Have you felt like Samuel? Of course, you have!
Have you had an experience something like Samuel's? Of course, you have!
At some time in your life, have you felt God pressing you,
inviting you, moving you,
God in some way letting you know what God was up to and inviting you to be a part of it? Of course, you have!
I say, Of course, you have! because some such experience is why you're here!
This is, after all, a seminary!
And a seminary is a group of people gathered in an extraordinary way around that experience of being called by God.
The Greek New Testament's word for church is ekklesia,
meaning the called out ones,
so being church means being called out.
Clergy and other parish leaders often have trouble convincing their congregations that the congregations are a called out people,
because often those folks want to be a sitting down and sitting easy people.
Folks in a seminary, on the other hand, usually have a keen sense of being called,
called out by God to do something with and for God.
When I say, Of course you've had some such experience! I do mean y'all! -
Yes, students, and tonight especially the newly entering students,
but I also mean y'all: I've not been here long, but from the short time here I've gotten to know y'all enough to know this:
faculty feel called out by God to educate the next generation of church leaders,
and they are passionately committed to their students;
the staff of this place know their work as a ministry,
they feel called out to make this place work,
and they likewise are deeply committed to the students and to one another.

Returning to the new students, from the conversations I've had with you I know that you feel called.
Some of you felt God calling you long ago, and for years you've held that call at arm's length, and now, at length, you're responding to it.
Like Samuel, you've already been ministering in the temple,
and you've had many and diverse and rich ministries.
Now you sense God calling you to a different ministry for which you need the preparation of this place.
Unlike Samuel, none of you is a mere lad or lass:
No, you are adults, many of you accomplished in other careers;
many of you with families of your own, some with grown children;
many of you are well practiced in struggle and even in wrenching grief.

So I say to you now what I have said to you before:
We are honored to have you with us.
You have given up extraordinary things to be here:
fulfilling careers, closeness to relatives, friends and familiar surroundings.
Your commitment is good news for the church.
Thank you for saying yes to the call.
Thank you for inviting us to share in your response.
Your call is precious to us.
Our call is to gather around your call and help you clarify that call,
help you nourish that call,
help you strengthen that call,
and help you so expose that call to the riches of the Christian tradition and to the movement of the Holy Spirit
that you become powerfully centered in Christ's presence in your life
and powerfully equipped for what the writer to the Ephesians calls "building up the body of Christ."
But I get ahead of my story.

"My soul thirsts for you," says the psalmist tonight,
"my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water."
You may feel a paradox in your call:
in the ministry to which you feel called you will be something of a provider of spiritual sustenance,
yet you may feel you're the one who needs to be provided for.
You may be here in the fullness of your call, but you're probably also aware of how far you are from God and you're just longing to be closer, deeper and fuller with God -
you're thirsting and fainting for God.
That's good - not just good: That's essential!
Yearning for God is everything.
Yearning for God is the most authentic thing in the spiritual life.
That yearning, that sense of never knowing enough of God, never being close enough to God -
that is what holds the most promise for you in your ministry.

My prayer partner in Zimbabwe was not an Anglican,
but a former Anglican who had joined one of the African-initiated churches, this one the African Apostolic Church of Johane Marange, a prophet who received a vision in 1932 -
the Apostles walk on fire, the men are polygamists, and there are over a million Apostles in Central Africa.
Somehow John Sachikonye and I sensed in one another the possibility of a spiritual frendship,
so he invited me to pray with him early in the morning behind the big mountain at Bonda, where we lived and worked, and I said yes.
So he would come by at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, while it was still dark,
and we would go behind the mountain to pray toward the east until the sun rose - don't worry, we didn't imagine that our praying made the sun rise!
But oh what times of prayer we had in the fullness of the Spirit!
Only gradually did I realize that when John collected me at 4:30 or 5, he was not coming from his home in the village:
no, he was coming down from the mountain where he had already been at prayer since 2 or 3 in the morning.
"When I start praying at 4," he said, "I get closer to God. If I start at 3, it's a little bit closer. At 2, I get even a little bit closer."
There's a yearning for God.

I'm reminded of a prayer at eucharist composed by the great Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard:
"Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou that givest both to will and to do, that also longing when it leads us to renew the fellowship with our Saviour and Redeemer is from Thee. But when longing lays hold of us, oh, that might lay hold of the longing; when it would carry us away, that we might give ourselves up . . . So we pray for them that are assembled here, that with hearty longing they may today approach the Lord'' Table, and that when they go hence they may go with increased longing for Him, our Saviour and Redeemer."*
So rest with your longing, your hunger and thirst for God.
Yes, this community will seek to assuage it,
but if what we do is truly centered in Christ Jesus our common life will leave you with a lifelong hunger and thirst for more, and more and more of God.

Do not imagine that your call to ministry comes at just any old time,
that the year 2002 is just any old year,
that you will go from here to any old parish and minister there in any old way.
No, you come to this place in a time of crisis in the church and the world.

"When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" -
Jesus beheld a people in crisis:
a crisis of poverty,
a crisis of disparities between the haves and the have-nots,
a crisis of religious and social classism in Jewish society,
a crisis of military occupation by an imperial power,
a crisis of maintaining cultural integrity in the cosmopolitan currents of the Mediterranean world.
Jesus was born into these crises, he read the times, and in the midst of these crises he proclaimed that God was doing a new thing that he called the Kingdom of God:
God was breaking into the human story in Jesus and calling people to a new way of life where the old distinctions were to mean nothing and where God and a way of mercy and justice were to be accessible to all.
"Jesus went about all the cities and villages," says Matthew, "proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness" -
Jesus' proclamation was a crisis proclamation for a time of crisis.

Obviously, our time is one of crisis
- it has been such for a long time, but we're more aware of it now since last year:
the crisis of terrorism not only here but in many parts of the world,
the crisis of the war on terrorism,
the crisis of rising militarism throughout the world,
a crisis in Muslim-Christian relations, but also deteriorating relations between religions in many parts of the world, most notably India, the far Pacific and northern Africa,
the crisis of atrociously widening gaps between the rich and the poor, both in the USA and throughout the world,
the many economic and cultural crises of globalization,
the crisis of the AIDS pandemic, especially in Africa,
the crisis of planet earth that the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development is seeking to address.
There are the crises of the churches:
the crisis of sexuality as our churches struggle to clarify God's will,
the crisis of our churches' lack of appeal to young people and young leaders,
the crisis of integrity as our churches have felt the percussive impact of this year's sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.

Yes, every age has its crises.
I cite these not to induce a grandiose sense of urgency but to say this:
To be a Christian is to see the crises and take them to heart,
to see the crises from the standpoint of Jesus' proclamation of the Reign of God.
As you here grow in your call and nourish yourself in the Spirit of Christ,
I enjoin you also to relate your call to what I am calling the world crisis -
the wounds that cry for healing,
the anguish that pleads for solace,
the humiliation that demands justice,
the outrage that prompts bellows of rage.
The leadership to which you are called is not just hand-holding
but a leadership of vision and proclamation,
a leadership of prophecy and justice.
"The harvest is plentiful," said Jesus, but the laborers are few."
Jesus and the churches need you, dear theologues.

We're glad you're here in this environment,
where we're growing in our commitment to equip you for ministry in the call and the crises:
a community serious about the multicultural context of life and ministry,
a place committed to mission both in the USA and globally.
My own focii for the coming year are three-fold:
spirituality, as we grow in our life of prayer and worship together;
leadership, as we grow in focusing on the leadership challenges of ministry;
mission, as we grow in our vision for what God is up to today in the whole human story throughout God's whole and cherished world.

So come.
Come and pray.
Come and study.
Come and talk.
Come and argue.
Come and grow.
Come and worship.
Come and become.
Welcome to the journey!

* Perry D. LeFevre, ed., The Prayers of Kierkegaard (Chicago, Cambridge and Toronto: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 114.