The Calling of
Peter and Andrew, Duccio di Buoninsegna
"Follow me and I will make you fish for
people." Mark 1:17
The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Rhonda Lee
3 Epiphany, Year B
Mark 1:14-20
Immediately!
Immediately?
I recently had lunch with a friend
of mine who is a Roman Catholic monk.
He has been given a lot of responsibility for finding new vocations –
new candidates – for his monastic community.
He goes out and talks to young men about the monastic life in general
and his community in particular, and he organizes “Come and See” weekends at
the monastery, for interested men to experience a few days in the life of the
community. My friend’s methods are more
aggressive than the monastery is used to, and some of his brothers wonder about
the fact that he uses the word “recruitment” a lot. They wonder, isn’t it God’s job to “recruit”? “Recruitment” sounds like something the army
does. I can understand their concerns:
using new language about matters near and dear to us can feel threatening. But of course a monastery does have to
recruit: in the twenty-first century people aren’t dropping off their children
at the door anymore. These days,
joining a religious order is a counter-cultural move.
As my friend and I were discussing
his monastery’s new campaign, I was thinking about today’s Gospel reading, and
I mentioned that even Jesus went out and selected the disciples he wanted to
follow him. Every gospel tells the
story of him doing that at the beginning of his ministry. For all we know, Jesus may have spent the
first thirty years of his life hanging around his father Joseph’s carpentry
shop, which he eventually inherited, waiting for disciples to come to him. If he did, apparently that strategy didn’t
work. Because eventually, he left the
shop and went walking along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, calling fishers
and others to follow him.
Today’s reading tells the story of
Jesus calling Simon and Andrew, and James and John. Like the rest of Mark’s Gospel, it’s a fast-paced story, packing
a lot of action into just a few verses.
Jesus has a short, direct message for anyone who will listen, and for
the four men he’s calling in particular: It’s time. God is active in the world. Turn around and change your
life. Believe the good news, that it is
possible for human beings to live in communion with God and with each
other. That’s the message Jesus brings
to the fishermen when he walks into their field of vision by the Sea of Galilee
one day, and it’s the message of the Epiphany season, the time when we reflect
on Jesus becoming visible to us. What
does he say when he walks into our field of vision, and how do we respond?
Mark tells us that when Jesus calls
Simon and Andrew, and James and John, they leave their boats “immediately” to
follow him. The Greek word that we
translate as “immediately,” “euthus,”
is Mark’s favourite word: he uses it 41 times in his Gospel. Mark had a strong
sense of urgency about Jesus’ message, and about our response to it. The scenes of Simon and Andrew leaving their
boat behind, and James and John leaving their father Zebedee in his boat with
the hired men, may strike Mark’s listeners in different ways: as appealing,
intriguing, or frightening. Maybe we’ve
had a similar experience, of knowing right away what we were called to do, and
setting out to do it. One of my friends
knew she wanted to work with abused children when she was still a child
herself. When she was twenty years old,
she took a job at the Center for Women and Families, and five years later she’s
still there. My great-aunt Edie was
engaged to be married for a year to a wealthy, perfectly nice man she knew and
cared for, until she met Jack and knew she couldn’t stay with her fiancé. She married Jack a month after they met
during the Second World War, even though he was so poor that when they knelt
for the prayers at their wedding, the whole congregation could see that the
soles of his shoes were full of holes.
Feeling certain about a decision
may be a comfort to us, but it can be frightening to our family and
friends. We can only imagine how Edie’s
certainty about Jack made her jilted fiancé feel, and her father frankly
thought she had lost her mind. Did Zebedee
think that his sons had lost their minds, when they ran off to join the wandering
preacher who showed up by the lake one day? The kingdom of God is at hand, it’s
time to repent and believe in the good news...what did that mean?
Was this Jesus guy running a cult?
What about James and John’s stake in the family business, their future
security? Who was going to feed their
wives and children? Jesus’ call to
repentance would have sounded familiar to Zebedee, since he would have known
the words of the prophets like Hosea, Joel, and Isaiah, who called upon Israel
to “turn” away from worldly riches and selfish competition, and toward
God. The prophet Joel had summed up
God’s message this way: “...return to me with all your heart...rend your hearts
and not your clothing. Return to the
Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding
in steadfast love, and relents from punishing” (2:12-13). But it would be understandable if Zebedee
wondered if Jesus was really faithful to the prophetic tradition. What assurance did he have that this person
really had been sent by God, and wasn’t just going to lead his sons astray?
We don’t know if Zebedee ever
became a disciple of Jesus himself.
It’s possible that he did, but just needed a little more time than his
sons did to hear Jesus’ message and decide what his response would be. In other words, he may have spent some time
in discernment. I said earlier,
somewhat jokingly, that Jesus may have stayed in his carpentry workshop for
thirty years, waiting for disciples to come to him, before he finally decided
to go seek them out. But it’s also
possible that Jesus stayed in his shop for thirty years, not waiting for
disciples, but slowly figuring out what his own call from God was. And then one day – after thirty years of
living – the call became clear, and off he went. Or, it’s possible that Jesus had walked by the shores of the Sea
of Galilee before, calling Simon and Andrew and James and John, but they hadn’t
heard him. Maybe the wind was too
strong, or they didn’t look up from their nets, or they turned away from the
sight of a stranger. But when the time
was right, they heard, they saw, and they responded.
Each of us, as a disciple of Jesus
Christ, needs to discern her or his own call from God – what we are best
equipped to do to build up God’s reign in the world, healing, feeding,
challenging, comforting, worshipping.
The needs are urgent, and the call is urgent, but that won’t necessarily
mean that we will act immediately. The
time we spend in discernment is not necessarily passive, doing nothing. We’ve all heard the story of Rosa Parks
refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white man in
1955. Often the story goes like this:
Mrs. Parks was a humble seamstress who just got tired one day, refused to give
up her seat, and was thrust into the spotlight almost by accident –
“immediately.” But the real story is a
little more complicated than that. Mrs.
Parks had been active in her local chapter of the NAACP for some time. She had gone to the Highlander Folk School
in Tennessee, a place that taught people how to organize for social justice,
and she had seen how black and white Americans could live and work
together. She had seen that it was
possible to turn away from the old, evil and destructive ways toward a new
future grounded in the gospel. When
Rosa Parks was called to be a leader in the Montgomery bus boycott, her husband
urged her not to do it. He was afraid
she would be killed. But after all that
preparation and time spent in discernment, Parks and her community and some like-minded
white people took hold of their courage and their faith and “immediately” swung
into action.
Every Christian is called to
ministry that brings the gospel to life.
Whenever we have a baptism in our church, we pray for the candidates
that they will be filled with God’s “holy and life-giving Spirit,” that they
will go out into the world in witness to God’s love, and that God will bring
them to the fullness of divine peace and glory. Candidates or their sponsors make a covenant to “seek and serve
Christ in all persons” and to “strive for justice and peace among all
people...respect[ing] the dignity of every human being.” The job of each of us is to figure out how
we will live out those promises in our own lives, and to pray for each other in
that we will hear God’s call when it comes.
I wouldn’t want anyone to feel as
if they have to know immediately what
their call is when they’re baptized, or confirmed, or when they arrive at
Calvary Church. But my prayer for each
of us is that, while we discern our ministry, we have the sense of urgency that
comes from knowing that Jesus didn’t just call fishermen along the shores of
the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago.
He’s calling you and me today.
Just like he called the fishermen away from their nets to make them fish
for people, chances are Jesus will call you and me to put the skills, gifts,
and desires we already have to new uses.
Contemplating a new ministry can be exhilarating; it can also be frightening. Our faith assures us, though, that if God
calls us to a ministry, God will equip us for it.
And the first way in which God
equips us for ministry is happening right now: in worship, where we come
together to gain strength from Scripture, from the prayers, from Communion, and
from each other. Here, we are also
challenged by Scripture, by the prayers, by the ongoing, living presence of
Christ among us, and by each other to hear the call, to turn around, and to
live into God’s vision of new life and new relationships. Thanks be to God for that promise of
strength, and for the potential contained in that challenge.