Texts: Luke 5:1-11, Isaiah 6:1-8
Everybody has a bad day now and then. We all do. One afternoon, New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle went hitless and struck out three times in a row. “When I got back to the clubhouse,” he remembered, “I just sat down on my stool and held my head in my hands, like I was going to start crying. I heard someone come up to me, and it was little Tommy Berra, Yogi’s son, standing there next to me. He tapped me on the knee, nice and soft, and I figured he was going to say something nice to me, like ‘You keep hanging in there” or something like that. But all he did was look at me, and then he said in his little kid’s voice, ‘You stink.’”
We’ve all had days like that. Simon didn’t play baseball, he was a fisherman. But he was 0-for the day. Along with his fishing partners, he had worked all night with nothing to show for it, not even that first fish. If Simon is even slightly like us, he can’t be in a very good mood.
And then along comes Jesus. But Jesus is not alone. A crowd is following. Jesus is becoming something of a celebrity and people want to be around him. The scripture says that the crowd wanted to hear the Word of God.
Jesus asks Simon to take him out on the lake in boat. So Simon takes him out far enough so that he has space to speak to the large crowd that had gathered on the shore.
After he had finished speaking, Jesus tells Simon to go out into the deep water and let down the nets for a catch. Peter expressed some skepticism, saying, “Well Jesus, we’ve been here all day and haven’t caught a thing, but since you asked, I’ll do it,” and he does.
Clearly, all the details have not been reported. Peter may have left his nets on the shore when he took Jesus out in the boat—remember, he was finished for the day and was cleaning his nets. Perhaps he had to go back to shore before going out into the deep water. Here is a possible scenario that fills in a few of the details:
Peter ties the boat on the shore and tells Jesus, “Wait here, I’ll be right back.” He goes to get the nets, but just then some other fishermen happen by. Peter asks them what they think about Jesus’ request to fish in deep water, and a special committee meeting of the United Fishermen Local 235 was convened, right on the spot. There was lively discussion.
“Everybody knows that fish feed in the shallows,” said one fisherman. Going out into the deep water would be a real waste of time.”
“Besides that, we’ve been out here all day and haven’t caught a thing,” said another. There is absolutely no way that you are going to catch anything now.”
“Look, the guy’s a carpenter!” said another fisherman. “Do what you want, Peter, but there is no way in Sheol I would take advice from a carpenter, even if he is a pretty good preacher. It’s insulting, is what it is.”
Another spoke up. “Don’t you think there is a larger issue here? The real issue is tradition. This is not the way we fish. We haven’t done it that way before. It would be highly irregular. We need to maintain our traditions.”
Then the Public Relations consultant for United Fishermen weighed in. “Jesus is quite a media celebrity at the moment,” he said. “It can’t hurt to be seen with him. That was a great move, Peter, letting him speak from your boat and all. But I would definitely draw the line on taking fishing advice from the guy. When you let down your nets and come up empty, he’s likely to tell some parable about ‘the one who fisheth in deep water’ – you’ll wind up looking silly and everybody will laugh at those dumb fishermen. It could be a public relations disaster.”
And so it went. There were all kinds of reasons not to fish with Jesus. Finally, James said, “Oh, lighten up, will ya? Let’s humor the guy. I like Jesus. And John said, “I say it’s worth a shot. Why not go for it?”
Simon was still a bit hesitant, but decided to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt. “Sorry for the delay, I ran into some friends of mine, “ he said to Jesus. He put out into the deep water, and James and John followed in their boat.
Peter let down the nets, and what happened was the biggest surprise of his life. (Well, up to that point, anyway.) There were so many fish, he couldn’t pull the nets in. There were so many fish, the nets were tearing. There were so many fish, both boats could not hold them all.
Simon was caught up in this incredible, unbelievable, miraculous catch, but then he stopped. It hit him what had happened. It hit him who Jesus was. The words Jesus had spoken to the crowd came back to him.
Peter fell to his knees, there in the boat, and said, “Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus said, “Do not be afraid. From now on, you will be catching people.”
Why Simon’s fearful response?
The fears he had before going into the deep water now seemed like small potatoes. He had been afraid of failure, afraid of wasting time, afraid of being in the spotlight, afraid of coming off not looking so good.
But now, everything had changed. Having seen the power and goodness of God, Peter understood his own finitude, his own sin. “Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
At worship in the temple, Isaiah receives a stunning vision of God’s glory. And what is his reaction? It is exactly the same as Simon’s. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lip, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”
“Get away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” What was Simon afraid of? For one thing, he was afraid of being found out. He was afraid of having his sin revealed, if only to himself.
There was more. Simon was initially unsure about honoring Jesus’ request to go into the deep water because he feared failure. But maybe the only thing scarier than failure is success. If such things were possible with Jesus…where would it lead? Things would change. Life would be different. Was Simon up to it? Was he qualified, was he worthy? In some ways, familiar failure can be easier than life-changing success.
Simon was afraid because the way he had conceived of the world was obviously not exactly the way it really was.
After a day of striking out, you don’t just throw the nets into deep water and pull up a boatful of fish. What could this mean? Like most of us, Peter liked to think that he understood the way things worked. But all that was shattered, as something impossible, something miraculous, had taken place.
Jesus said, “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching people.” I’m not sure Jesus’ words relieved Simon’s fears. In fact, rather than lessening Simon’s anxiety, Jesus may have just added to it. “Catching people?”
Jesus was calling for Simon to follow. He was calling for commitment. He was calling for change. And this was scary.
In a sense, when Simon expresses fearfulness he is asking Jesus to take the mystery of God away from him and return his certainties. But instead, Jesus invites him to leave behind all his certainties and follow. And the scripture says, “They left everything to follow Jesus.”
That is a short little verse – it seems to be a minor part of the story. There is no elaboration. “They left everything to follow Jesus.” But that is really the story. This is the call of the first disciples in Luke’s gospel. James and John and Simon and presumably Simon’s brother Andrew, who is not mentioned here, leave everything to follow Jesus.
When you have just had far and away the largest catch of fish you have had in your lifetime, that is a lot to walk away from. If I had been Simon, I would have been tempted to say, “Sounds great, Jesus. I’d love to join you! First we need to go and sell this fish, there’s so much we’ll probably need to pickle some, and we really need the money.” I would have been tempted to try and take care of a few things first.
But that is not what happened. The experience was so life-changing that Simon and his friends leave everything and immediately follow Jesus.
Simon Peter, as he comes to be called, leaves everything behind, including his certainties about the way life works. And as he followed Jesus, he had to leave his certainties behind again and again: the certainty that God’s Messiah would not have to suffer, the certainty that he himself would be loyal to Jesus through whatever came, the certainty that dead was dead, the certainty that the gospel was just for the Jews.
This is not really a fishing story; it is a call story. Simon is called to follow Jesus, called to be a fisher of people. And this is our calling. We are called to reach out to others with God’s love.
I remember a little song we sang in Sunbeams, back in 1st grade or so. “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men. I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.” (We didn’t know about inclusive language back then.)
It was a fun and happy little song that we sang, but as grown-ups, if we take this seriously, it can be very scary. And I guess I may as well just say it out loud – this invites us to think about evangelism.
Just to mention the word “evangelism” can scare us. It is a word that has been kind of sullied by abuse over the years. Yet Jesus calls us to share the Good News, and just because it has been done manipulatively and irresponsibly over the years is not a good reason to ignore Jesus’ call.
The word “evangelism” simply means, literally, “sharing the good news.” The reason we don’t want to have much to do with it is because so often, it hasn’t sounded like Good News, it’s sounded like bad news, judgmental news, scary news, exclusive news.
A book that came out in the last year with the title UnChristian. It reports on a survey of 16-29 years olds who were not religious, asking their impression of Christians. The top responses were that Christians are antigay, hypocritical, judgmental, and too tied to politics. For a lot of people, Christianity comes across as anything but good news.
These negative impressions did not just come from out of the blue. If the only thing you knew about American religion came from news stories, your impression would be pretty negative too. Those who get the attention are so often the ones who are peddling a Bad News kind of Christianity. But this is even more incentive for us to authentically share the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Now to be honest, I’m not sure fishing is the best metaphor to use for talking about sharing the Good News in our culture. Jesus was speaking to a bunch of fishermen, but not everybody fishes. I’m not much of a fisherman myself. A couple of years ago at Green Lake, I went fishing with Aiddy and Elijah. We were out in a row boat and both of them had caught a couple of fish already, just little bluegill. But they didn’t want to head for the shore until I had at least caught one fish. Elijah, who was five years old at the time, said, “Come on Dave. You can do it.” I would almost as soon he had said what that kid said to Mickey Mantle. I finally caught a fish so we could quit.
Anyway, not everyone fishes and the image of hooking someone and reeling them in doesn’t fit real well with the idea of loving and caring for the person. The analogy breaks down at some point – I mean, we’re not trying to eat them for lunch. But as long as we are kind of stuck with this image, we might think about the kind of lures we use. I heard Shane Claiborne speak recently – he leads a community called The Simple Way, a group that lives and serves in the poorest area of Philadelphia, a very interesting guy with a great story. Claiborne bemoans the way Christians have so often spoken in our culture and acted in the public square. He says that the gospel is best spread not by force but by fascination.
That is what Jesus did. Jesus told great stories. He acted in selfless, compassionate ways that made people wonder about him. Folks came to hear him because the way he talked about life and the way he related to God were different – and authentic. People were genuinely interested in what he had to offer. Simon did not follow Jesus because he was scared into it or cajoled into it or because he was obligated. He followed because he was intrigued.
Maybe you have seen those beer commercials for Dos Equis, with “the most interesting man in the world.” I think Jesus could really lay claim to that title. People followed him not because they were harangued or shamed or nagged or criticized or bullied, but because they were deeply interested.
What if we exhibited such care and compassion that folks started to wonder about us? What if we reached out to people with such genuine interest in them as individuals that they sat up and took notice? What if folks experienced Christians not as hypocritical or judgmental, but as a breath of fresh air? What if we came across not as having all the answers but being open to the questions? What if we didn’t offer shallow comments but instead invited people to think deeply? What if we came across not as having it all together but as struggling like the next person, but wrapped up in the grace of God and the care of the community as we struggle?
I’ve got to believe that if we let down our nets like that, we’ll get more than a couple bluegill. May we fish for people using not fear nor force, but fascination. Amen.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
"Accidental Prophets" - January 31, 2010
Text: Jeremiah 1:4-10
After our latest blizzard, I was shoveling out on Tuesday morning. I had run the snow blower, and after clearing the drive and the sidewalks, I used a shovel to clear around the house and on the front step. I had been out in the cold a long time and I was losing feeling in my fingers. I made a mental note to buy some ski mittens. After all of this, I was down to the very last thing – I was digging out a little area for our dog Rudy to do his business.
As I threw the very last shovelful of snow, I heard that familiar sound that nobody shoveling snow wants to hear. It was the rumble of the city snow truck coming down the street, the truck with that blade that throws all of the snow onto your driveway. I had finally finished shoveling and everything had been clear for all of 5 seconds. And sure enough, the truck dumped a bunch of snow in our drive. And not nice and fluffy snow – it was the hard, icy, heavy, hard to shovel kind.
I stood in Rudy’s little dug out area of our yard and as I saw this truck doing the unthinkable, I just said “Dude,” and stepped back. Of course, I stepped back and hit the bank of snow I had been digging out, and I promptly fell on my backside. It was a nice landing. I was cold and tired and it felt pretty good to just lie there in the snow for a minute or two - until I felt my jeans getting wet and decided it was time to get up.
I had made a snow angel. I didn’t mean to, it just happened. It wasn’t my intention – I guess you could say that I was an accidental angel.
Upon reflection, I think there are a lot of accidental angels. There are a lot of folks who don’t necessarily plan to do what they are doing, they just kind of fall into it, as we say.
Our Old Testament scripture gives us the story not of an accidental angel, but an accidental prophet. This is not a job that Jeremiah sought out. In fact, prophet is probably not a job that anyone really seeks out.
Jeremiah is a teenager. A youth. Now if you check out our bulletin cover, they have it completely wrong. We subscribe to a church art service and Gayle generally finds a nice clip art to go along with the scripture or the theme for each week. But look at this guy and tell me he is a teenager! He looks like what we might imagine to be a prophet – maybe Jeremiah as a veteran prophet – but this is definitely not a teenager.
The Word of God comes to Jeremiah, and he senses that all of his life has been leading him to this point, that from before he was even born, when he was but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes, God’s call on him was to be a prophet. And how does he respond to this revelation, to this call of God?
He says, “I am only a boy. I’m just a kid. I am too young, I am too inexperienced. Who would ever listen to me? I am definitely not the person for this job.”
Jeremiah is in very good company. This is the way that most of the prophets responded to God’s call. Moses was full of excuses and said, “I am a man of slow speech.” Isaiah responded, “I am a person of unclean lips dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” Gideon protested, “My clan is the weakest of Manasseh.” And Jeremiah said, “O Lord God. Truly I do not know how to speak for I am only a boy!”
Prophets generally don’t seek after the job. Seeking after it, in fact, might be a sign that you are really not a prophet.
There are an awful lot of people working on their resume, trying to come across their very best to potential employers. I talked to a student who had a job interview in New York City last week. It was very cool to go to New York, and he really tried to make the best impression he could. Some seniors will go to job fairs. You put on a nice suit, you get a haircut, you do some research on the companies that you hope to work for, all in the hopes of landing a job. In a difficult economy, there may be even more than the usual amount of working hard to impress employers.
You will never find that with prophets. They don’t really want the job, so that pretty well eliminates embellishing the resume or trying to impress the employer. Instead, they say, “I’m too young, I can’t talk, I have no influence, I am morally deficient, nobody will listen to me, I am absolutely the wrong person.” To speak of someone as a reluctant prophet is probably redundant.
This is true of modern day prophets as well. No one aspires to the job, you just kind of fall into it. You don’t really find the job, it is more a case of the job finding you. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a young pastor, 26 years old, who had just come to a church in Montgomery, Alabama. It just happened to be shortly before Rosa Parks decided one night that she was tired of having to give up her seat on the bus. The bus boycott started, they needed a leader, the more seasoned pastors had the good sense to beg off, and Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the movement. And it turned out that growing up in a pastor’s home, being educated both in the south and in the north, having gifts as a preacher and a leader as well as a scholar, and having a passion for justice, he was perfectly suited for the task. Looking back, he may have had the same sense that Jeremiah had, that he had been born for this, but he wasn’t eager for the job.
The call of God can be a funny thing – sometimes it comes dramatically, as it did for Moses, speaking to God in the burning bush. Or Isaiah, caught up in ecstatic worship. But sometimes, it just kind of happens. That’s the way it is for many of us. We just kind of fall into it.
I have a friend who lives in southern Iowa who saw a need for after school care for children. And so she did something. She started out small, with a story and games and some snacks for a few kids at her church. But it grew and grew, and now there is this wonderful program with tutoring and activities and all kind of kids, many from at-risk backgrounds. She loves what she is doing and she is good at it - she has kind of fallen into the job that she didn’t know God had been preparing her for her whole life.
When we talk about the call of God, what comes to mind generally is the call to ordained ministry – to go to seminary and become a pastor or a missionary. God certainly calls people to this kind of ministry, and we need to encourage folks to consider this call.
But God’s call on us is a lot broader, than that. We are all called to be disciples. And God calls people to all kinds of vocations, to a wide variety of places of service. Sometimes a person’s calling is not necessarily where he or she is employed. And the call of God often comes in a roundabout, unexpected way. It can look like it came from clear out of the blue until in retrospect we see that God was preparing us all along.
How often have you seem someone wind up doing something they had never in their wildest dreams imagined themselves doing, only to engage in that work and discover that God had been equipping them for years for a task they were not even aiming at? Most often, providence is best recognized in retrospect. God’s work in our lives may be quiet, behind the scenes, and perhaps even unrecognized at the time. But later, looking back we can see God’s hand at work, preparing us all along.
God saw Jeremiah coming from a long ways off, and God appointed Jeremiah to be a prophet. This came as startling news to Jeremiah, who had not considered being a prophet as his life’s work.
Hearing and answering the call of God in our lives is not just something for those who work in the church. Evelyn McLachlan has a quilting group in her church. Evelyn asked one woman how she got started quilting. She said that she grew up sewing, making clothes and curtains, and the like. She had never quilted, though. It was about 15 years ago, when her son needed the car and she asked to be dropped off at a quilt show - she just needed a place to hang out a little while until her son came back with the car. And as she walked through the auditorium, she realized she didn’t just want to learn to quilt ... she needed to quilt. It became her passion. She has made quilts for many people, and it is indeed a calling.
Marilyn McDonald is a pastor who a number of years ago was called to a new congregation and moved into the parsonage. She noted that the lawn needed mowing, and planned to get to it the next day. But when she returned home, it was already mowed – the yard looked beautiful. This happened a couple of times, and she didn’t know who it was that had mowed it and obviously taken care of the grounds around the church next door as well.
But one day she came home to find her secret lawn mower at work. She introduced herself, and then thanked him for his “ministry.” He was quiet-spoken, but asked, “What did you say?” She repeated, “Thank you for your ministry.” She told him that what he was doing was certainly appreciated by many - even if they did not know who it was who was doing it - and that this was a valuable ministry.
The next Sunday he was in church, which this new pastor did not know was unusual. His daughter, it turned out, was the Clerk of Session – kind of like our moderator - but he had never gone to church except for funerals and weddings. He became a very active member of the church.
The idea of calling goes far beyond what we often think of as “church vocations.” I have visited in hospitals and nursing homes and observed nurse’s aides who have great joy in their work. It is not easy work and the pay is not great and the hours can be long and you don’t necessarily get off for holidays because hospitals and nursing homes don’t close for holidays. Those who stay at it for a long time usually do so because it is a calling, and they are performing a very real ministry.
Parker Palmer tells of the time he went to a college to lead a workshop on teaching. Early on, he was warned about the curmudgeonly Professor X. Professor X would come to the workshop, he was told, but likely only to debunk whatever was said.
As the workshop began, Palmer asked the teachers to tell the group about a mentor, someone who had taught them how to teach. The teachers related many stories, some very moving stories. After several people had gone, Professor X began to speak, not in the cranky tones his colleagues were used to hearing, but in a voice full of sadness and regret. He confessed that for twenty years he had been trying to mimic his mentor's teaching style, and the results had been disastrous. His teaching wasn’t working because he was trying to be someone he was not. Twenty years into his career it was just starting to dawn on Professor X that what he was doing was not his life. Palmer speaks of “listening to your life” as a way of recognizing God’s call.
That can be hard. And sometimes, listening to our life – listening to the way that God is leading and guiding us – can be costly. It can sometimes cost us – in comfort, in security, in popularity, perhaps in the kind of paycheck we earn.
Historian Howard Zinn died this week. Zinn once made this statement that I think has to do with listening to our life and listening to God’s call. He said,
Our New Testament scripture was I Corinthians 13, a very familiar passage. We remember the part about love – love is patient and kind, it dos not envy or boast, and so on. But we may not remember so well the latter part – about our knowledge being only partial. We see through a glass dimly. Since we don’t know everything, the best we can do is to be loving. This applies to our own lives. We don’t know which way our lives will turn and we don’t know how God may use us. This also means we don’t know how God may use another, and we should be very careful about judging another’s call. I have heard men say out loud, “God can’t be calling you because you are a woman.” I think that people who say things like that need to pay attention to their own calling.
We need to “listen to our lives,” as Parker Palmer puts it. We need to be open to God’s call. Those whom God called in the Bible were often as not the last ones you would expect. He called poor speakers like Moses and and shepherd boys like David and prostitutes like Rahab and mere youth like Jeremiah and a herdsman and vinedresser like Amos and a young peasant girl like Mary.
Look at Jesus: he begins his ministry by assembling a motley group of fishermen, tax collectors, political radicals and assorted peasants. He turns to the twelve of them and says, “I’m going to take over the world. Guess who’s going to help me?”
God can use us all, and there is a calling for each of us. And there is joy and fulfillment in claiming our call:
But not only calls to work in the church, calls to serve outside the church:
thank you to Evelyn McLachlan and Marilyn McDonald for contribution on the "Midrash" list.
After our latest blizzard, I was shoveling out on Tuesday morning. I had run the snow blower, and after clearing the drive and the sidewalks, I used a shovel to clear around the house and on the front step. I had been out in the cold a long time and I was losing feeling in my fingers. I made a mental note to buy some ski mittens. After all of this, I was down to the very last thing – I was digging out a little area for our dog Rudy to do his business.
As I threw the very last shovelful of snow, I heard that familiar sound that nobody shoveling snow wants to hear. It was the rumble of the city snow truck coming down the street, the truck with that blade that throws all of the snow onto your driveway. I had finally finished shoveling and everything had been clear for all of 5 seconds. And sure enough, the truck dumped a bunch of snow in our drive. And not nice and fluffy snow – it was the hard, icy, heavy, hard to shovel kind.
I stood in Rudy’s little dug out area of our yard and as I saw this truck doing the unthinkable, I just said “Dude,” and stepped back. Of course, I stepped back and hit the bank of snow I had been digging out, and I promptly fell on my backside. It was a nice landing. I was cold and tired and it felt pretty good to just lie there in the snow for a minute or two - until I felt my jeans getting wet and decided it was time to get up.
I had made a snow angel. I didn’t mean to, it just happened. It wasn’t my intention – I guess you could say that I was an accidental angel.
Upon reflection, I think there are a lot of accidental angels. There are a lot of folks who don’t necessarily plan to do what they are doing, they just kind of fall into it, as we say.
Our Old Testament scripture gives us the story not of an accidental angel, but an accidental prophet. This is not a job that Jeremiah sought out. In fact, prophet is probably not a job that anyone really seeks out.
Jeremiah is a teenager. A youth. Now if you check out our bulletin cover, they have it completely wrong. We subscribe to a church art service and Gayle generally finds a nice clip art to go along with the scripture or the theme for each week. But look at this guy and tell me he is a teenager! He looks like what we might imagine to be a prophet – maybe Jeremiah as a veteran prophet – but this is definitely not a teenager.
The Word of God comes to Jeremiah, and he senses that all of his life has been leading him to this point, that from before he was even born, when he was but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes, God’s call on him was to be a prophet. And how does he respond to this revelation, to this call of God?
He says, “I am only a boy. I’m just a kid. I am too young, I am too inexperienced. Who would ever listen to me? I am definitely not the person for this job.”
Jeremiah is in very good company. This is the way that most of the prophets responded to God’s call. Moses was full of excuses and said, “I am a man of slow speech.” Isaiah responded, “I am a person of unclean lips dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” Gideon protested, “My clan is the weakest of Manasseh.” And Jeremiah said, “O Lord God. Truly I do not know how to speak for I am only a boy!”
Prophets generally don’t seek after the job. Seeking after it, in fact, might be a sign that you are really not a prophet.
There are an awful lot of people working on their resume, trying to come across their very best to potential employers. I talked to a student who had a job interview in New York City last week. It was very cool to go to New York, and he really tried to make the best impression he could. Some seniors will go to job fairs. You put on a nice suit, you get a haircut, you do some research on the companies that you hope to work for, all in the hopes of landing a job. In a difficult economy, there may be even more than the usual amount of working hard to impress employers.
You will never find that with prophets. They don’t really want the job, so that pretty well eliminates embellishing the resume or trying to impress the employer. Instead, they say, “I’m too young, I can’t talk, I have no influence, I am morally deficient, nobody will listen to me, I am absolutely the wrong person.” To speak of someone as a reluctant prophet is probably redundant.
This is true of modern day prophets as well. No one aspires to the job, you just kind of fall into it. You don’t really find the job, it is more a case of the job finding you. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a young pastor, 26 years old, who had just come to a church in Montgomery, Alabama. It just happened to be shortly before Rosa Parks decided one night that she was tired of having to give up her seat on the bus. The bus boycott started, they needed a leader, the more seasoned pastors had the good sense to beg off, and Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the movement. And it turned out that growing up in a pastor’s home, being educated both in the south and in the north, having gifts as a preacher and a leader as well as a scholar, and having a passion for justice, he was perfectly suited for the task. Looking back, he may have had the same sense that Jeremiah had, that he had been born for this, but he wasn’t eager for the job.
The call of God can be a funny thing – sometimes it comes dramatically, as it did for Moses, speaking to God in the burning bush. Or Isaiah, caught up in ecstatic worship. But sometimes, it just kind of happens. That’s the way it is for many of us. We just kind of fall into it.
I have a friend who lives in southern Iowa who saw a need for after school care for children. And so she did something. She started out small, with a story and games and some snacks for a few kids at her church. But it grew and grew, and now there is this wonderful program with tutoring and activities and all kind of kids, many from at-risk backgrounds. She loves what she is doing and she is good at it - she has kind of fallen into the job that she didn’t know God had been preparing her for her whole life.
When we talk about the call of God, what comes to mind generally is the call to ordained ministry – to go to seminary and become a pastor or a missionary. God certainly calls people to this kind of ministry, and we need to encourage folks to consider this call.
But God’s call on us is a lot broader, than that. We are all called to be disciples. And God calls people to all kinds of vocations, to a wide variety of places of service. Sometimes a person’s calling is not necessarily where he or she is employed. And the call of God often comes in a roundabout, unexpected way. It can look like it came from clear out of the blue until in retrospect we see that God was preparing us all along.
How often have you seem someone wind up doing something they had never in their wildest dreams imagined themselves doing, only to engage in that work and discover that God had been equipping them for years for a task they were not even aiming at? Most often, providence is best recognized in retrospect. God’s work in our lives may be quiet, behind the scenes, and perhaps even unrecognized at the time. But later, looking back we can see God’s hand at work, preparing us all along.
God saw Jeremiah coming from a long ways off, and God appointed Jeremiah to be a prophet. This came as startling news to Jeremiah, who had not considered being a prophet as his life’s work.
Hearing and answering the call of God in our lives is not just something for those who work in the church. Evelyn McLachlan has a quilting group in her church. Evelyn asked one woman how she got started quilting. She said that she grew up sewing, making clothes and curtains, and the like. She had never quilted, though. It was about 15 years ago, when her son needed the car and she asked to be dropped off at a quilt show - she just needed a place to hang out a little while until her son came back with the car. And as she walked through the auditorium, she realized she didn’t just want to learn to quilt ... she needed to quilt. It became her passion. She has made quilts for many people, and it is indeed a calling.
Marilyn McDonald is a pastor who a number of years ago was called to a new congregation and moved into the parsonage. She noted that the lawn needed mowing, and planned to get to it the next day. But when she returned home, it was already mowed – the yard looked beautiful. This happened a couple of times, and she didn’t know who it was that had mowed it and obviously taken care of the grounds around the church next door as well.
But one day she came home to find her secret lawn mower at work. She introduced herself, and then thanked him for his “ministry.” He was quiet-spoken, but asked, “What did you say?” She repeated, “Thank you for your ministry.” She told him that what he was doing was certainly appreciated by many - even if they did not know who it was who was doing it - and that this was a valuable ministry.
The next Sunday he was in church, which this new pastor did not know was unusual. His daughter, it turned out, was the Clerk of Session – kind of like our moderator - but he had never gone to church except for funerals and weddings. He became a very active member of the church.
The idea of calling goes far beyond what we often think of as “church vocations.” I have visited in hospitals and nursing homes and observed nurse’s aides who have great joy in their work. It is not easy work and the pay is not great and the hours can be long and you don’t necessarily get off for holidays because hospitals and nursing homes don’t close for holidays. Those who stay at it for a long time usually do so because it is a calling, and they are performing a very real ministry.
Parker Palmer tells of the time he went to a college to lead a workshop on teaching. Early on, he was warned about the curmudgeonly Professor X. Professor X would come to the workshop, he was told, but likely only to debunk whatever was said.
As the workshop began, Palmer asked the teachers to tell the group about a mentor, someone who had taught them how to teach. The teachers related many stories, some very moving stories. After several people had gone, Professor X began to speak, not in the cranky tones his colleagues were used to hearing, but in a voice full of sadness and regret. He confessed that for twenty years he had been trying to mimic his mentor's teaching style, and the results had been disastrous. His teaching wasn’t working because he was trying to be someone he was not. Twenty years into his career it was just starting to dawn on Professor X that what he was doing was not his life. Palmer speaks of “listening to your life” as a way of recognizing God’s call.
That can be hard. And sometimes, listening to our life – listening to the way that God is leading and guiding us – can be costly. It can sometimes cost us – in comfort, in security, in popularity, perhaps in the kind of paycheck we earn.
Historian Howard Zinn died this week. Zinn once made this statement that I think has to do with listening to our life and listening to God’s call. He said,
I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them...Prophets have been called a lot of things, but a successful cog in the wheel is not one of them. Now, a person may wind up making what we might think of as very traditional and conventional choices in life. And that is fine, that is well and good as long as that is where a person finds joy and meaning and that is where a person can best make a contribution. The point is that rather than just going through the motions and being a part of the herd, we need to be open to the surprising ways God may lead us.
Our New Testament scripture was I Corinthians 13, a very familiar passage. We remember the part about love – love is patient and kind, it dos not envy or boast, and so on. But we may not remember so well the latter part – about our knowledge being only partial. We see through a glass dimly. Since we don’t know everything, the best we can do is to be loving. This applies to our own lives. We don’t know which way our lives will turn and we don’t know how God may use us. This also means we don’t know how God may use another, and we should be very careful about judging another’s call. I have heard men say out loud, “God can’t be calling you because you are a woman.” I think that people who say things like that need to pay attention to their own calling.
We need to “listen to our lives,” as Parker Palmer puts it. We need to be open to God’s call. Those whom God called in the Bible were often as not the last ones you would expect. He called poor speakers like Moses and and shepherd boys like David and prostitutes like Rahab and mere youth like Jeremiah and a herdsman and vinedresser like Amos and a young peasant girl like Mary.
Look at Jesus: he begins his ministry by assembling a motley group of fishermen, tax collectors, political radicals and assorted peasants. He turns to the twelve of them and says, “I’m going to take over the world. Guess who’s going to help me?”
God can use us all, and there is a calling for each of us. And there is joy and fulfillment in claiming our call:
- Calls to serve in ordained ministry.
- Calls to work with youth or preschoolers or older adults.
- Calls to attend to the church’s physical facility.
- Calls to work with the finances of the church.
- Calls to serve as a deacon.
But not only calls to work in the church, calls to serve outside the church:
- Calls to work with the homeless and the hungry.
- Calls to be counselors and mental health workers.
- Calls to care for the earth.
- Calls to be good accountants and bankers and teachers and scientists and doctors and electricians.
- Calls to be caring and honest and ethical and trustworthy people wherever we work.
- Calls to be good moms and dads and grandparents, calls to care for aging parents, calls to be good neighbors.
- And sometimes, calls to be a prophet like Jeremiah, pointing out injustice and working for what is right.
thank you to Evelyn McLachlan and Marilyn McDonald for contribution on the "Midrash" list.
Friday, January 22, 2010
"Really Believing" - January 24, 2010
Text: Luke 4:14-31
Many of us, perhaps most of us, have had some experience with our speech being evaluated. I am somewhat used to this, because in a sense my speech is evaluated each Sunday. Not everyone actually makes a comment, but by the looks on people’s faces and by the number who fall asleep or stay awake, there is an evaluation of sorts going on. That reminds me of the church I served where they only had one functioning radio headset for folks with hearing difficulties. One Sunday, Lorene asked Fred if he wanted to use it and he said, “That’s OK, you take it. I think I’ll sleep this morning.”
At any rate, what we say gets critiqued. Maybe you teach a class or present a paper at a conference. You take a speech class or you are on the debate team. You make a sales presentation or lead a workshop or teach Sunday School. You come up with a persuasive way to ask mom and dad for the car. Most of us have some experience with our speech being evaluated, whether we get actual formal feedback or not.
Our scripture for today is Jesus’ first sermon recorded in Luke. He has a limited amount of preaching experience and he’s giving one of his first sermons. But those present are not just evaluating the sermon; they are evaluating him.
Jesus had been a big hit in Capernaum. Stories were starting to circulate about how he was healing people and about what a captivating teacher he was. And so when he came home to Nazareth and went to the synagogue, the place was packed. Everyone was excited to see Jesus and hear what he had to say. These people knew him. They wanted him to do well. They were predisposed to give him a favorable evaluation.
And beyond the personal connections they had, folks were genuinely enthused about what Jesus’ success might mean to their community. It wasn’t easy living in Nazareth. There were heathens all around. Phoenicians lived to the west and north, Samaritans to the south, Greeks to the west. Nazareth was far from the good influence of Jerusalem and surrounded by these pagans. It was hard to be a good, pious Jew in the city of Nazareth. It’s no wonder that Nathaniel asked Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was not an easy place for a Jew to grow up. A religious leader coming from Nazareth could be a great thing for the city.
In synagogue worship, all adult male members were eligible to read the scripture and comment. It was a fairly informal service, as opposed to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. There was only one temple, but all it took to form a synagogue was ten male members. The service consisted of prayers, reading scripture, comments on the scripture, and almsgiving.
On this day, Jesus was invited to read the scripture. He opened the scroll of Isaiah and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. That was the custom – one didn’t stand at the pulpit to speak, one sat. All eyes were on Jesus. There was great anticipation. Everyone was eager to hear what he had to say. And this is what he said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Wow. Not what they expected, exactly – Jesus seemed to be taking a bit more pastoral authority than one would expect from a fledgling preacher – but he sounded great. This was Jesus, one of their own. People commented on how well he spoke, how proud they were. Although there were some other thoughts behind these kind words for Jesus.
For one thing, there was some question about his scripture reading. He read from Isaiah chapter 61, which was all well and good, but he failed to finish the verse. He mentioned “the day of the Lord’s favor,” but he left out the next part, about “the day of vengeance of our God.” He spoke of good news for the poor, release, recovery, freedom, and the Lord’s favor, but left out vengeance. What was that about? Where was the vengeance? Was Jesus weak on sin?
And even more on the minds of people were subtle questions about whether Jesus had gotten too big for his britches. “Isn’t this Joseph and Mary’s boy?” they asked—and the implication was, how could Joe and Mary’s boy be talking like this?
So while Jesus was outwardly well received, there was some latent criticism. And as Jesus continued with the sermon, the negative response grew stronger, much stronger.
Jesus was aware of the criticisms and questions. But rather than quieting the crowd with a moving, inspirational sermon, Jesus is in the crowd’s face. “No doubt you are going to quote to me the proverb, “Doctor, heal yourself,” and you are going to want me to do in my hometown the things I did in Capernaum. Well, I know that no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
Like this is going to win over the crowd. Fred Craddock says that the opening of a sermon is like driving a bus. As you start off, you’re just trying to get everybody on board so that they will take the trip with you, and so you want to connect with the hearers. Obviously, Jesus had not read Fred Craddock’s book.
It gets worse. Jesus goes on to remind the crowd of instances in which God’s favor is shown not to good Israelites, but to dirty foreigners! “Remember when there was a severe famine, and Elijah went not to one of the Hebrew widows, but the poor widow at Zarephath in Sidon, and she was the hero of the story? Or remember when there were many lepers in Israel, but the leper who was healed was Naaman the Syrian?”
What is Jesus thinking? It is one thing to be provocative; it’s another to be stupid. These are people surrounded by Gentiles. These are people who are trying hard to be good Jews, but Jesus, one of their own, a hometown boy, is talking up foreigners! What’s the use of having a hometown Messiah if it’s not going to benefit the hometown? Jesus was disrespectful -- and what’s more, he was just wrong. These were isolated incidents – yes, God could on occasion show favor to other nations, but this was their God, not the Phoenicians’, not the Syrians’, not the Samaritans’. Where did Jesus get off? To stay with Fred Craddock’s transportation image, Jesus throws them under the bus.
The crowd became enraged. Jesus had essentially shown himself to be a false prophet by blaspheming the faithful, pious Jews and praising the sinful, pagan Gentiles. The punishment for false prophecy is death. They chased him to the edge of town and intended to throw him off the cliff there. That was the plan. Luke does not tell us how exactly, but Jesus was able to walk away.
Now, I have on occasion had adverse reaction to a sermon. Some folks will tell me when they think I’ve got it wrong, and I generally appreciate that – it then means something when they tell me I’ve got it right. But while folks have taken issue on occasion, I have never had an angry mob after me. I’m not necessarily proud of that - part of me thinks that if we were really preaching the gospel, we would have more angry mobs. If we preached like Jesus, more people would get mad.
You’ve got to admit: Jesus did get the crowd’s attention. They took notice. But if Jesus wanted to stay in the business long, this was definitely not the way to go about it.
There were good reasons the people in Jesus’ hometown reacted so strongly. First, there was the problem of familiarity. They knew Jesus—or they thought they did. This was the kid they had watched grow up, the boy who had worked with his father in the carpenter’s shop. What reason did he have to think he could just come in and tell them the way it was?
Jesus’ words were harsh, but it were someone else, they may have been a little easier to digest. If some outside expert had come in with a good PowerPoint presentation, it might have gone over better. But Jesus was one of their own. The problem was that their proximity and familiarity tended to blind them. Having known Jesus for years, having seen him in all kinds of situations, they just could not recognize him as a prophet. Certainly not as a messiah.
I wonder if we sometimes have that same problem. Jesus can be too familiar. Too much of a pal, too much “our” guy. Have you ever noticed all the paintings of Jesus that have him as a blond, blue-haired white guy? Have you noticed that we tend to attribute to Jesus good middle-class American values? Have you noticed how easy it is to make Jesus into somebody who could easily serve on the board of the Chamber of Commerce? Familiarity can blind us. Jesus is a friend, yes, a friend who is always with us. But Jesus is not our lackey.
Familiarity wasn’t the biggest problem. Perhaps a bigger issue was resentment that Jesus had taken God’s favor to others – others whom they didn’t care for. Capernaum, where Jesus had already had success, had a strong non-Jewish population. And his stories about the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian didn’t help at all.
You know what really got them? You know what was the worst thing? The worst thing was, Jesus really believed this stuff. He took it all just a little bit too seriously. He quotes Isaiah, talking about release of the captives and restoring sight to the blind and all that stuff. They liked that – it was a very nice sentiment. But Jesus really, truly, seriously believed this. He really did believe in good news for the poor – even for a poor widow of Zarapeth. He really did believe in healing – even for a Syrian like Namaan. Jesus wasn’t putting a limit on it. And he really did believe that he was somehow called by God to bring about this healing and recovery and release and Good News.
There was a strong reaction because Jesus’ preaching confronted them with truth they did not want to face. They wanted a manageable Messiah, a savior that could be controlled. They did not want someone barging in to remind them of a part of their own tradition that they would just as soon forget: that God’s favor extended beyond the confines of Israel. At the root of it all, they were offended by God’s grace, grace toward those of whom they did not approve.
You know, we can be just like the folks in Jesus’ hometown. We can feel under siege, like the good people of Nazareth: dominated by the powers-that-be, surrounded by pagan influences, lax morals, and power-mongering corporations. We can feel under siege, as though things are out of control, and we want God to be on our side. And God is with us. But like the people of Nazareth, we can be offended that God’s grace embraces those who are different from us.
We want a Messiah we can manage. We want a savior that we can control. What we don’t want is an unpredictable messiah. What we don’t want is a savior who will challenge us and maybe even change us.
It is worth noting that the very first word Jesus utters in the gospel of Luke is “today.” Not yesterday, not someday, but today. He begins not by dwelling on the past or dreaming of the future, he begins right here, right now, today. Today this scripture has come to pass. That is challenging.
There is a big difference between seeing the Bible as beautiful words and lofty thoughts and seeing it as making actual demands on us, calling for action here and now.
In her book The Case For God, Karen Armstrong argues that over the centuries, religion has been much more about what people do than simply what they think. Faith really can’t be understood, she says, unless it is lived. She wrote,
It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. The rules of a board game sound obscure, unnecessarily complicated, and dull until you start to play, when everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice, but if you persevere, you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible.
Jesus challenged his hometown congregation that their faith be about more than reading lofty scriptures. Living out this faith, making it a part of your life, could cause some discomfort.
Years ago Johnny Cash recorded the song “Man in Black.” Some of the words went like this:
It was a hard message. And Jesus was absolutely right: prophets find little honor in their hometown.
Many of us, perhaps most of us, have had some experience with our speech being evaluated. I am somewhat used to this, because in a sense my speech is evaluated each Sunday. Not everyone actually makes a comment, but by the looks on people’s faces and by the number who fall asleep or stay awake, there is an evaluation of sorts going on. That reminds me of the church I served where they only had one functioning radio headset for folks with hearing difficulties. One Sunday, Lorene asked Fred if he wanted to use it and he said, “That’s OK, you take it. I think I’ll sleep this morning.”
At any rate, what we say gets critiqued. Maybe you teach a class or present a paper at a conference. You take a speech class or you are on the debate team. You make a sales presentation or lead a workshop or teach Sunday School. You come up with a persuasive way to ask mom and dad for the car. Most of us have some experience with our speech being evaluated, whether we get actual formal feedback or not.
Our scripture for today is Jesus’ first sermon recorded in Luke. He has a limited amount of preaching experience and he’s giving one of his first sermons. But those present are not just evaluating the sermon; they are evaluating him.
Jesus had been a big hit in Capernaum. Stories were starting to circulate about how he was healing people and about what a captivating teacher he was. And so when he came home to Nazareth and went to the synagogue, the place was packed. Everyone was excited to see Jesus and hear what he had to say. These people knew him. They wanted him to do well. They were predisposed to give him a favorable evaluation.
And beyond the personal connections they had, folks were genuinely enthused about what Jesus’ success might mean to their community. It wasn’t easy living in Nazareth. There were heathens all around. Phoenicians lived to the west and north, Samaritans to the south, Greeks to the west. Nazareth was far from the good influence of Jerusalem and surrounded by these pagans. It was hard to be a good, pious Jew in the city of Nazareth. It’s no wonder that Nathaniel asked Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was not an easy place for a Jew to grow up. A religious leader coming from Nazareth could be a great thing for the city.
In synagogue worship, all adult male members were eligible to read the scripture and comment. It was a fairly informal service, as opposed to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. There was only one temple, but all it took to form a synagogue was ten male members. The service consisted of prayers, reading scripture, comments on the scripture, and almsgiving.
On this day, Jesus was invited to read the scripture. He opened the scroll of Isaiah and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. That was the custom – one didn’t stand at the pulpit to speak, one sat. All eyes were on Jesus. There was great anticipation. Everyone was eager to hear what he had to say. And this is what he said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Wow. Not what they expected, exactly – Jesus seemed to be taking a bit more pastoral authority than one would expect from a fledgling preacher – but he sounded great. This was Jesus, one of their own. People commented on how well he spoke, how proud they were. Although there were some other thoughts behind these kind words for Jesus.
For one thing, there was some question about his scripture reading. He read from Isaiah chapter 61, which was all well and good, but he failed to finish the verse. He mentioned “the day of the Lord’s favor,” but he left out the next part, about “the day of vengeance of our God.” He spoke of good news for the poor, release, recovery, freedom, and the Lord’s favor, but left out vengeance. What was that about? Where was the vengeance? Was Jesus weak on sin?
And even more on the minds of people were subtle questions about whether Jesus had gotten too big for his britches. “Isn’t this Joseph and Mary’s boy?” they asked—and the implication was, how could Joe and Mary’s boy be talking like this?
So while Jesus was outwardly well received, there was some latent criticism. And as Jesus continued with the sermon, the negative response grew stronger, much stronger.
Jesus was aware of the criticisms and questions. But rather than quieting the crowd with a moving, inspirational sermon, Jesus is in the crowd’s face. “No doubt you are going to quote to me the proverb, “Doctor, heal yourself,” and you are going to want me to do in my hometown the things I did in Capernaum. Well, I know that no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
Like this is going to win over the crowd. Fred Craddock says that the opening of a sermon is like driving a bus. As you start off, you’re just trying to get everybody on board so that they will take the trip with you, and so you want to connect with the hearers. Obviously, Jesus had not read Fred Craddock’s book.
It gets worse. Jesus goes on to remind the crowd of instances in which God’s favor is shown not to good Israelites, but to dirty foreigners! “Remember when there was a severe famine, and Elijah went not to one of the Hebrew widows, but the poor widow at Zarephath in Sidon, and she was the hero of the story? Or remember when there were many lepers in Israel, but the leper who was healed was Naaman the Syrian?”
What is Jesus thinking? It is one thing to be provocative; it’s another to be stupid. These are people surrounded by Gentiles. These are people who are trying hard to be good Jews, but Jesus, one of their own, a hometown boy, is talking up foreigners! What’s the use of having a hometown Messiah if it’s not going to benefit the hometown? Jesus was disrespectful -- and what’s more, he was just wrong. These were isolated incidents – yes, God could on occasion show favor to other nations, but this was their God, not the Phoenicians’, not the Syrians’, not the Samaritans’. Where did Jesus get off? To stay with Fred Craddock’s transportation image, Jesus throws them under the bus.
The crowd became enraged. Jesus had essentially shown himself to be a false prophet by blaspheming the faithful, pious Jews and praising the sinful, pagan Gentiles. The punishment for false prophecy is death. They chased him to the edge of town and intended to throw him off the cliff there. That was the plan. Luke does not tell us how exactly, but Jesus was able to walk away.
Now, I have on occasion had adverse reaction to a sermon. Some folks will tell me when they think I’ve got it wrong, and I generally appreciate that – it then means something when they tell me I’ve got it right. But while folks have taken issue on occasion, I have never had an angry mob after me. I’m not necessarily proud of that - part of me thinks that if we were really preaching the gospel, we would have more angry mobs. If we preached like Jesus, more people would get mad.
You’ve got to admit: Jesus did get the crowd’s attention. They took notice. But if Jesus wanted to stay in the business long, this was definitely not the way to go about it.
There were good reasons the people in Jesus’ hometown reacted so strongly. First, there was the problem of familiarity. They knew Jesus—or they thought they did. This was the kid they had watched grow up, the boy who had worked with his father in the carpenter’s shop. What reason did he have to think he could just come in and tell them the way it was?
Jesus’ words were harsh, but it were someone else, they may have been a little easier to digest. If some outside expert had come in with a good PowerPoint presentation, it might have gone over better. But Jesus was one of their own. The problem was that their proximity and familiarity tended to blind them. Having known Jesus for years, having seen him in all kinds of situations, they just could not recognize him as a prophet. Certainly not as a messiah.
I wonder if we sometimes have that same problem. Jesus can be too familiar. Too much of a pal, too much “our” guy. Have you ever noticed all the paintings of Jesus that have him as a blond, blue-haired white guy? Have you noticed that we tend to attribute to Jesus good middle-class American values? Have you noticed how easy it is to make Jesus into somebody who could easily serve on the board of the Chamber of Commerce? Familiarity can blind us. Jesus is a friend, yes, a friend who is always with us. But Jesus is not our lackey.
Familiarity wasn’t the biggest problem. Perhaps a bigger issue was resentment that Jesus had taken God’s favor to others – others whom they didn’t care for. Capernaum, where Jesus had already had success, had a strong non-Jewish population. And his stories about the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian didn’t help at all.
You know what really got them? You know what was the worst thing? The worst thing was, Jesus really believed this stuff. He took it all just a little bit too seriously. He quotes Isaiah, talking about release of the captives and restoring sight to the blind and all that stuff. They liked that – it was a very nice sentiment. But Jesus really, truly, seriously believed this. He really did believe in good news for the poor – even for a poor widow of Zarapeth. He really did believe in healing – even for a Syrian like Namaan. Jesus wasn’t putting a limit on it. And he really did believe that he was somehow called by God to bring about this healing and recovery and release and Good News.
There was a strong reaction because Jesus’ preaching confronted them with truth they did not want to face. They wanted a manageable Messiah, a savior that could be controlled. They did not want someone barging in to remind them of a part of their own tradition that they would just as soon forget: that God’s favor extended beyond the confines of Israel. At the root of it all, they were offended by God’s grace, grace toward those of whom they did not approve.
You know, we can be just like the folks in Jesus’ hometown. We can feel under siege, like the good people of Nazareth: dominated by the powers-that-be, surrounded by pagan influences, lax morals, and power-mongering corporations. We can feel under siege, as though things are out of control, and we want God to be on our side. And God is with us. But like the people of Nazareth, we can be offended that God’s grace embraces those who are different from us.
We want a Messiah we can manage. We want a savior that we can control. What we don’t want is an unpredictable messiah. What we don’t want is a savior who will challenge us and maybe even change us.
It is worth noting that the very first word Jesus utters in the gospel of Luke is “today.” Not yesterday, not someday, but today. He begins not by dwelling on the past or dreaming of the future, he begins right here, right now, today. Today this scripture has come to pass. That is challenging.
There is a big difference between seeing the Bible as beautiful words and lofty thoughts and seeing it as making actual demands on us, calling for action here and now.
In her book The Case For God, Karen Armstrong argues that over the centuries, religion has been much more about what people do than simply what they think. Faith really can’t be understood, she says, unless it is lived. She wrote,
It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. The rules of a board game sound obscure, unnecessarily complicated, and dull until you start to play, when everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice, but if you persevere, you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible.
Jesus challenged his hometown congregation that their faith be about more than reading lofty scriptures. Living out this faith, making it a part of your life, could cause some discomfort.
Years ago Johnny Cash recorded the song “Man in Black.” Some of the words went like this:
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read,Jesus came into his hometown synagogue and challenged his hometown congregation. The challenge was to really believe and really act on the words they read and spoke in worship each week. The challenge was to show their faith in their living, through compassion that reached out to those in need, to those most vulnerable, to those who were different than they were.
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.
Well, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought ‘a be a Man In Black.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin' everywhere you go,
But ‘til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.
It was a hard message. And Jesus was absolutely right: prophets find little honor in their hometown.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Water to Wine - January 17, 2010
Text: John 2:1-11
Sometimes things go wrong at church. We all know this. Well, things go wrong everywhere, to be sure, but when things go wrong in worship, the seriousness and solemnity of the occasion magnifies everything. We try so hard to do things decently and in order, and when things do not go as planned, it can be painfully obvious.
Exhibit A for things that go wrong at church would have to be weddings. Stuff just seems to happen at weddings.
A lot of these are small things. I had a groomsman, the younger brother of the groom, lock his knees and eventually pass out. Not necessarily funny, especially if you are the one passing out, but certainly memorable. There was the wedding where the bride and groom were trying to light the unity candle and the bride dropped her candle on the open Bible. A Bible up in flames is not the image you want to begin your marriage. There was a wedding rehearsal where I was off in a side room with the groom and groomsmen, waiting to enter the sanctuary when the organist began the processional. There was a woman at the rehearsal who seemed to be semi- in charge of things, but she was not one of the mothers. So I asked who the woman in the orange dress was, and one of the groomsman let out an expletive to describe this woman. That’s when I remembered my microphone was on. We were all pretty scared for a moment there, but fortunately, nobody paid attention to much of anything at this rehearsal, and no one heard what this guy said.
One of the best examples of things going wrong at a wedding was a time when the bride and groom were to come down the aisle to recorded music. The song was by Luther Vandross, “Here and Now.” “Here and now, I promise to love faithfully.” It’s not what we had at our wedding, but it’s a nice song and the sentiment is certainly appropriate for a wedding.
Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. The usher who was to unroll the aisle runner, an uncle of the bride, was nowhere to be found. We waited and waited, but this guy was out taking a smoke or something. Finally, the maid of honor looked at the best man and said, “Eddie’s gone. We need to do the aisle runner.” The best man said “I’m not doing it,” so the maid of honor muttered a couple of choice words and said that she was going to do it, and she did. She pulled the runner all the way down the aisle, unrolling it.
The problem was that by the time that was done and the maid of honor was back in her place and the bride and her father were ready to enter the sanctuary, the song was over. The cassette – this was back in the olden days – went on to the next song. The next song was, “Love the One You’re With.” Not what most brides choose to come down the aisle to.
Well, we have all witnessed things go wrong at weddings. And this is by no means a recent phenomenon.
Our text this morning is from John chapter two. In the first chapter of John’s gospel, we have the prologue, which speaks of Jesus as the Word become flesh; then Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist; and then he begins to call his disciples, Andrew and Simon and Philip and Nathaniel.
Then we come to our text for today. After these kinds of preliminary stories, the first thing we see Jesus doing is attending a wedding. We are told that Jesus’ mother was there, and then we are told that Jesus and his disciples were also invited, making it sound as though Mary was a close friend of the couple, and Jesus not so much. Incidentally, Mary is never mentioned by name in John, she is always referred to as “the mother of Jesus.” So Jesus and his disciples are at the wedding, Jesus’ mother is there, and as it turns out, something has gone badly wrong.
Now we need to step back for a second to understand what weddings were like. There was no ceremony like we have today; the wedding was basically a weeklong party. Seven days of eating and drinking and dancing and visiting and celebrating.
The wedding was all about joyous celebration with family and friends. The poor, which included most of the population, rarely ate like this. Most had cheese and bread and olive oil for their daily fare, with water to drink. Of course, the water was often of poor quality, but that is what they had. Wine was a cash crop and while many worked in the production of wine, the poor had little wine to drink, just as they had little meat to eat. But a wedding was different. A wedding was a time for extravagance. A family would scrimp and save for some time in order to do it right. Sheep and calves and every delicacy would be served, and there would be wine in profusion.
The setting was the third day, or a Tuesday. It does not say how long this wedding had been going on, but in mid-course, far before the wedding is to be over, the wine runs out. Mary seems to be a close friend of the family – one tradition is that she was the groom’s aunt. She learns that the wine is about to run out and reports this to Jesus.
For the wine to run out in mid-party would be a great embarrassment. People would talk about it for years to come. “Remember the Cohen wedding, when the wine ran out? What a disaster. How embarrassing that must have been for them!!”
For the family, this would have been a social faux pas, a great embarrassment. But Jesus does not seem that concerned. His response to his mother seems rather harsh. “Woman, what concern is this of ours? My time has not yet come.” It’s not our problem, and besides, it is not yet time for my glory to be shown. Jesus can only act according to God’s plan and timing.
But Mary seems to have no doubts about it. “Do whatever he tells you,” she says to the servants. Again, this seems to indicate that Mary was close to the family, an insider, giving instructions to servers.
And despite whatever misgivings he may have had, Jesus acts. There were six very large stone jars used to hold for Jewish rites of purification. Jesus told the servants to fill them, all the way to the brim, and then draw some out and give it to the chief steward.
And the water had become wine. Not just any wine, but fine wine, far better than what had been served up until that point. The steward was amazed. Everybody serves the good stuff first, and then when everybody’s sense are dulled a bit they bring out inferior wine. But he says to the bridegroom, “You have saved the good wine until now!” Of course, the groom didn’t know what he was talking about, but he wasn’t going to let on.
And did you catch how much wine we are talking about? There were six stone jars that each held 20 or 30 gallons - something like 150 gallons. To put this in perspective, this is on the order of 900 standard size bottles of wine. A lot of wine has already been served, and now they break out 900 bottles of fine wine for this village wedding. When Jesus supplies a need, he really supplies a need.
It wouldn’t take much reflection here to criticize Jesus’ action. Sure, it might be a embarrassing to not provide the proper hospitality at a wedding, but did it call for a miracle? In fact, maybe it would have been better to do nothing. Maybe having the wine run out would teach them a good lesson about the need to plan wisely. How else would they learn? There have been too many bailouts already. It was their own fault, and they did not deserve a miracle. And in the big picture of things, wasn’t this a small matter?
Well, perhaps. It wasn’t a life or death circumstance, but it mattered to someone. And that is important. If it matters to someone, then it matters to Jesus. If it matters to you, it matters to Jesus.
It is interesting that Jesus’ first miracle, or sign as John calls it, is not some big splashy pyrotechnic kind of event. He is not raising someone from the dead, it is not a public healing, he doesn’t feed the 5000 or calm the storm or walk on water. In fact, hardly anyone even knows about it. Mary and the servants and Jesus disciples are the only ones in on it. The bride and groom don’t know, the guests don’t know, the chief steward who discovers that the good wine has been saved for later does not know. The miracle is not for public consumption. Jesus simply sees a need and responds. Or more accurately, a need is pointed out to him and he responds.
And maybe that is for the best. Miracles are not just for those extraordinary moments. Miracles are not just for the holiest persons among us. But perhaps, each day is filled with miracles if only we will look and listen. How many times a day are we blessed in ways we don’t even realize? How many miracles are there around us of which we are unaware?
Albert Einstein once commented, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Perhaps there are miracles all around us, miracles in abundance. And it is important for us to know that even those matters which are not life and death are important to Jesus. If it matters to us, it matters to Jesus.
I think it is worth thinking about that Jesus takes the stone jars intended for ritual cleansing and uses them in a different way. Empty jars used to fulfill the law are filled with water-turned-to-wine. Wine was a symbol of holy joy, of deep gladness, of celebration, a symbol of life.
In Jesus, God supplies our needs in abundance and pours out blessing. In Matthew, Jesus said, “I did not come to abolish the law but fulfill the law.” The law is fulfilled in Jesus, who pours out grace.
While John calls this a sign, it is not a sign for everybody. Jesus is not trying to show off, he is not trying to impress the crowds. As we think about Dr. King this weekend, you may remember his sermon on “The Drum Major Instinct.” He said that the showy drum major types who wants to lead the parade is no more or less important than anyone else. It takes everyone to create a parade, it takes everyone working together to create a community. And Dr. King said that Jesus gave us the model for greatness: “The one who wants to be great among you shall be your servant. And that means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve… Everybody with a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.”
As we gather together today, our thoughts are with the people of Haiti. It is heartbreaking to see people who have so little, who already live with great hardship, suffer such a tragedy.
What might this text say in such a situation?
The people of Haiti are not just out of wine at a wedding. It is far beyond that kind of need. They are out of food and water. They are out of medicine. They are out of the basic necessities. They have lost their homes. They have lost loved ones. People are desperate. Many are out of hope.
At the wedding in Cana, the need gave Jesus an opportunity to act. And we as the Body of Christ have an opportunity to act today. By coming together and sharing out of our abundance, we can meet the needs of those who are hurting.
Steve and Nancy James are American Baptist missionaries in Haiti. Steve is a medical doctor and Nancy is a nurse. They are working with the Haitian Baptist Convention to treat those who are suffering and to plan a sustained response. Kristy Engel is an ABC missionary in the Dominican Republic. She happens to be an Iowa native and is a nurse practitioner working at the Good Samaritan Hospital in La Romana. She is putting together a medical team that will soon be in Haiti. Other medical teams are preparing to go from the U.S. American Baptists have sent funds to the Haitian Baptist Convention and to Church World Service for emergency relief.
We can help by making financial contributions. There are a variety of ways to give, as I’m sure you are aware. Gifts through our One Great Hour of Sharing offering go 100% to emergency relief, and you can simply make a check to our church with the notation OGHS-Haiti.
The other way to tangibly help at this time is to make relief kits that we will send to Church World Service, the ecumenical relief agency that we work through. There is information on the bulletin board and we will have more details in the Spire, which will go out this week.
The message of Jesus turning the water into wine is that in God, there is abundance. There is enough. There is plenty.
Jesus modeled servanthood. In his first miracle, he met a very real need – not a life and death situation, though he surely cared about such needs, but a very human need. And he met the need without fanfare, without calling attention to himself. In doing so he gives us a picture of the abundance of God’s love. We are invited to share in that abundance – and we are invited to share with others out of that abundance. May it be so. Amen.
Sometimes things go wrong at church. We all know this. Well, things go wrong everywhere, to be sure, but when things go wrong in worship, the seriousness and solemnity of the occasion magnifies everything. We try so hard to do things decently and in order, and when things do not go as planned, it can be painfully obvious.
Exhibit A for things that go wrong at church would have to be weddings. Stuff just seems to happen at weddings.
A lot of these are small things. I had a groomsman, the younger brother of the groom, lock his knees and eventually pass out. Not necessarily funny, especially if you are the one passing out, but certainly memorable. There was the wedding where the bride and groom were trying to light the unity candle and the bride dropped her candle on the open Bible. A Bible up in flames is not the image you want to begin your marriage. There was a wedding rehearsal where I was off in a side room with the groom and groomsmen, waiting to enter the sanctuary when the organist began the processional. There was a woman at the rehearsal who seemed to be semi- in charge of things, but she was not one of the mothers. So I asked who the woman in the orange dress was, and one of the groomsman let out an expletive to describe this woman. That’s when I remembered my microphone was on. We were all pretty scared for a moment there, but fortunately, nobody paid attention to much of anything at this rehearsal, and no one heard what this guy said.
One of the best examples of things going wrong at a wedding was a time when the bride and groom were to come down the aisle to recorded music. The song was by Luther Vandross, “Here and Now.” “Here and now, I promise to love faithfully.” It’s not what we had at our wedding, but it’s a nice song and the sentiment is certainly appropriate for a wedding.
Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. The usher who was to unroll the aisle runner, an uncle of the bride, was nowhere to be found. We waited and waited, but this guy was out taking a smoke or something. Finally, the maid of honor looked at the best man and said, “Eddie’s gone. We need to do the aisle runner.” The best man said “I’m not doing it,” so the maid of honor muttered a couple of choice words and said that she was going to do it, and she did. She pulled the runner all the way down the aisle, unrolling it.
The problem was that by the time that was done and the maid of honor was back in her place and the bride and her father were ready to enter the sanctuary, the song was over. The cassette – this was back in the olden days – went on to the next song. The next song was, “Love the One You’re With.” Not what most brides choose to come down the aisle to.
Well, we have all witnessed things go wrong at weddings. And this is by no means a recent phenomenon.
Our text this morning is from John chapter two. In the first chapter of John’s gospel, we have the prologue, which speaks of Jesus as the Word become flesh; then Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist; and then he begins to call his disciples, Andrew and Simon and Philip and Nathaniel.
Then we come to our text for today. After these kinds of preliminary stories, the first thing we see Jesus doing is attending a wedding. We are told that Jesus’ mother was there, and then we are told that Jesus and his disciples were also invited, making it sound as though Mary was a close friend of the couple, and Jesus not so much. Incidentally, Mary is never mentioned by name in John, she is always referred to as “the mother of Jesus.” So Jesus and his disciples are at the wedding, Jesus’ mother is there, and as it turns out, something has gone badly wrong.
Now we need to step back for a second to understand what weddings were like. There was no ceremony like we have today; the wedding was basically a weeklong party. Seven days of eating and drinking and dancing and visiting and celebrating.
The wedding was all about joyous celebration with family and friends. The poor, which included most of the population, rarely ate like this. Most had cheese and bread and olive oil for their daily fare, with water to drink. Of course, the water was often of poor quality, but that is what they had. Wine was a cash crop and while many worked in the production of wine, the poor had little wine to drink, just as they had little meat to eat. But a wedding was different. A wedding was a time for extravagance. A family would scrimp and save for some time in order to do it right. Sheep and calves and every delicacy would be served, and there would be wine in profusion.
The setting was the third day, or a Tuesday. It does not say how long this wedding had been going on, but in mid-course, far before the wedding is to be over, the wine runs out. Mary seems to be a close friend of the family – one tradition is that she was the groom’s aunt. She learns that the wine is about to run out and reports this to Jesus.
For the wine to run out in mid-party would be a great embarrassment. People would talk about it for years to come. “Remember the Cohen wedding, when the wine ran out? What a disaster. How embarrassing that must have been for them!!”
For the family, this would have been a social faux pas, a great embarrassment. But Jesus does not seem that concerned. His response to his mother seems rather harsh. “Woman, what concern is this of ours? My time has not yet come.” It’s not our problem, and besides, it is not yet time for my glory to be shown. Jesus can only act according to God’s plan and timing.
But Mary seems to have no doubts about it. “Do whatever he tells you,” she says to the servants. Again, this seems to indicate that Mary was close to the family, an insider, giving instructions to servers.
And despite whatever misgivings he may have had, Jesus acts. There were six very large stone jars used to hold for Jewish rites of purification. Jesus told the servants to fill them, all the way to the brim, and then draw some out and give it to the chief steward.
And the water had become wine. Not just any wine, but fine wine, far better than what had been served up until that point. The steward was amazed. Everybody serves the good stuff first, and then when everybody’s sense are dulled a bit they bring out inferior wine. But he says to the bridegroom, “You have saved the good wine until now!” Of course, the groom didn’t know what he was talking about, but he wasn’t going to let on.
And did you catch how much wine we are talking about? There were six stone jars that each held 20 or 30 gallons - something like 150 gallons. To put this in perspective, this is on the order of 900 standard size bottles of wine. A lot of wine has already been served, and now they break out 900 bottles of fine wine for this village wedding. When Jesus supplies a need, he really supplies a need.
It wouldn’t take much reflection here to criticize Jesus’ action. Sure, it might be a embarrassing to not provide the proper hospitality at a wedding, but did it call for a miracle? In fact, maybe it would have been better to do nothing. Maybe having the wine run out would teach them a good lesson about the need to plan wisely. How else would they learn? There have been too many bailouts already. It was their own fault, and they did not deserve a miracle. And in the big picture of things, wasn’t this a small matter?
Well, perhaps. It wasn’t a life or death circumstance, but it mattered to someone. And that is important. If it matters to someone, then it matters to Jesus. If it matters to you, it matters to Jesus.
It is interesting that Jesus’ first miracle, or sign as John calls it, is not some big splashy pyrotechnic kind of event. He is not raising someone from the dead, it is not a public healing, he doesn’t feed the 5000 or calm the storm or walk on water. In fact, hardly anyone even knows about it. Mary and the servants and Jesus disciples are the only ones in on it. The bride and groom don’t know, the guests don’t know, the chief steward who discovers that the good wine has been saved for later does not know. The miracle is not for public consumption. Jesus simply sees a need and responds. Or more accurately, a need is pointed out to him and he responds.
And maybe that is for the best. Miracles are not just for those extraordinary moments. Miracles are not just for the holiest persons among us. But perhaps, each day is filled with miracles if only we will look and listen. How many times a day are we blessed in ways we don’t even realize? How many miracles are there around us of which we are unaware?
Albert Einstein once commented, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Perhaps there are miracles all around us, miracles in abundance. And it is important for us to know that even those matters which are not life and death are important to Jesus. If it matters to us, it matters to Jesus.
I think it is worth thinking about that Jesus takes the stone jars intended for ritual cleansing and uses them in a different way. Empty jars used to fulfill the law are filled with water-turned-to-wine. Wine was a symbol of holy joy, of deep gladness, of celebration, a symbol of life.
In Jesus, God supplies our needs in abundance and pours out blessing. In Matthew, Jesus said, “I did not come to abolish the law but fulfill the law.” The law is fulfilled in Jesus, who pours out grace.
While John calls this a sign, it is not a sign for everybody. Jesus is not trying to show off, he is not trying to impress the crowds. As we think about Dr. King this weekend, you may remember his sermon on “The Drum Major Instinct.” He said that the showy drum major types who wants to lead the parade is no more or less important than anyone else. It takes everyone to create a parade, it takes everyone working together to create a community. And Dr. King said that Jesus gave us the model for greatness: “The one who wants to be great among you shall be your servant. And that means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve… Everybody with a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.”
As we gather together today, our thoughts are with the people of Haiti. It is heartbreaking to see people who have so little, who already live with great hardship, suffer such a tragedy.
What might this text say in such a situation?
The people of Haiti are not just out of wine at a wedding. It is far beyond that kind of need. They are out of food and water. They are out of medicine. They are out of the basic necessities. They have lost their homes. They have lost loved ones. People are desperate. Many are out of hope.
At the wedding in Cana, the need gave Jesus an opportunity to act. And we as the Body of Christ have an opportunity to act today. By coming together and sharing out of our abundance, we can meet the needs of those who are hurting.
Steve and Nancy James are American Baptist missionaries in Haiti. Steve is a medical doctor and Nancy is a nurse. They are working with the Haitian Baptist Convention to treat those who are suffering and to plan a sustained response. Kristy Engel is an ABC missionary in the Dominican Republic. She happens to be an Iowa native and is a nurse practitioner working at the Good Samaritan Hospital in La Romana. She is putting together a medical team that will soon be in Haiti. Other medical teams are preparing to go from the U.S. American Baptists have sent funds to the Haitian Baptist Convention and to Church World Service for emergency relief.
We can help by making financial contributions. There are a variety of ways to give, as I’m sure you are aware. Gifts through our One Great Hour of Sharing offering go 100% to emergency relief, and you can simply make a check to our church with the notation OGHS-Haiti.
The other way to tangibly help at this time is to make relief kits that we will send to Church World Service, the ecumenical relief agency that we work through. There is information on the bulletin board and we will have more details in the Spire, which will go out this week.
The message of Jesus turning the water into wine is that in God, there is abundance. There is enough. There is plenty.
Jesus modeled servanthood. In his first miracle, he met a very real need – not a life and death situation, though he surely cared about such needs, but a very human need. And he met the need without fanfare, without calling attention to himself. In doing so he gives us a picture of the abundance of God’s love. We are invited to share in that abundance – and we are invited to share with others out of that abundance. May it be so. Amen.
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