important to her, I learned, was that for years prior
to her conversion to Christianity, she had been immersed
in a homosexual lifestyle that left her, in her own words,
“hurting, depressed, violent, confused, promiscuous, agoraphobic, and very suicidal, convinced that life was meaningless.” After our conversation, she sent me an eight-page email detailing the story of her journey to faith, which she
gave me permission to share with others who might find it
meaningful. At the heart of that incredible story are some
elements of astonishing simplicity. “There was a man in my
office,” she writes, “who had given me a Christmas card
earlier in the year. He was a very kind man, different from
his colleagues—this was a very high-pressure work environment, yet he seemed so peaceful.” In her desperation,
she asked him about that Christmas card one day. He took
her to lunch, and “over tuna fish sandwiches,” she writes,
he shared the simple Gospel: we’re all sinners, God loves
us, Jesus died for us. What was her reaction? “Well,” she
says, “I was so offended—who does this guy think he is,
telling me I’m a sinner.” But he gave her a New Testament,
eventually she began to read it and talk to him about it,
and finally the Gospel broke through. Her search for a
Gospel-centered church eventually led her to The Lutheran
Church—Missouri Synod, and I can’t tell you how excited
she was (after a lot of disappointing church-shopping) to
discover a church that refused to compromise one iota of
the truth of God’s Word and at the same time treasured the
precious Gospel as the center of that Word.
In the context of this discussion of Christian vocation, I
want to highlight one simple point. The initial “critical
event(s)” that God used to deliver this woman from sin and
Satan and everlasting condemnation did not take place in a
2004 Convention Proceedings