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David Whelan
Peace Lutheran Church
Menomonie, WI
Epiphany 3B
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Mark 1:14-20
People who become aware of God’s constant
presence with them can never again live as they did before they
experienced that awareness. When people hear, “The kingdom of God has
come near! Repent, and believe in the good news,” they may turn and
follow. Or they may continue on a path in the presence of God
that doesn’t vary from what it was in the absence of God. But
they will always have to live with the fact that God’s Word has
invaded their lives. They’re free to ignore it. But they can’t deny
its presence. God’s Word changes lives. In every instance.
Sometimes we actively resist that change, and then God pushes harder.
“The Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time,”
before Jonah turned from his own ways and set out for Nineveh. Jonah
had to experience a sort of death and resurrection from the belly of a
great fish before he repented, before he turned from his own way in
order to follow God’s way. Even then he followed begrudgingly,
resentful of God’s meddling in his life.
Some
people are only dimly aware of the profound change in orientation that
God’s word causes. So God sends someone such as Paul to remind us not
to get so tied up in measuring success by the world’s standards, that
we lose sight of the truth that God’s relationship with us is the
only standard by which everything else is measured. Time and space
and relationships take on a much different reality when we realize
that this life is for real, but that it isn’t final.
Some
people hear God’s call and completely change their lives. Mark, in
his terse way, reminds us of how powerful the word can be. Jesus saw
Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the sea – “for they were
fishermen,” Mark says. Fishing wasn’t just what they did for a
living. It described who they were. Yet when Jesus said,
“follow me,” Simon and Andrew left their nets. They left “immediately”
Mark says. God’s word changes lives.
Much the
same could be said about the call of James and John. We don’t know
how content they were working in their father’s business. It’s
irrelevant anyway, Mark implies. The power of the call from Jesus was
all that was necessary. God’s word has a profound effect upon the
lives of people who hear it. God’s word changes things.
Yet that
story, the story of the call of James and his brother John gets me to
thinking. What about Zebedee? What did he think about all
this? Was he glad that his sons left to fulfill a greater
purpose in their lives? Was he angry with them for leaving a
business he had hoped that they would take over one day? It was a
prosperous business, after all. Mark says Zebedee had hired men in
addition to his sons.
What
about Zebedee? Mark emphasizes the significance of the event by
recalling its every detail: “James and John left their father,
Zebedee, in the boat, with the hired men, and followed Jesus.” A
radical change of circumstances. Mark tells us later in the story
that even Zebedee’s wife became an active follower. She was
there at Golgotha and at the tomb 3 days later. Presumably, Zebedee
stayed in Galilee, alone except for his hired hands, doing what he had
done all of his life, fishing. Fishing for fish, while his entire
family left him to fish for people as Jesus had put it.
So what
about Zebedee? If God’s word changes people, what about Zebedee?
Didn’t he hear? Didn’t he care? Did he actively resist and God,
unlike the case with Jonah, left him to follow his own chosen path
through life?
We don’t
know what Zebedee thought about the situation. But we can be certain
that life did change for him. The word forced him to adjust his own
way of life in the absence of his sons, and then of his wife as well.
Zebedee isn’t important for Mark’s story, so we hear nothing further
about him except as an identifier for two of the disciples as, “the
sons of Zebedee.” Zebedee isn’t important to the rest of the story.
But Zebedee’s story still has something important to say to us.
Jesus
called relatively few to follow him directly. The vast majority of
those who heard him and believed in him stayed home.
Which is as it should be. While some are called to fish for people in
a direct sort of way, more are called to fish for fish. And
everyone is called to live – each day – in response to the good
news of God coming to us, of God’s presence among us, of God’s love
for us.
The
texts we’ve heard today are all about “vocation,” about God’s call to
each of us to be aware of what God is doing among the people
with whom we live, and to respond to that awareness in our own lives.
Pastors and professional church workers are not the only ones who have
a call. Each of us has a call.
Wherever
you go, God has already arrived there before you. Whoever you are,
you have but one important identity – child of God. The work of those
who hear and believe the word of God, the word that is God, is
to let the story of God’s love weave its way into our story and
through us to others. Christianity isn’t a set of religious
beliefs. It is first and foremost a way of life. A way of daily
life, in or out of this building, together with or apart from the
people who gather here.
Some
churches rightly have at the top of any list of staff members the
legend: “Ministers: all the people.” There’s a church building whose
main exit contains the legend: “Servant’s Entrance.” For a few of us,
our role model might be Simon and Andrew, James and John. But for the
majority of us, the closer role model is Zebedee. They also serve who
fish for fish, who produce or sell things necessary for life, who
protect lives, who administer, who teach, who build, who tend the
helpless, who nurse the sick, who befriend the stranger. Wherever you
- the people of God - are, that’s where the church is,
and what the church should be about. Go and do that which God has
called you to do – to be the people of God, receiving the gifts
of God for the good of the world. |
