January 22, 2012 – Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
The Calling
Third Sunday after Epiphany [Lectionary 3] – January 22, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
God, I’m pretty sure, is always calling us.
Sometimes – maybe a lot of the time – it’s hard to hear what that call is.
Sometimes God’s voice is clouded by disappointment, or illness, or grief,
or mental illness, or consumerism, or selfishness or just plain apathy.
But sometimes we do get to hear that God is calling us to something noble and
worthy of our great human dignity and stature as God’s stewards or
caretakers of creation and of one another.
Jonah and the disciples hear that call pretty clearly this morning.
But they respond in completely opposite ways.
At different times in our lives I’m sure we identify with either Jonah who runs away,
on the one hand,
or Simon and Andrew and James and John who respond immediately on the other.
Jonah runs away from that call: God calls him to go the enemy Assyrians in Ninevah,
capital of a violently ruthless empire, and call them to repentance,
to a new way of being and living.
This is a story to be sure of God’s magnanimity, of God’s inclusive love for all people,
even the supposedly beyond the pale citizens of Ninevah.
But it is also a story about a person who is very reluctant to heed God’s call,
to participate in God’s loving mission to bless heal and restore this world.
He runs in the opposite direction – to Tarshish – boards a boat bound there – is tossed overboard
when it’s discovered he’s bad luck because he’s disobeyed God – finds himself
in the belly of a whale or large fish for three days and nights – is spit up on
shore – and . . . is called by God to go to Ninevah and do thing that
he’s been called to do.
He goes, and with five little words in Hebrew, has astonishing success.
The entire city – unlike the Hebrew prophet Jonah – responds immediately and
repents of its cruelty and violence.
And in addition to this irony, there is a further one in that Jonah is given a second chance by God
even as the Ninevites are.
It is a story about God’s grace for all people, insiders as well as outsiders.
It’s a story about God never giving up on any of us.
When Jesus calls the first disciples this morning, though, they react a lot more like
the Ninevites than Jonah.
Immediately, Mark says (one of Mark’s favourite words),
immediately they left their nets and followed him.
Sometimes we respond like this in our lives of faith.
Perhaps especially when we were young or new to faith.
And it’s a beautiful thing. And pastors love it!
They immediately follow him.
But we wonder, “Why?” What was so compelling about him?
Do they even really know him at this point?
My own guess is that they hear him say, The time is at hand, the kingdom of God has come near,
Believe in the good news and they think:
Great! God is finally coming to rout the bloody Romans and give us our land back!
It’s about time he’s sent his Messiah to do this. Count us in!
Why do I think this?
Because the disciples show themselves to be so thick-headed throughout Mark’s Gospel and
because despite Jesus being very clear about what he’s all about,
they just do not get it over and over and over again.
Ultimately, they’ll abandon him in him time of greatest need –
they won’t follow him to the cross – but after three days and three nights
they’ll get another chance when Jesus rises to forgive them.
And Jonah’s God of grace and second chances will offer them a new life yet again too.
And they will throw in their lot – finally, if not perfectly – with this God and
with God’s loving mission to bless, heal, feed, and bring to peace this whole world
and every person in it.
It turns out that this story, too, is about God never giving up on any of us.
This morning, Jesus is calling each of us, all of us together, to follow him.
He’s calling us again.
Risen from the three days tomb he calls.
And he never stops.
I believe that God has created each one of us in such a way that
there is something in us that will respond to that call.
That call to compassion. That call to the nobility of service.
That call to make a difference. That call to not just talk the talk but walk the walk.
That call to care for others and the world God made.
That call to be a peace-maker in our homes and in our work-places.
That call to give others at home and our work second chances.
The call to work for justice and peace in our neighbourhoods and our communities.
We know God is calling us to do these things and to make them a priority in our lives.
Jesus walked the walk and he wants us to follow where he walked.
But it’s not easy. It seems easier to run away like Jonah or the disciples when
the cost of the call becomes clear.
Like pastor Kelly Fryer used to say, although it’s not always easy to know when
God is calling you to do something,
you can be pretty sure when the thing you’re asked to do makes you feel like throwing up!
I mean, a lot of the time – let’s face it – the nets are hard to leave behind!
The nets are heavy. They’re filled with the cares that cumber us.
They’re filled with our fears and apprehensions and our “What if I really do this?” questions.
The nets are filled with things God did not put in them, things like addictions of various kinds,
and things like individualism and materialism and consumerism.
These things are powerful forces that are at work all around us and over time they can
silently erode values that perhaps we held dearly at certain stages of our lives:
values like compassion and caring and community which we perhaps come to
see as “impractical” in the real world.
(http://bloomingcactus.typepad.com/bloomingcactus/2006/01/jonah_3_mark_11.html)
But Jesus has a lot of faith in us, more, I think, than we have in ourselves.
And he never, ever tires of calling us, calling us to leave the nets, and just follow him.
Sometimes I think we’re just not sure that heeding Jesus’s call will make any difference,
so why invest our lives in it?
There was a television show in the late 90s that
I read about this week that played with that question. (Ibid.)
It was a show called Early Edition, and the premise was that there was this
ordinary guy who, every day, received an early edition of the newspaper,
a newspaper that didn’t tell him yesterday’s news, but the coming day’s news.
The stuff that was going to happen that day unless he did something to change the future.
So his days are spent trying to stop various bad things from happening,
and when he succeeds the news in the paper changes.
One episode showed how two bad things were going to happen that day.
One was that a passenger jet exploded at the airport just after take-off killing 150 people.
The other was that a 6 year-old girl died after being hit by a car because while
the hospital staff had thought she had only minor injuries,
she in fact had significant internal injuries that escaped their attention.
Well, he sets off immediately to the airport to save the 150 people.
But he’s only got 30 minutes till take off and traffic is heavy.
He’s not sure he’ll make it in time when he realizes the little girl is just down the street and
has just been hit by the car.
So he makes the decision to save the one he knows he can save, rushes her to the hospital,
and insists that the doctors examine her very carefully, and thereby saves her life.
Shortly after, her father arrives at the hospital, wearing of all things a pilot’s uniform!
Turns out he was the pilot of the airplane, and turned the jet around before it could take off to
attend to his hurt child.
So the 150 were saved too.
We do not always know what the consequences of our loving actions will be.
We simply trust that God will bring good from them.
Our decisions matter. The decisions we ordinary people make matter.
We don’t even know how much they will matter.
But in every situation it matters that we heed Jesus’s call to love and to care and to serve and
to strive for justice and peace in all the earth, because God is working through us when
we do these things.
The Gospels are clear: God calls the ordinary people, the Marys and Josephs,
the humble shepherds and the lowly fishermen because the priests and religious leaders
and political leaders and kings and emperors could not or would not heed the call.
You and me, together in this ordinary congregation: Jesus is calling us to ministry – to
his ministry of compassion and care and feeding and peace-making – Jesus is
calling us to his ministry this morning.
Jesus is calling you.
And as the Belgian priest Henri Nouwen wrote, the mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God. (from In the Name of Jesus, quoted by Kathryn Huey at
http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/january-22-2012-third-sunday.html)
The thing is, though: unlike the guy with the early edition of the newspaper, we don’t know
for sure how our loving actions will make a difference.
We have something else: we have faith, trust, the trust that God’s kingdom –
God’s reign of grace and justice – is very near to us in the risen Jesus who is among us.
We have the promise in Jesus that life is stronger than death.
That love is stronger than hate.
That God’s life and God’s love wins.
That the Spirit is at work among us even now.
That even when we are walking in death’s dark valley he is with us.
That even when we are walking with death, life is with us.
That a new day is rising.
A day that is anticipated in our Holy Communion this morning,
a future day of manna sharing and mercy giving,
a day of perfect justice and perfect peace.
A day anticipated as we leave our nets behind in the pews and simply come to him and his grace.
So come: in exchange for those nets,
Jesus will come to us and tend us, and give us his peace, and give us himself.
And that will be enough.
Enough for heeding another week of following his call to simply follow him.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
