Casting Call

Sunday, January 21
Third Sunday after Epiphany
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Focus Theme:
Casting Call

Focus Prayer:
God of the prophets, you call us from evil to serve you. Fulfill in us your commonwealth of justice and joy, that the light of your presence may be revealed to all nations, to the glory of Jesus’ name. Amen.

Focus Reading:
Mark 1:14-20

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came 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.” As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea–for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

All readings for this Sunday:
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:5-12
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Questions for reflection:

1. How would you describe the Kingdom of God?

2. How often do you think about your call to follow Jesus? What prompts you to think about it?

3. Why do you think it was so hard for many people (in Jesus’ day and today) to accept the good news Jesus preached?

4. Did your decision to follow Jesus happen at one particular moment, or has it been an ongoing process?

5. Why do you think Mark tells his story with such urgency?

Reflection:
by Kate Matthews

For many years, we held a Bible study on Thursday evenings in the church where I was serving. Most weeks, we explored the lectionary readings for the following Sunday, but once a year we spent our time together reading an entire Gospel (the one for that church year), out loud, from beginning to end, with everyone taking a turn. While I appreciate the lectionary, I found that annual practice immensely helpful for hearing so much that’s missed if the Gospel is read in pieces that are more like episodes in a longer story.

As the shortest Gospel, Mark was a good one to begin with, and it works particularly well for a one-sitting reading. I think that’s not just because it’s the shortest, but because of its pace. Read out loud, straight through, Mark’s Gospel conveys a sense of the urgency in the ministry of Jesus. (Also, more than once, our little group actually laughed in surprise at the questions the clueless disciples asked, given all they had seen and experienced, just a few verses or chapters earlier. You miss that in the lectionary approach to reading the Bible. Also, we recognized ourselves all too often in those clueless disciples.)

The gospel as alarm clock

Ted Smith captures the urgency well: “Mark,” he writes, “begins like an alarm clock, persistently declaring the time and demanding some response.” The Gospel takes off, without the beautiful infancy narratives, with no manger, no shepherds, no elderly prophets singing praise to God in the temple as they hold the promised One, a baby, in their arms. Instead, Mark sets the scene with compact accounts of John the Baptist preaching, and Jesus being baptized and then driven into the wilderness (Mark gives the wilderness temptations two verses, while Matthew uses fourteen). At a clipped pace, the Gospel writer simply refers to John’s arrest so he can get on to his main point, the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Even at the end of today’s reading, we’re not even halfway through chapter 1!

Time, then, and urgency are at the heart of this passage. In that first chapter, William Abraham writes, “Jesus sweeps through Galilee and takes it by stormÖ.the underlying sense is that God is on the march in the ministry of Jesus.” The time is now, Jesus announces: his very first words of proclamation are “The time is fulfilled” (v.15), or, as Eugene Peterson renders it in The Message, “Time’s up!” This isn’t the kind of time we keep track of in our calendars, whether on our phones or written in journals: days, weeks, months and years. It’s a different kind of time, found in the New Testament but sometimes experienced today, too: kairos, as Fred Craddock describes it, “a time in which the constellation of factors creates an unusually significant moment.”

What are we preparing for?

It’s the kind of time we long for, especially as communities, and the people of Israel had been waiting for just such a moment, when the heel of this oppressor or that one–there had been so many, from Egypt through Assyria and Babylon to Rome–would be removed from their throats. They trusted in the promises of God even when everything around them contradicted and even violated the vision of justice and peace, of shalom, that was at the heart of those promises. The prophets spoke and sang of this hope, and how could the people of God not hold onto it, long for it, watch for it? And yet, how does one prepare for such a time? And how does one respond to it when it finally comes?

Much has been written about the response of the disciples who dropped everything to follow Jesus. Why did they do something so drastic, and how could they up-end their lives so dramatically, and would that really be a good thing for us to do today, that is, if we could “manage” it? (“Up-ending” and “managing” hardly go together.) We can’t help putting ourselves in that boat, or on that shore, doing our everyday work, casting our nets and minding our own business, fulfilling our commitments and dealing with the reality of having to work just to survive. Could we measure up to the standard of those disciples, and drop everything, too?

What made them walk away?

We might wonder why and how those first four disciples could do such a thing, without even a stirring sermon from Jesus, or maybe a dramatic miracle, or better yet, the sky opening up and a voice announcing that this was God’s own “Beloved,” and that they should listen to him. (We assume they weren’t around when Jesus was baptized, just a few verses earlier.) Such an incident would have at least provided some explanation for their abandonment of everything to follow Jesus. And it’s perplexing that men of such insight and response would then prove to be those same clueless disciples through much of Mark’s Gospel. What did they know, or sense, on that seashore, that we don’t know?

Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that we’re missing the point if we linger on such questions. This is a story about God, not the disciples or us, she claims in her sermon, “Miracle on the Beach.” To focus on what the disciples gave up (and whether we could do the same), is “to put the accent on the wrong syllable.” This “miracle story,” as she calls it, is really about “the power of God–to walk right up to a quartet of fishermen and work a miracle, creating faith where there was no faith, creating disciples where there were none just a moment before.”

What about our power?

Now this way of approaching the story may, oddly, make us uncomfortable, especially in a culture that emphasizes self-actualization and independence, our ability to make choices, to shape our lives and determine our paths and even our destinies. We can do whatever needs to be done; it’s within our power; we can fix and improve everything; we can take hold of the future and make it what we want it to be.

In fact, we think we have to do it: to make the right choices and take the correct path at just the right moment, in order to please God and get to heaven. The better we are, the more saintly and sacrificing we are, the more likely we are to earn our salvation. Taylor rightly calls this “works-righteousness”: “What we may have lost along the way is a full sense of the power of God–to recruit people who have made terrible choices; to invade the most hapless lives and fill them with light; to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not God, and smack them upside the head with glory.” Whether we’re ready or not, God acts.

A whole new way of being

And yet we do have the freedom to respond to God’s grace and God’s call (or not!). Those are words we say often, but what does that response look and feel like? Ted Smith suggests that Jesus doesn’t ask the fishermen “to add one more task to their busy lives. He calls them into new ways of being.” So he doesn’t give them a new list of things to do but “a new identityÖa whole new life.”

On the other hand, Elton W. Brown acknowledges that our whole new life has a lot of work in it, including the work we do for the sake of the kingdom: maybe the fun part is throwing the nets out and bringing in the haul, although “[t]here are also the preparations, the mending of nets, repairing the tools that are bound to be damaged and wornÖ.You can’t always be fishing, even if that’s your favorite part.” We are caught (so to speak) once again in that tension between works-righteousness and a conversion experience of grace that really changes the way we behave, but that behavior, our actions, reflect an overhaul, if you will, of our whole being, a new way of living and being that we call “conversion.”

Kingdom discourse has an edge

What about “the will of God”? What about the need and longing of the world, and the hope, and expectation, of the people? And what is this “kingdom” that Jesus proclaims has drawn near? William Abraham hears political content in Jesus’ message, and he offers us some hard words about it: our response shouldn’t just focus on self-examination, on “what we have done wrong, or where we need comfort and consolation and then turning to God to take care of our list of particulars.” We may want to concentrate on our own personal “piety,” but “kingdom discourse,” he says, turns our attention, and our energies, toward “current public and political issues.”

For example, January 9 is the anniversary of the death of Samuel Gridley Howe, a 19th-century abolitionist and physician who was the husband of Julia Ward Howe, also an abolitionist (she wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Samuel Gridley Howe was an abolitionist who helped people who escaped slavery, then traveled to the Deep South after the Civil War to investigate how freedmen were being treated. ‘Meaning well is only half our duty,’ he said.” So what we choose to do (not just what we say) matters–even if it comes at a cost, even if it changes our life from safe and comfortable and familiar to different, even jarring.

When and where it happens

Engaging, then, in “kingdom discourse,” we might consider the significance not only of “when” in this passage, but “where” it happens: on a seashore. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t begin his ministry by walking into the temple, the center of the religious life of his people, or even into the city of Jerusalem, and announcing who he is and what he is about. He starts out on the edges, even when he comes out of the wilderness, preaching in places like Galilee, and gathering his little band of disciples not from the religious leaders and scholars but from fishermen, here and there, along the seashore, the prosperous ones like James and John (with their boat and their hired men), and the poorer ones like Simon and Andrew, who have to cast their nets from the shore.

We might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that Jesus is a good example of someone who is “spiritual but not religious,” but that wouldn’t really be consistent with where the Gospel story unfolds, would it? We remember from our Nativity and childhood stories of Jesus, like the Presentation in the Temple, that Jesus was an observant Jew, raised by observant Jews, and he spoke faithfully from within his tradition. I’m reminded of a thought-provoking book by James Carroll, Christ Actually, which left me with the feeling that the author’s emphasis on, and exploration of, the important fact of the Jewishness of both Jesus and the early church could re-shape our understanding of texts like this one.

Jesus: both spiritual and religious

For example, William Abraham writes that Jesus began his ministry out there, away from “the great centers of power” because “the ground has to be further prepared before he can speak directly to the powers that be.” Carroll, however, is instructive about who those “powers that be” actually were–not “the Jews,” leaders or otherwise, but the Romans who were so brutally oppressing Jesus’ own people. (His ninth chapter of Christ Actually, “Imitation of Christ,” is particularly powerful as it draws his ideas together and then challenges us to examine more deeply what it means to be disciples of Jesus, to throw down our nets, so to speak, and follow him.)

This week, we observe a holiday that reminds us of the great and difficult struggle of a people whose faith in God sustained (and sustains) them through a long and hard experience of oppression. The personal response of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and of countless other individuals, expresses faith in what God has done and continues to do and promises to do, and Jesus embodies that promise and that “kingdom,” that new and decisive way to live according to the will of God. We know that the “yes” of Dr. King, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis (to name only a few leaders in the movement) was followed by courageous and faithful actions that have inspired countless others yearning for freedom and justice to be established and nourished in this land. They drew on the promises of God for that courage and that faithfulness.

Seeking new occasions and new ways

In the United States, we have collectively recommitted, in a moment in our own history of both challenge and hope, to seek new occasions and new ways to walk in the ways of justice, healing, and peace. Dr. King drew together that public/political nature of the kingdom with our own call from God, away from old ways of being, to claim our identity as the children of God, and to live lives faithful to such a calling: “Now,” he said, “Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter–but beautiful–struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the [children] of God, and our brothers [and sisters] wait eagerly for our response.”

And so, whether we leave our nets for good, or return to them and catch fish in a new way, with a new identity and a whole new life, we are responding to Jesus, and to what God is doing in Jesus. This is not just a moment of decision, but a lifelong commitment, and we have something of immeasurable value to sustain us along the way: the promise, as Henri Nouwen says, that “the same Lord who binds us together in love will also reveal himself to us and others as we walk together on the road.” Christians are called to ministry, and “[t]he 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.” This love permeates our lives, both public and personal, and reveals God’s own hand at work in our lives.

A preaching commentary on this text (with book titles) is at http://www.ucc.org/worship_samuel.

The Rev. Kathryn Matthews (matthewsk@ucc.org) retired in 2016 after serving as the dean of Amistad Chapel at the national offices of the United Church of Christ in Cleveland, Ohio (https://www.facebook.com/AmistadChapel).

You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.

For further reflection:

Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals, 21st century
“One by one, these disciples would infect the nations with grace. It wasn’t a call to take the sword or the throne and force the world to bow. Rather, they were to live the contagious love of God, to woo the nations into a new future.”

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, 21st century
“When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.”

Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, 21st century
“Conversion was turning out to be quite far from the greeting-card moment promised by televangelists, when Jesus steps into your life, personally saves you, and becomes your lucky charm forever. Instead, it was socially and politically awkward, as well as profoundly confusing. I wasn’t struck with any sudden conviction that I now understood the ‘truth.’ If anything, I was just crabbier, lonelier, and more destabilized.”
and
“Faith, for me, isn’t an argument, a catechism, a philosophical ‘proof.’ It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.”
and
“Conversion isn’t, after all, a moment: It’s a process, and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt.”

John Lancaster Spalding, 19th century
“Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.”

Richard Rohr, 21st century (in Falling Upward)
“True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it. In fact, the best of modern theology is revealing a strong ‘turn toward participation,’ as opposed to religion as mere observation, affirmation, moralism, or group belonging. There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant. You are already in the eternal flow that Christians would call the divine life of the Trinity.”

Teilhard de Chardin, 20th century
“I think that the world will not be converted to the heavenly hope of Christianity if first Christianity does not convert itself to the hope of the world.”

Booker T. Washington, 20th century
“Lay hold of something that will help you, and then use it to help somebody else.”

Anne Lamott, 21st century
“I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don’t have time to carry grudges; you don’t have time to cling to the need to be right.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 20th century
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration, 21st century
“Most of us have nicknames–annoying, endearing, embarrassing. But what about your true name? It is not necessarily your given name. But it is the one to which you are most eager to respond when called.”

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