When I started to share with my family that I was discerning a call to ministry and was considering going to seminary, folks on my dad’s side of the family wanted to tell me about my Great Uncle John, who had been a Lutheran minister in Minnesota. As the story goes, he had been a farmer, had grown up on a farm (like everyone of that generation on both sides of my family). But as a young man John started feel like there was something of out of place about his life, something deep that was unsettled and unfulfilled in his soul.

He was someone with a deep faith, so he would pray about this.

One day John was out in the fields on his tractor, and he was feeling that uneasy feeling in his soul, and he was saying, “God, what do you want from me?”

And then, for some reason, he just stopped the tractor and he turned off the motor. And he looked up at the sky.

It was midafternoon and the sky was a clear blue, and the clouds were these vaulting, billowing, tremendous, luminous bodies lit by the sun. This feeling of wonder came over him. And then he noticed that the clouds around the sun had formed in this strange and wondrous way. One cloud was the shape of the letter “P.” And the other cloud was the shape of the letter “C.”

And John leapt off his tractor and fell to his knees: “Preach Christ! Preach Christ! That’s it! Yes, God, yes! I’m going to preach Christ.”

So, he went off to seminary. And he became a Lutheran minister in the area.

Now, from all that I’ve heard my great uncle John was a very kindly man. And he became a beloved and dedicated pastor for generations of folks in this agricultural region in Central Minnesota.

In fact, he was so beloved that they say everyone in the county came to call him “Uncle John.” My dad growing up was kind of confused about how big his family was, you know, because he seemed to have cousins everywhere calling his Uncle John “Uncle John”. He was kind of like everyone’s uncle.

The one thing was that, as a preacher, it was just understood that Uncle John, bless his soul, was just … well, you know Minnesotans are nice, they came to church and sat through his sermons, but it was just known that dear Pastor Uncle John when he was up there in the pulpit could drone on and on and on.

Some people would even say to each other, with a wink, “You know how Uncle John got his call when he saw the clouds in the heavens form ‘P’ and ‘C’? Maybe God was just telling him to plant corn.”

***

I love the poet Carl Sandburg. Again, I’m showing my Swedish-American Upper Midwest agricultural roots. Carl Sandburg: wry and wise, sing-song, salt of the earth, humane and plainspoken poet of the people.

One day I was reading through a book of his, “The People, Yes.” It’s a book of poems about the wide scope of the humanity spread from sea to sea, especailly the salt of the earth. The book is sprinkled and peppered with little folk sayings and jokes and aphorisms Sandburg had picked up on his travels through the rural America of the early 1900s.

In the middle of that book I stumbled on a little story about a farmer who was out plowing his fields and looked up and saw the clouds forming a “P” and a “C.” He thought it was God telling him to “Preach Christ.” But after he went to seminary it turned out he was a lousy preacher and everyone said that God was telling him to “Plant Corn,” not “Preach Christ.”

I almost fell out of my chair. It was one of those experiences of having your sense of reality slip out from underneath you. That was my Great Uncle John’s story! … but apparently not! What’s going on!

I told my dad and my aunt and uncle, and they were perplexed.
            Could it be that Uncle John’s story became told around the region and made its way to Carl Sandburg’s ears? No, the timing doesn’t work out – Sandburg’s book would have come before Uncle John’s rambling sermons.

What happened?

What I suspect is that “Preach Christ Clouds” story was not in fact Uncle John’s call story. Instead it was a joke that circulated around through churches and farming communities in the Midwest. And when it came to Uncle John, this beloved pastor but perhaps boring preacher, some folks in the county starting to tell that joke in reference to him, in a tongue-in-cheek teasing kind of way. My dad and aunt and uncle heard it as kids and took it to be actually true. Maybe other folks also starting telling the story that way. But it wasn’t actually true.

***

One of the more important things we do as people of faith is called discernment. According to our faith God is at work in our lives and in the world – in the United Church of Christ especially we like to say, “God is still speaking” – but it’s up to us to discern how that is, what God is calling us to, where we are being led, what the right thing to do is, what’s wrong, what’s true and what’s false.

How do we read the signs for our lives? How we sort out the stories that other’s tell about God and themselves and each other and this world?

The question is especially important because there apparently are all kinds of people who are more than happy to confidently proclaim that God has spoken to them, that God is speaking through them, to deliver this or that a proclamation or warning. Especially in charismatic communities, there can be the expectation that faithful people experience direct and specific messages from God. People pray for God to speak through them and are confident that what happens next has indeed been delivered by the Holy Spirit, as long as someone can find some kind of snippet from scripture to support it. There is good that has come of this, for sure, but also plenty of so-called prophetic declarations that the world is going to end on this or that a date or that this or that a nation or political leader is specially anointed by God for whatever self-serving agenda. There is not a culture of humility and good humor about it, but judgment and self-righteousness and lack of moral accountability for the damages. All of this can turn off a lot of people to the idea that “God is still speaking.”

Jesus himself addressed this problem, and, I’m happy to report, had some wise and helpful guidance. He had what I would call a spiritually and morally pragmatic approach.

Jesus said that we are going to find that all kinds of people are going to say “Lord” this and “Lord” that – that may even be ourselves. We can sort out the truth and authenticity and falsehood of it by asking “What kind of fruits does it produce?” It is “By our fruits that we are known,” Jesus famously said.

What kind of fruits? Jesus said, fruits that show the kind of living faith in the living God that he has been teaching. So we’re talking about fruits like:

Loving God with one’s all our heart, mind, body, soul, and selves. And loving our neighbor as our selves. Being merciful as our God is merciful. Having loving kindness as our God has loving kindness. Being free from the control of anger, and of greed, and of lust, and of petty judgment. Having a heart that cares for the “least of these,” those who are suffering, especially from the neglect of their society. Humility to be accountable to the wrongs one has done, willingness come to God for forgiveness and to be made new. Newness of life, fullness of life.

“I have come that they may have life,” Jesus said, “and life abundantly.”

All of these give us some helpful questions to ask in our discernment about how God may be speaking, or not.

The core of it, I think can be summed up by Jesus’ summary of the wisdom of his ancestors:

Does this help me to grow in that love? Grow in my love for God? Grow in my love for others? Grow in the love God has for me, and for you, and for all people and all creation? Does this help me, as the Prophet Micah put it, walk more humbly with my God, and act more justly while loving mercy more deeply? Mercy for the flawed and faulty and often confused creatures we so often are, especially before the glory of God.

These questions can help us when we are feeling that unsettledness in our soul, that deep soul yearning, need for deeper fulfillment, and when we stop what we’re doing and call out to the heavens, hoping perhaps for some sign.

This is about nothing less than a process of transformation in our souls, transformation in the midst of a holiness and glory far beyond ourselves.

The Reality of God is beyond anyone’s understanding. It is beyond any signs we can try to interpret or tell.

It is very important to be clear that according to the wisdom of our faith, the One Whom we call on when we use this little human word, “God,” is One Whose holiness and glory and infinite Being is beyond any being we can name or even conceive – Being beyond being, Sacred Source beyond all that ever was or is or shall be, glory beyond glory …

God beyond “God,” God beyond ‘God beyond “God,”’ God beyond “God beyond ‘God beyond “God”’”… … …

Yet we know the Infinite is also Intimate; the Transcendent, Imminent. For us as Christians through Christ we know that God joins us in the human condition, that we are embraced as we are, at the core of our beings, by nothing less than the cosmic consciousness of the Holy Universal Creator.

Our faith is that God can indeed be calling us, speaking to us, working on us and through us, to call out to God from the depths of our souls, and receive the overabundant Glory of God that fills and fulfills our deepest needs and spills beyond the boundaries of our petty selves, calling us, according to our gifts, to lives of love and service.

It is guaranteed we are not going to be perfect in how we do all that, limited and flawed and humble that we are. It is guaranteed that we are not going to be perfect in how we interpret the signs and hear and heed the call from our God – limited and confused as our understanding is, beyond the bounds of our minds as the Reality of God truly is. 

So we do our best, and try to keep it real and keep it humble and keep it earnest … and good humored.

I have come to enjoy the fuller picture of my Great Uncle John and the story that was told about him. I have no doubt he genuinely responded to a real call on his life, however it actually happened, that helped him grow into being a beloved “Uncle John,” for an entire county, despite his all-too-human shortcomings. (At this point you may be worrying I’ve inherited the shortcoming for long-winded sermonizing.) I also appreciate the lesson of the story mis-attributed to him, that we need to take care to discern the truthfulness of things.

And I have no doubt that despite whatever confusion or incompleteness – or confidence – you all may be feeling, you each are called to beautiful and human ways of living into and living out of God’s love.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, October 26, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.