William Muehl has a bone to pick with ministers. Muehl is on the faculty of YaleDivinitySchool, and he has spent many years teaching people who are about to become ministers and those who are already ministers. William Muehl is well acquainted with ministers, and he has a complaint.

What bothers Professor Muehl is what he sees as a widespread tendency among ministers to do some romantic editorial work on the nature of Christian calling. To hear most ministers talk, claims Muehl, God calls people only in moments of theatrical intensity. Someone, for example, is reading a theological book when, suddenly, a shaft of light falls upon a penetrating passage and scales fall from the reader's eyes. Or a hillside communion service at a summer church camp begins to glow with all the luminosity and power of the Upper Room. The ministerial version of Christian calling almost always involves a moment of high drama.

Muehl does not doubt that such moments do occur, but he does doubt that they occur as often and as predictably as some ministers say they do. Muehl thinks many ministers are guilty of dressing up these events in "Damascus Road" garb, which is unfortunate since most people come to faith, he says, in ways that are far more gritty and down-to-earth. They were forced into Sunday church school by their parents, or found the local church youth group to be a reliable way to spice up an otherwise dull weekend, or discovered that the sanctuary could be entered on the arm of an attractive member of the opposite sex. "These ways seem to have at least one thing in common," states Muehl. "They are not nearly as dramatic and intellectually impressive as people feel a genuine religious experience ought to be."'

One of the reasons which prompts Muehl to complain is his own experience of call. He was trained as an attorney and discovered, in the law school's moot court, that he was an exceptionally effective trial lawyer. He won his cases, for the most part, but the emotional stress of doing so caused him to develop a duodenal ulcer. After treating him for several gastric episodes, one of the health service physicians made a dire prediction. "Muehl," he said, "if you really undertake a career in the law, you will probably be rich by the age of forty. The only trouble is that you will be dead by the age of thirty."

Hearing this, Muehl left the field of law and joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School. Surrounded there by colleagues who had come to their work in response to a genuine sense of calling, Muehl soon began to doubt that he had experienced a real call, so he approached another faculty member, the ethicist H. Richard Neibuhr, with his concern. Neibuhr puffed on his pipe, laughed gently, and responded, "What does it take to make up a 'call' for you, Muehl? What you had planned to do with your life was quite literally eating you up inside, driving you . . . to consider alternatives. I can't imagine a better call outside the Bible."

What does it take to make up a "call" for you? That's an intriguing question, and one which lies at the heart of today's passage from the Gospel of John.