January 25, 2002
3rd Sunday after Epiphany
Year A
Title: The Dreaded Call
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved “call” stories. Call stories
are stories like the one we heard today from the Gospel of Mathew—they’
re moments when God calls prophets, servants, disciples, ordinary
people, like you or me, into lives of service. They’re moments when its
as if God pointed and said “You! No, no, you on the left, yeah, you!” It’
s a moment when the Divine intrudes into the lives of ordinary people,
like you and I, and the Divine disrupts the comfortable, ordinary lives we’
ve been leading, and the Divine asks us—no, TELLS US—to go another
direction, a crazy, illogical direction, and we are left with no other choice
but to go. The story in Mathew we heard read a few seconds ago is one
of those crazy call stories. You know, I’ve admitted that I love call stories,
but even though I love them, I also admit that they always seem a little
crazy, if you really look at them! Take, for example, today’s story from
Mathew. Here we have Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee and he sees
two men, Simon Peter and Andrew, casting a net into the sea. Of
course, the act of throwing a net into the sea in not extraordinary, its not
surprising, because, as the Gospel of Mathew tells us, they were
fishermen by trade. This is what they did for a living. They were in the
midst of doing their job and all of a sudden, this stranger comes, and all
he says is “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Just out of
the blue, this man walks up and says this strange thing—
and even stranger, they actually do it, they actually follow this man!
Now, this is incredible in itself, but if you look at HOW the whole rabbi-
disciple model worked in Jesus’ day, in the first century, its even more
extraordinary!In the first century, disciples would seek out rabbis, not the
other way around. Rabbis did not seek out students, but were sought
out by potential students. So this story is even stranger and more
extraordinary because it breaks down the old way of doing things,
something that Jesus would always have a knack of doing in the Gospel
of Mathew. In the old ways of doing things, people pursue God—in the
new way of doing things, God pursues people. Even here, at the very
beginning of Jesus’ ministry, we see something incredible happening—
everything gets turned upside down, as they usually do when Christ
enters into the picture. But, you know, I sometimes wonder whether the
first disciples really wanted their lives turned upside down THIS MUCH!As
least in the Gospel of Mathew, we find the disciples at work, doing
something useful and important, making a living for themselves and their
families—and yes, they probably did have families to take care of. We
don’t find them at the River Jordan like we did in the Gospel of John’s
telling of Jesus’ baptism, something we heard about a few weeks ago.
We don’t find them with any particular or obvious need in their lives, but
here comes this call, perhaps a dreaded call from a stranger and they
immediately—and that’s the word Mathew uses twice in this passage,
immediately—they immediately leave everything and follow this One from
Nazareth. They didn’t give their two weeks notice, they didn’t forward
their mail, they didn’t close out their accounts at the local merchants,
they left their families all the Scripture says is that they left everything
and followed this Christ.
And to do WHAT? To become fishers of others, to participate with this
One from Nazareth in reclaiming the world for the Divine. Christ has
called them to tell the world that Love is the foundation of the world and
that Love will set you free because Love itself is free. Really, if you think
about it, this moment of call was Christ’s first miracle, because I think it
would take a miracle to get anyone to literally drop everything to follow
this One into the mystery that is the life of discipleship. But the miracle
happens, doesn’t it? They follow him. The great thing about stories like
this—call stories—is that they remind us that when God calls us, that call
really does disrupt the comfortable and the ordinary—it really does
shake up every area of our lives, just as the disciples experienced it that
day when Christ called them. The Gospel call us into something new—
and this call into something new, this disruption, this inbreaking, this
shining forth of God, this call by God in and on our lives, is something
that challenges our sense of control—it makes us aware that it is God
who always FIRST pursues us. It is, after all, God who first seeks us out,
it is God who offers us what we didn’t even know we were looking for. St.
Augustine, the first great theologian of the church, put it this way when
he was addressing God: “I could not seek you, if you had not already
found me.” Even when we think we were the ones doing the seeking,
even when we think we found God, the reality, of course, is that God
found us first. I think one of the dangers of leading a comfortable life,
like the ones which the disciples had before the moment Christ said to
them, “Follow me” is believing that we really do control our own
destinies. But the Christ who finds us at our comfortable jobs, cocooned
within our ordinary lives, reminds us that the Gospel breaks open the
ordinary and disrupts our routine and intrudes upon our safety zones.
The call of God upon our lives—and we are all called by God to do a
work of some sort in this life, that call is always going to be a little bit
scary because it remind us that we are not our own—that when Christ
calls, we cannot resist, that we are to drop everything and go with One
from Nazareth into a strange and unknown land. And so we go, because
there was no other choice, was there? Amen.
