THE THIRD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

January 22, 2006

Jonah 3:1-5,10

I Cor. 7:29-31

Mark 1:14-20

Year B

Mark Twain once said, “Never put off until tomorrow what can be put off until the day after tomorrow”.

We empathize with that, yet one of the characteristics of children is the importance of the moment, the immediate. “Are we there yet?”, the “I want it now!” syndrome. The Gospel writer of Mark would understand.

Mark is very much in a hurry. The word “immediately” occurs in the Gospel of Mark 42 times, in comparison to Luke who only uses it once. This stands out even more when we consider that Mark is the shortest gospel, never even mentioning Jesus’ birth. Mark is often called the Passion Narrative with an expanded introduction. Maybe that gives us a clue as to why Mark is in a hurry. Crisis can cause one to be urgent, to make decisions that are often left to simmer in the oven of life until something stirs action. The something that was occurring in the life of Mark’s community was the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in A.D. 70. That’s enough to make any one urgent.

Today Jesus said to Simon, his brother Andrew, as well as the Zebedee brothers, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people”. And immediately they left their nets and followed him. It was abrupt and impulsive; you might even say reckless. So committee-less as one writer puts it. Shouldn’t changing your entire life be a well thought-out decision made after months of carefully weighing the pros and cons? In the real world no one would hire someone to a position of high responsibility who had shown such impulsiveness, so we end up thinking these first disciples didn’t have real jobs or real lives. Think again.

Let’s begin with the fact that it is highly doubtful these men would have considered themselves religious types. Add to that the fact that the fishing business in Galilee was strong and good. It was solid and dependable. Also, it was highly unusual for a rabbi or teacher to seek disciples; disciples sought the teacher. So it would have been very unusual for these men to just up and leave everything and follow Jesus.

Yet they did.

This is not a story about brash brave young religious fanatics. This is a story about God. God’s presence, filling Jesus as it did, caused something to happen to those young men. Letting their nets wash out to sea, they got up and followed him. It’s scary stuff when you think about it. That’s why we prefer to distance ourselves from it; to look at them as cardboard biblical figures rather than people who had as much to lose as we do.

A few years ago a minister was interrupted at the beginning of his sermon when a man at the back of the church stood up and said, “I have a word from the Lord”. No surprise that heads swiveled around and ushers rushed back to show the guy out.

Sunday after Sunday countless preachers like me spread out their carefully crafted notes, take a deep breath and start to preach what they hope is the Lord’s word. From this vantage point I see people whisper to one another or seem completely far away. They fold up the service leaflet and settle in for what they hope won’t be too long or boring a sermon. Nobody swivels around in alarm. What they’re expecting is a sermon, hardly a word from God Almighty. That would confront us; smack us up against the wall. We might have to make a decision, whereas a sermon can be ignored after church is over and we can get back to our own world without God having interfered. We have become experts at domesticating God, making God tame, like the house cat, restraining God so God can’t interfere with our lives. And then we wonder why it is that our faith becomes dull and God’s presence barely discernable.

Paul understood the urgency of the gospel. His experience on the road to Damascus literally turned his life upside down and he responded to it immediately. Paul’s response today to leave one’s status alone had to do with expecting Christ’s return right away, but also emphasized the fact that no one has to ‘earn’ God’s approval.

Jonah was outraged that God was like that. He considered the Ninevites the lowest of the low when God asked him to go them. He attempted to escape God’s call by boarding a ship in the opposite direction. In the end he surrendered and went back. The miracle was that everyone there heard God’s voice and responded to it. Everyone in Ninevah partied all night - except Jonah. Jonah simply could not accept the gift of God’s outrageous love and so joy filled everyone in Ninevah - except Jonah, who chose to stay in his misery.

Bishop N.T.Wright, Bishop of Durham, England, says Jesus never coerced belief. No one came to believe at gunpoint. “Believe” in Greek means action. It is a verb. It does not mean, “Let me give you something to think about”.

Wright says the Sermon on the Mount is a summons to de-center one’s life from the artificiality of cultural norms and distinctions, and to re-center one’s life in the experience of God. The disciple of Jesus was called to de-center from wealth, prestige, family norms, and re-center in the sacred experience of encountering the living God. Sounds good – until it comes to us. We think risk taking belongs to others; not us. Let God interfere with somebody else’s life, not ours. But what if Jesus had had to wait to recruit people who had not already committed themselves to some other life already? God would be waiting still.

God is always in the business of recruiting people who have made wrong choices in life. God is always in the business of sneaking up on people who are planning the rest of their week and breaking in to try and alter the rest of their lives. It’s risky business to get involved with this God, but there’s no other way to BE involved with God.

What seems most certain in the gospel is the fact that Jesus seemed to draw people into an experience of the holy that utterly knocked their socks off and caused them not to hesitate to change their lives; risk and all. We could say it was his charisma, but of course, it was more than that. In the gospels it is spoken of as an authority within him that seemed unexplainable. This ‘presence’ went beyond the ordinary. It was a ‘different’ reality, charged with power and overflowing with joy.

Jesuit priest Teihard de Chardin once said, “Joy is the most unmistakable sign of the presence of God,” and more than anything else, THIS is what drew people to Jesus and what made the early disciples follow him ‘immediately’.

I am reminded of Metropolitan Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Russian physician who worked for the French Resistance during World War II and also strident atheist – until something happened. So irritated with people who were trying to force Christianity down his throat he set about to try and prove the gospels nothing but a fairytale. Not wanting to waste his time he chose to read the Gospel of Mark because it was the shortest. He writes, “While I was reading the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel, I suddenly became aware that on the other side of my desk there was a presence. And the certainty was so strong that it was Christ standing there that it never left me. This was the real turning point”.

For Bloom there was no lengthy pondering - and no going back. He became so sought after as a speaker at Oxford University, students would squeeze into where ever he was speaking like sardines. They came, not to hear a sermon, but an experience of the living God.

Calls from God do not happen like that often, but calls from God happen all the time. If following Jesus means being swept up by the power of God’s presence in your life, it means being swept into the flow of God’s will for your life as well. They simply cannot be separated from one another.

If the call you hear is of God, you may have the feeling that this moment has been ‘on the way’ for your entire journey. As Frederick Buechner writes: “The bow had already been drawn tight, the arrow already set in place and aimed for Lord knows how long. The voice just made it possible to let it fly, to give it wings”.

A call from God may not even have words attached. Sometimes what you hear in silence speaks the call more loudly than ever words can do. Sometimes it comes in the presence of another, in the look of the eye, the touch of a hand. God’s call is not bound to one dimension, but our answering always involves love and our feet.

In looking at the call of the disciples today Buechner says: “it is precisely love that set this whole scene on fire; Faith is the word that describes the direction our feet start moving when we find that we are loved. Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp”.

I pray that for each one of us. I pray that for the church. I pray that your feet may sweep you into the presence of the God who calls you, into the presence of the Savior who cherishes you, into the Kingdom that will bring you, not just life, but joy, beginning “immediately”.

AMEN

The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville, Illinois