This coming Sunday I am preaching on God's call - lectionary (I think!) gives the call of Samuel and in the C of E strand the calls of Philip and Nathanael.  I'm not overly fussed if I've got that wrong, it's a good theme for the start of the year anyway.

As part of the warm-up bit I am using a few of the 20th century martyrs as per Westminster Abbey to see what we know about them and their sense of call (probably not a lot really!) and am then adding on Mother Theresa as someone well known who died of natural causes!  A quick internet search on Mother Theresa was quite enlightening, revealing a faith that struggled and questioned as well as a profound sense of call.  It was from her story that I came across the idea of the 'call within the call' - not simply to be a nun, but to be the nun she was, working with the poorest of the poor in India.  Her own 'dark night' experiences never led her to deny or abandon the call which was worked out over a long life.

So, now I'm thinking about calls within calls, and various ideas are wafting through my mind.  One (rather cringe-laden) phrase is that of 'reason, season and lifetime' often applied to friendship in those gloopy emails that circulate from time to time.  Is there, within the life-long call to discipleship the potential for timebound calls - for reasons or seasons?  I am sure the answer is 'yes' - otherwise why do people move on from time to time, sensing God leading them to new things?

Another idea owes its origins more to computer programming  in the days when you had to be able to speak FORTRAN or COBOL, and the idea of 'nested do loops' (Remember them?  No?  Never mind). The outer 'do loop' would be the call to Christian disicpleship inside which other loops would be, for example 'to this role' 'in this place' 'at this time' 'for this purpose.'  How many levels of nesting, and how many nests within the outer loop may vary.  If this is as clear as mud, well either (a) you're too young to have learned to programme properly (b) you are too old to have learned to programme at all (c) you avoided computers before the advent of Windows (d) I'm talking gibberish [(e) a combination of the above!!].  Visually a series of concentric circles almost expresses this idea - at least in its simplest form.

At various times I, like many others, have had people say my (current) 'calling within a calling' is 'for such a time as this' and maybe that's true.  But I am left wondering now, as I look around the world (or at least my bit of it) what might be the voice of God 'for such a time as this' and that, I think is where I want our sermon exploration to go on Sunday.  Not the naff and predictable 'how do we hear God's voice?' or 'How many times constitutes God's call?' (where does that ridiculous notion of three come from?  Samuel was called four times!) or 'the call is to follow Jesus.'  Rather, what is the 'call within the call to follow Jesus for such a time as this, with credit crunches, rising unemployment and wars and violence across the globe?'  I can't neatly 'exposit' that from Samuel, Philip or Nathanael, but I do feel that is what the "divine niggle" is prompting me to say.