|
|
|
Mystic Congregational Church, UCC Mystic,
Connecticut Sermon
from January 22, 2006 “Call to
Discipleship” Rev.
Patricia L. Liberty Scriptures: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Mark 1:14-20 “Disciple”: Merriam
Webster defines it as one who subscribes to the teachings of a master and
assists in spreading their teaching or as an active adherent, as of a movement
or philosophy. It’s a noun that
comes from the Latin, discipulus meaning
pupil and discere, to learn.
Discipleship, they also say, is a noun
but I think it should be a verb. Mark’s
characteristic paucity of detail makes it difficult for us to know if Simon and
Andrew, James and John were active adherents of Jesus’ teaching or not.
The fact that we don’t know if they knew Jesus from a hole in the wall
makes their seemingly sudden willingness to leave everything and follow him that
much more dramatic. It also can leave us feeling somewhat wistful. In
my experience, this text often leads to the kind of guilty sigh, “Oh, would
that we were like these brave disciples who left everything to follow Jesus.” Well, yes, there’s that, but I think it blurs the text out
of focus a bit. It is not a text
about the great faithfulness of the disciples.
It is a text about four, ordinary fishermen being hit upside the head by
the grace and mystery of God. It’s
a God thing. When we make it into a
people thing, we get the guilty sigh. But
when we make it into a God thing, we can begin to talk about the intrusions of
grace into our own lives and then about how we respond to them. That
takes us back to Jonah, who depicts a pretty real human response to grace. As in, “No way, God!”
After Jonah makes it out of the belly of the whale, you may remember, the
second turn, he goes and preaches to the Ninehvites, they all repent, God
changes God’s mind about what’s going to happen, and Jonah is none
too pleased. So he goes off and
sulks. So there’s this Jonah
response and there’s the disciples’ response—they set out like Moses, not
knowing where they were going and not having much to go on, except a promise
from God and, in Moses’ case, a burning bush.
I
don’t’ know about you, but I’d be very happy with something as obvious as
a burning bush or a direct call from on high: “Hey, you!
Yeah, I’m talking to you! C’mon,
let’s go!” But for the most
part, God’s call in my life is manifest more as a series of glowing twigs than
burning bushes. So, in the absence
of burning bushes, copious amounts of whale spit, or a direct encounter with
Jesus, we’re left to ponder our own calls to discipleship, and how we respond
to them. One
of my favorite daily devotional books is titled, “Listening to Your Life” by
Frederick Buechner. The basic
premise of this book, and much of his Christian apologetics, is that God speaks
through our human experience—God known, first and foremost, through the stuff
of life. We hear God’s voice, see
God’s face, and know God’s truth in the nitty-gritty of life, the intrusions
of grace. Buechner
writes, “Someone we love dies. Some
unforeseen act of kindness or cruelty touches the heart or makes the blood run
cold. We fail a friend, or a friend
fails us, and we are appalled at the capacity we have for estranging the very
people in our lives we need the most. Or maybe nothing extraordinary happens at
all, just one day following another, helter-skelter in the manner of days.
We sleep and dream. We wake.
We work. We remember and
forget. We have fun and are
depressed. And into the thick of
it, or out of the thick of it, at moments of even the most humdrum of our days,
God speaks.” What
remains to be seen for all of us, he suggests, is how well we listen and
respond. Most of us are a little
sheepish talking about how God moves in our lives, and the language of call
these days, at least for the most part, is associated with the “professionally
religious”. If you hear anything
today that scares you, that should be it.
In
the United Church of Christ, people who are preparing for ordained ministry are
examined by the Church and Ministry Committee and, later, by the Ecclesiastical
Council. One of the
main components of the examination and the ordination paper is talking about
God’s call in their life. I’ve
often thought that church membership should have a similar component; as a way
of encouraging everyone to claim the language of call and the truth of God’s
movement in our lives. From the
moment of baptism, God’s call unfolds in our lives and it is not fulfilled
until we draw our last breath. God’s
call is mediated in the human experience in many different ways.
I doubt that Rosa Parks had any idea of what would be unleashed by her
faith-filled refusal to relinquish her seat to a white person on the Cleveland
Avenue bus after a long day of work at the Montgomery Fair Department store.
I doubt that Martin Luther King, Jr. had any idea that his support of a
rally during the ensuing bus boycott would propel him to the forefront of the
Civil Rights Movement. But
they are only two of countless examples in the saga of human history who take
that place as prophets who are inspired, as Daniel Clendenin wrote this week, to
choose risk over regret, urgency over complacency.
Sometimes God’s call in our lives comes as a passion for justice,
working for something that’s bigger than ourselves, an attachment to a cause
we believe in. Often, those
passions are attached to great pain. For
Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the hundreds of thousands of people who
joined them, this was not an academic debate about right and wrong; it was the
stuff of their very lives. Discipleship
is often born of great pain that is met by great faith.
Henri Nouwen suggests that, whether we are doing ministry in a dislocated
world or sitting with a dying person, our best service, our most faithful
witness, will be born of an authentic heart that is wounded by the suffering we
are trying to address. Our greatest
pain, when met with God’s grace, can be a source of great passion and great
ministry. In
the course of almost thirty years of ministry, I have been privileged to
accompany people in their journey through grief, as a facilitator in bereavement
groups. Time and time again, I
would witness people coming together as individuals feeling isolated, alone,
angry, devastated by sadness just trying to get through each day, wondering if
they were the only ones feeling as they were feeling.
As the weeks unfold and their truths were told, they became companions
for one another, encouraging, cajoling and comforting from places of their
common sadness. Sometimes, years
later, one or two would come back and become hospice volunteers, or train to
lead a group with me. Faithful
to their own journey through sadness, they became companions for others on
similar roads. As they wrenched
meaning from places of deep brokenness, they became symbols of hope for others. Sometimes
the call of God in our lives is mediated through other people.
In a very real sense, Simon and Andrew, James and John became disciples
because Jesus literally called them. As
with all the disciples, they were called because of what Jesus saw in them, not
what the world had made of them. By
the world’s standards, they were common, uneducated, rough-around-the-edges
fisher folks, very unlikely candidates for bearing the message of God.
But as I said earlier, their call to discipleship was about God’s
grace, not about their pedigree, or lack thereof. Jesus
clearly saw beyond appearances. Jesus
isn’t the only one who can do that. We
often do that for each other. Sometimes
we see in someone else, or someone sees in us something that is just waiting to
be called forth. As
a pastor, one of the most exciting things that happen is that I begin to see
gifts for ministry develop in people. Sometimes
it bends toward ordained ministry, often times not.
With young people especially, it can sometimes be quite comical.
When I suggest to a young person for the first time that I see gifts for
ministry in them, the response is often, “You must be joking.”
Sometimes that’s the end of it. Sometimes
it isn’t. A year later, or two or
six, while flipping pancakes or playing air hockey, a conversation starts.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said … about ministry … I
don’t know, but something about it stuck …Can we talk more?” There’s
a freedom in opening ourselves to a vision of life that is beyond what is dealt
to us by birth, social standing, education, age and all the other things that
our society uses to define us. That
freedom, as the gospel reminds us this morning though, is not to do as we
please. As Gawain de Leeuw writes,
“It's a journey on which we discover what it means to be loved by God.
It's a journey of true identity in which we move from understanding
ourselves as the world does to perceiving that God is giving us a heart and
calling us to something beyond ourselves.” Through
the voices of others who see us differently than we see ourselves, the paths we
have inherited have now been altered. We
now do not simply choose paths within or because of our identities, but because
of the heart that God gives us. He
goes on to saying, This
patchwork stole I wear from time to time is, for me, a very personal reminder of
that truth. After a period of
several years where I was doing everything I could think of to avoid my call to
ministry and struggle with it on all kinds of levels—I really just wanted to
do something else. As that time was
coming to an end and I came to a time of acceptance and willingness to continue,
I reflected on those people who were companions through the dark days. They listened, shared pieces of their own journey and
struggles, and gradually helped me feel the rhythms of grace in my own life once
again. I asked each of them for a
piece of fabric and then asked a friend to fashion it into a stole.
Each time I wear it, it is a reminder of how the tattered threads of
their lives and mine bear witness to the stream of grace that speaks through
deep pain and, often, gives birth to greater faithfulness. James
Alison tells the Irish joke in which a traveler asks, "How do I get to
Dublin?" and gets the response, "I don't know, but I wouldn't start
from here." Gratefully, that's
not what the life of discipleship is all about, and that's not the freedom that
comes as Jesus' gift. The call to
discipleship starts with where we are, with the stuff of our own lives in our
days. There’s a freedom that
comes in that—our greatest passions, our deepest pains, our greatest joys, our
silent dreams, our most profound brokenness, through the alchemy of God's grace,
become a call to discipleship that unfolds again and again and again. Amen. |