The Rev. Ann R. Lougee

January 22, 2006

When We’re Called

Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20

The biblical writers tell a lot of stories about how God has tried to wake people up, to call them into awareness, to turn them around from their self-centered concerns and send them forth to deal with the world’s needs. So it was when Jesus broke in upon the consciousness of Peter and Andrew, James and John, calling them away from their ordinary, workaday pursuits and sending them forth to fish for people.

So it was, also, when God called Jonah and sent him forth with a wake-up call for Nineveh. The lectionary for today brings us in on Jonah's story just after the marvelous comic sequence in which he refuses God's call, gets on a boat going the other way, is tossed overboard, swallowed by a great fish, and, finally, spewed out on the dry land again.

With exquisite understatement, today's passage begins, "The word of God came to Jonah a second time..." This time, Jonah goes to Nineveh and proclaims the city's impending doom so effectively that they repent so completely that God's mind is changed and the city isn't destroyed after all.

If you read a little further, you’ll discover what Jonah's is reaction to all this. Does he rejoice that his preaching has saved them? No, not at all. He sulks over God's sparing these people because he hates them, and that's why he hadn't wanted to go to Nineveh in the first place. Jonah was afraid that God would forgive the Ninehvites -- and, in Jonah’s eyes, they're not the right kind of people!

But God can’t be bound by the distinctions and divisions that Jonah draws between the right people and the wrong people. I'm pretty sure that God is not co-opted by the lines that we draw either between what we consider the right kind of people and the wrong sort.

I don’t think that God plays favorites between citizens of the United States and those of other countries. I doubt that God draws lines between Catholics and Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists and Unitarians; between liberals and conservatives, progressives and fundamentalists, Christians and non-Christians; between different races and cultures; between heterosexual people and homosexual people; between women and men; between young and old, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, and on and on.

 

After all, when Jesus tells the first disciples he calls, "I will make you fish for people," he doesn't tell them to exclude foreigners, the ill, lawbreakers, the ritually unclean, the poor, the homeless, the unwanted; he just says people. And to all people the message is the same: Repent. To repent means literally to turn around. Repent -- whoever you are -- wake up, turn away from what is sidetracking you and turn toward God.

"The kingdom of God has come near," says Jesus, and the rest of Mark's gospel serves to illustrate that God's reign does draw near in the life and death of this man. "Follow me," says Jesus. The rest of Mark's gospel how to follow as true and faithful disciples, bringing the reign of God nearer and nearer.

As the gospel of Mark unfolds, it will show that Peter and Andrew and James and John are very imperfect disciples. In fact, at times they will seem exceedingly dense, and behave as if they had never heard of the coming of God's rule.

But in today's passage they take the first step toward true discipleship -- they leave their nets and follow Jesus, with the personal and financial sacrifices, the loss of security that must have entailed. And Mark's gospel is so constructed as to issue the same call to us, "follow me."

Naturally enough, we ask, "Where?" Where does Jesus go, and how do we follow? In the gospels, Jesus goes wherever the news of God's reign is needed, to the leper and the demon-possessed, to those whose lives can be more than they are.

"Come. Follow me. I will make you fish for people." What does it mean to fish for people? It doesn’t mean to trap them so we can feed on them, that is, it doesn’t mean to trap them into becoming members of the church just so we can get their pledges.

What does it mean to fish for people? It means to minister to them. It means to throw them the lifeline of the good news of God’s love. Jesus is quoted as saying, "I come that you might have life and have it more abundantly." We’re not trying to lure people to anything but a life that knows God’s love for real. How do we do that?

We know that some churches use entertainment for bait, with Sunday services like huge multimedia shows. Some churches promise success, prosperity and happiness. Some appeal to social prestige. But the only bait worthy of the Gospel is love -- love which accepts people as they are, love which is shown through actions.

I suspect that each of us knows people that maybe only we can reach with that good news. Think about it. Who are those people for you? Identify them. Write their names down, now or later. Then reflect on specific ways that you can share God’s love with them.

If they are lonely, maybe you could invite them to share a meal or a cup of coffee. If they have kids and would appreciate a little time to themselves, maybe you could babysit. If they’re elderly or frail, maybe you could offer to run errands or do a household chore they can’t manage.

If they’ve suffered a bereavement, maybe you could send a card of condolence at the time, then call them up a week or two afterwards. You get the idea. Our commission is to go fishin’, to be God’s love connection, to follow Jesus’ example.

Now imagine a fishing club where the members merely sat around swapping fish stories about the big one they landed and the whopper that got away, but where they never stepped into a boat or cast a line into the water. What kind of a fishing club would it be whose members were content to admire trophies on the wall but never to go out and actually fish?

Some churches are like that. They sit around bragging about the days when their boat was full of fresh fish, that is, when the sanctuary and the Sunday school were full.

They look nostalgically back at the days when they knew that the mission of the church was to go fishing, to bring others to share the good news of God’s love. But they never actually go fishing anymore; they merely talk about going fishing. We don’t want to be that kind of fishing club, do we?

Though our efforts at discipleship in the church sometimes seem puny and inadequate, we are, as has often been said, not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful. Like those imperfect disciples beside the Sea of Galilee, we must again and again choose to follow Jesus, and to go fishing, not knowing where precisely that will take us.

Of course, Jesus, who shows forth God’s unconditional love, inevitably runs afoul of the powers of the world and goes to the cross. At the very center of Mark's gospel, the author is careful to make us understand that standing against the powers of the world is also the pattern of a life of discipleship. For many of us that’s not a comfortable thought.

At a lunch meeting for clergy in the Bay Area one December, each of us found a card by our plate which read, "Jesus promised those who would follow his leading only three things: that they should be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble! Merry Christmas!"

Absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble. Some of us had tried, like Jonah, to ignore our call into the ministry because we knew this was the kind of life we were being called into. Who in their right mind....?

Frederick Buechner in the first volume of his autobiography, The Sacred Journey, reports that about the time he first decided to go to seminary, he was invited through some acquaintances to a large dinner party in New York. From the other end of the long table, his hostess, on hearing of his vocation asked, "Was that your own decision, young man, or were you poorly advised?"

No, it doesn’t sound like the wisest vocational choice. But if you are called and don’t go one way, you’re likely to end up there another, like Jonah. A classmate, Nancy, talked often of "being dragged kicking and screaming into seminary," her way of speaking about her resistance to the sacrifices it called upon her to make, financially and personally.

How amused we both were when her first ministerial call took her to Nineveh, Indiana. To this day I call her Nancy of Nineveh, though she has long since left Indiana.

But the kind of call we’re dealing with is not exclusively for clergy. It is all of us in the church to whom the message was addressed that "Jesus promised those who would follow his leading only three things: that they should be absurdly happy, entirely fearless, and always in trouble!"

The marine flavor of today’s readings reminds me of an interesting creature I’ve mentioned before: the sea squirt. This strange animal seems to evolve backwards instead of in the direction of progress. The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea until it finds a suitable rock or hunk of coral on which to cling and make its home for life. After it has settled in -- found its spot and taken root, found security -- it then somehow figures it doesn't need a brain anymore. So it eats it!

When I was in graduate school, it was popular to point out a similarity between certain tenured professors and the sea squirt. I can imagine a temptation to apply the analogy to other spheres of life, like politics.

 

But we in the church ought not to laugh too loudly. Churches are prone to the same tendency to find a comfortable place to rest, to feel comfortable and secure, and enter into what, in an individual, would clinically be termed a "persistent vegetative state."

Such a condition in a person, if irreversible, spells the end of that person's existence as a thinking, responding, awake, human being, and justifies the removal of life support systems. In a church, it may have the same implications.

History demonstrates that following Jesus will bring disciples into conflict with the powers of the world who seek to gain and maintain power by dividing and oppressing people, often by invoking religion. This is where most of us, clergy and laity alike, tend to be only partial disciples, held back from reaching out into the needs of the world by our desire for security and comfort.

This is understandable, but nonetheless what we cannot do, I am sure, is cling to a safe place and remain at rest like sea squirts. One way or another, we must answer God’s call to go forward, either by our own choice, like Jesus and the disciples who followed him, or by being swallowed up and carried along like Jonah.

Who knows? Who knows what wonders the God who worked through even such a one as the sulky, disobedient Jonah who didn’t approve of God’s inclusiveness, through even such imperfect disciples as those Galilean fishermen, may work through even such as the likes of us. Let’s be brave enough to find out! May it be so. Amen.