The Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Jonah 3:1-5, 10Psalm 62: 6-14
1 Corinthians 7: 29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Since I was a member of the diocesan
Commission on Ministry for the past seven years, I have talked and heard a lot about
“call.” At first glance, our call stories seem to follow Jonah’s pattern. God
singles us out and calls us to perform some task—to preach or to teach, to serve
the poor or to comfort the sick. It can be a job to which we are powerfully
drawn, yet it is almost always a job that will turn our lives upside down in scary
ways. We might have to move, or give away money, or social standing, or
possessions. Often, we run from this call, like Jonah, getting as far away from
God’s annoying voice as we can. Of course, since no one can run from God, we
eventually end up over our heads in some tumultuous sea, or cooling our heels
in the noxious belly of a metaphorical fish somewhere, tossing and turning until
we figure out that we had better obey the voice.
Call—Refusal—Flight—Repentance—Submission. That’s the pattern that comes
through the clergy narratives that I used to hear, over and over again.
Not surprisingly, that’s also the
pattern that we preach to you guys in the pews: “Don’t you hear God’s voice
nudging you to give of your many gifts? There’s a job out here in the church or
in the world that God wants you to do. You can’t run from it; eventually it
will catch up with you.” With this understanding of call so ingrained in our minds,
we often don’t know what to do with Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John in
today’s Gospel. “Wow,” we marvel. “Look at those faith-filled disciples. They
don’t run from God’s call like I do. They don’t even have to think about it.
They hear Jesus’ invitation, and immediately
they give up their jobs and their families and take off with him. I could
never do that. I’m much more like Jonah.”
That’s what I thought, too, when I
first started reflecting on this week’s Gospel. “Did I ever make a huge
life-change without running away first?” I wondered. And then it hit me. Yes, I
did! And it wasn’t my call to ordination! Yes, once I was just like those
disciples, throwing down their nets and hitting the road with Jesus. You see,
when I was 21 years old, I went to France to live for a year at a French
Protestant seminary. I was just supposed to stay and do some research in church
history—just for the school year--before coming back home and going to grad
school. But one day, after I had been there about 5 months, I was walking back
to the seminary from town, and I suddenly decided to stay.
The story that
I usually tell people is that I fell in love with my New Testament professor. I
got engaged. That’s why I stayed. It makes for a dramatically romantic and even
shocking story, but that’s not really all that happened. After all, my fiancé
could have come back with me to the US. What happened was that I had entered
into a new world in France, a world that I wanted to make my own. I had lived
for 21 years in a very narrow world, a safe world, but a sad and confining one.
It was all about pleasing other people, following the rules, working, doing
what was expected. Suddenly, across the ocean in France, I found freedom: the
freedom of expressing myself in a new language, the freedom to be remade from
the inside out in a new culture. I found love, but I also found community—the
close-knit community of the French Reformed Church. In the seminary dorm, I
found friendship with men and women from countries all over the world, and I
learned for the first time how God was working in those countries for justice,
how the church was working in those countries to fight poverty and disease. I
wanted to be a part of that world of limitless horizons and goodness: that
world of freedom, love, and transformation. It’s hard to describe how I changed.
Almost overnight, my life in the United States didn’t matter anymore. My family
and friends, my old career aspirations …. None of it mattered. I had glimpsed
something better. Something that I knew I had to join, or wither and die.
That world of
new horizons, I believe, is what Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John saw in
Jesus of Nazareth. They didn’t hear a call to do some difficult and annoying task. They caught a glimpse of God in Jesus’ eyes. They saw the immediacy of
God’s reign of love and freedom and transformation in Jesus’ words and deeds.
And nothing was going to keep them from holding on to what they saw. They saw the
old oppressive world of fishing to provide food for Roman tables, as the
emptiness that it was. They didn’t join Jesus to become brave and successful
Fishers for People. They entered into Jesus’ world simply because they found life
and joy there, and, stepping over the threshold into God’s Kingdom, their lives
and their work were transformed.
Was it easier
for the disciples, perhaps, to recognize the Good News in the physical person
of Jesus Christ than it is for us 21st-century people, dependent on
Scripture and the Holy Spirit? I’m not so sure. What I do know is that, as
Christ’s Body in the world, the Church is supposed to be the community that
calls us all into God’s amazing new life. The Church is supposed to be the
place of life, love, mercy, and joy so wonderful that frightened 21-year-olds,
hope-starved workers, jaded elders, and thirsty, starving travelers of all
kinds will want the joy and love that we have. They will want it so badly that
they will put their burdens down and join us. Our “call” is not something that God is mainly
offering to people who want to be ordained. Our call is whispered into the ears of each one
of us at our baptism, as we—often nothing more than helpless little
babies—are drawn across the threshold of a new world and made into fishers of
people. So often, people fall in love with God through the Church and think
that means that they have to be ordained in order to live in the world that
they desire. But that world is meant for all of us—old and young, rich and
poor, saint and sinner—no exceptions. You don’t have to be a bishop, a priest,
or a deacon to give yourself to living the Good News of Jesus Christ.
At our best, then, we as the Church are the
place in which the world can see God’s mercy and love. When it comes down to
it, this is the true message of the Book of Jonah. Jonah isn’t really a call
story at all. It’s a story about God’s love and mercy. Jonah’s problem is not
that he doesn’t want to give up his comfy everyday life to go to Nineveh.
Jonah’s problem is that he hates the Ninevites. They are the evil arch-enemies
of his people. They want to slaughter his friends and family. He doesn’t think
that they are worthy of God’s—or his—attention. When God uses Jonah’s
begrudging prophetic words—the short sentence that we hear today in our
reading—to turn the people around and completely forgive the whole nation,
Jonah is furious with God! “This is
exactly why I ran away!” Jonah fumes. “Please just kill me God!” he rants. “If
this is the way of things, it is better for me to die than to live.”
“Would you rather die judging and
hating?” Jonah’s author asks us, “or live out of God’s love and mercy?” I saw the movie “Selma” last week, and during
the movie, I loved to hate then-Alabama governor George Wallace and his minions
who responded with such hardness and cruelty to King’s message of love and
justice. “Boo…” I jeered to myself whenever they appeared on the screen. At the
end of the movie, the writers included a little blurb about what happened to
each of the characters after the events in Selma. For George Wallace, they
pointed out that he was later shot in an assassination attempt and spent the
rest of his life in a wheelchair. “Ha--serves him right,” I thought to myself.
Later, my friend told me that the writers had left out one important fact. Wallace,
like the Ninevites, had repented. He had repented of his cruel and self-serving racism. After he
was shot, he experienced a religious conversion. He asked forgiveness of God
and of Martin Luther King, Jr’s family. Both forgave him, and Wallace changed his
ways.[1]
It’s too bad that the movie producers ran from an emphasis on mercy and repentance at the end of their movie.
Would you have forgiven Wallace, if
you were King’s widow? Can you take the hand of someone who recently humiliated
you, if it is offered at the Peace? Can you help the mean kid with her
homework, the same mean kid whose bullying ways got you in trouble last week
when you tried to defend your friend? Can you forgive the Patriots for
“deflategate,” even though it looks as if they are always getting away with
pulling a fast one? Can you pray for the members of Boko Haram with the same
love and concern with which you pray for their victims? God’s call to us is not
an individual task at which we succeed or fail. It is a joyful response to love and freedom.
Each one of us is called, right now and every day of our lives, to choose love
and mercy, to choose to live as a community of love and mercy, even over our own sense of fairness. “A new commandment I give to
you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love
one another. By this all men will know that you are my
disciples, if you have love for one another."[2] That is the challenging and transforming Good News that God
offered to Jonah, and that Jesus offers to us.May we run towards its promise.
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