sermon preached at St Margaret Newlands
Jonah 3.1-5,10
1 Corinthians 7.29-31
Mark 1.14-20
May I speak in the Name of God, who creates, redeems and sanctifies us.
Will you come and follow me,
if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know
and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
will you let my love be known,
will you let my life be grown
in you and you in me?
We will be singing this hymn by John Bell and Graham Maule at the end of this service. It’s a great choice because it sums up the challenge posed to us by today’s gospel. Jesus begins his public ministry by “coming to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” And then he calls four fishermen to follow him: Simon and Andrew, and James and John. They are busy with their nets when Jesus comes by, immersed in their daily lives and livelihoods. And yet when Jesus says “Come with me” they drop everything and go.
It really is an extraordinary story. Writing about it some years ago, the American preacher and theologian David Lose reflected:
I’ve always found this passage both inspiring and vexing. I find it inspiring because of the decisiveness and immediacy of the response of the four disciples mentioned in today’s reading. But I also find it a tad vexing because it seems to set the bar so high. Leave everything … to follow an itinerant preacher into an unknown future … immediately. To be honest, I find it hard to imagine doing as these four did.[1]
I resonate with that too: would I really leave everything to follow Jesus? I don’t know that I would. Would you?
But perhaps we’re not asking the right question here. Perhaps not a question of would we follow, but rather of understanding why the disciples did follow Jesus when he called, and why people have followed Jesus’ call down the ages. I’ve been reading a book by Richard Rohr this week: Falling Upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life. Rohr also discusses Jesus’ call to the disciples, and he points out that the disciples don’t come from nowhere. Rather, says Rohr, “When he calls his first disciples, Jesus is talking about further journeys to people who are already happily settled and religiously settled!”[2] Rohr suggests that there is a kind of double call: the first call, in what he sees as the first half of life, is to become established, to create what he describes as “a container”, or a foundation for a deeper, inner experience of God. That’s an essential first step. After all, he says “Abraham [did] a lot of possessing, Francis a lot of partying, David and Paul a lot of killing, Magdalene a lot of loving … before being ready to go on for the next stage of the journey.”[3] Getting this first half of life right, Rohr suggests, is important, for without it God’s call to deeper encounter cannot be truly experienced.
Once we are established in the first half of life, the call comes:
Some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your private resources.[4]
And that is the point when you find yourself, like Simon and Andrew, James and John, called out of your familiar existence. For someone like me who reads a lot of Luther, this really resonates with Luther’s understanding that the law can only get us so far, and that in the end it’s important that we recognise our need of grace. For Rohr, this is not a personal choice but rather something that happens to us: “There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one’s present comfort zone in life. … The invitation probably has to be unexpected and unsought.”[5] Sometimes we resist it, as the story of Jonah reminds us: the passage we read this morning occurs only after Jonah has gone to considerable lengths to avoid God’s call. Rohr suggests that Jesus’ call often arises from “a situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain change, or even understand.”[6] There may well be a sense of loss involved, most likely a sense a sense of failure:
Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.[7]
Again, this is what Reformation theologians like Luther would call grace.
It seems that something like this must have happened to the disciples when they encountered Jesus that day on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Chris Knights, a Scottish Church worker in Musselburgh, writes of their response to Jesus:
We aren’t told what Simon and Andrew or James and John were feeling as they sacrificed their former life to follow Jesus – fear, excitement, puzzlement, regret at what they had had to leave behind, all of these and more at once?
Nor are we told what they were thinking. “Where are we going?” “What does ‘fishers of people’ mean?” “What will my wife think of me doing this – not to mention her poor, sick mother?” “Can our old dad manage the business with just the hired men if we leave?”[8]
For Knights, this is faith, “real faith, true faith, living faith, faith as trust, faith as risk, faith as following, faith as sacrifice, faith as obedience.”[9] The encounter was such that it gave them the strength and the courage to do something entirely new. Knights quotes another hymn by John Bell and Graham Maule about Christ’s call:
Jesus Christ is calling,
calling in the streets,
‘Who will join my journey?
I will guide their feet.’
What is important to him is the response:
Listen, Lord Jesus,
Let my fears be few,
Walk one step before me
I will follow you.[10]
“Let my fears be few.” Jesus will often say to his disciples “Be not afraid,” and indeed this is an exhortation that appears frequently in the Old Testament as well. Rohr suggests that the second stage of life may be characterised by less fear of failure (because failure is recognised as a stage we all need to go through), less neediness, more freedom.
Rohr emphasises that such experiences can happen to people of all ages, but he is particularly interested in the actual second half of life that we experience as we get older. He says:
Most of us tend to think of the second half of life as largely about getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life, [but] what looks like falling [or failing]can be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.[11]
That doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning all that is familiar. Receiving the call and finding the courage to follow it will take us into new places, but may at the same time leave us where we are. The call to follow Christ is not always a call to abandon everything we have known. It can be a call to inhabit the same space in a new way, to have a new awareness of God’s call to us where we are. As T. S. Eliot puts it:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.[12]
What is an important part of that “Big Picture”, however, is that the calling to follow Jesus is not about us as individuals but about how we live together with those around us. “Transformed people,” Rohr suggests, “… come to serve, not to be served”; they “seem to be ‘mirrored’ into life by the response, love, and needed challenge of others.”[13] The exhortations in the Great commandment to love God, love neighbour and love one’s own self are intertwined; indeed they are at a deep level one and the same call.
The challenge remains: what might Jesus’s call to each of us be? David Lose reminds us that we can only respond to Jesus’s call in specific ways:
Perhaps we follow by becoming a teacher. Perhaps we follow by volunteering at the senior center. Perhaps we follow by looking out for those in our schools who always seem on the outside and invite them in. Perhaps we follow by doing a job we love as best we can to help others. Perhaps we follow by doing a job we hate but contributes to supporting our family and helping others. Perhaps we follow by being generous with our wealth and with our time. Perhaps we follow by listening to those around us and responding with encouragement and care. Perhaps we follow by caring for an aging parent, or special needs child, or someone else who needs our care. Perhaps we follow by…[14]
Fill in the gap: how do you follow?
Will you come and follow me,
if I but call your name?
Will you go where you don’t know
and never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown,
will you let my love be known,
will you let my life be grown
in you and you in me?
Amen
[1] David Lose, “Epiphany 3 B: Following Jesus Today,” posted at “Dear Partner”, on 19 January 2015; online at: https://www.davidlose.net/2015/01/epiphany-3-b-following-jesus-today/.
[2] Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: a spirituality for the two halves of life (London: SPCK, 2012), 22.
[3] Ibid., 23.
[4] Ibid., 65.
[5] Ibid., 66.
[6] Ibid., 68.
[7] Ibid., 67.
[8] Chris Knights, “25th January: 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany – Mark 1:14-20,” Expository Times 126 (2014), 138-140, at 139.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 140.
[11] Rohr, Falling Upward, 153.
[12] T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets.
[13] Ibid., 154.
[14] Lose, “Epiphany 3 B” (2015).
Wings of the Morning 