Off the Hook: Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany B

Many of you have probably heard the old Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

It’s a beautiful sentiment. But I have also seen the truth of its corollary: Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he will be gone the entire weekend.

There’s a lot of fishiness in this week’s readings, and hopefully, we are hooked into trying to learn more.

We start with just a snippet from the Book of Jonah. It’s unusual among the prophetic books. There are very few prophecies of his included. Instead it is a narrative of Jonah’s life. His life as a prophet is unique because in this book he is sent not to the people of Israel to correct their sins and shortcomings, but to the people of Israel’s oppressor—specifically, to the great city of Nineveh. A city Jonah hates, because it is the capital of Israel’s enemies, the Assyrians. So when Jonah is told by God to go offer his enemies salvation, he adamantly refuses and does everything he can to avoid it. I mean, a prophet who defies God. That’s some chutzpah. But in the end, to Nineveh he does go, and converts them with a single sentence. And in doing so, he learns that God’s mercy is wider than the widest sea.

In Mark’s gospel, which is notorious for using the word “immediately” dozens of times, Jesus converts two pairs of brothers with a single sentence, too. As I discussed this gospel with the vestry the other night, some of us contrarians reflected that the idea of fishing for people can seem rather negative. This image implies, after all, that maybe people should be baited, or hooked, or caught against their will. Fishing works by fooling the fish, or sneaking up on them unawares, after all. Not to mention the fact that fishing for a living, rather than when one does it as a hobby, is backbreaking work with no guarantee of success—and desperate, too, when fishing is a matter of survival.

When we survey the scope of scripture, being caught in a net is almost always a negative thing. A net is almost always portrayed as a trap. In the psalms, a net is what your enemies lay out to trip you up, to ensnare you. With that in mind, the idea of “fishing for people” can be seen as manipulative.

And sure, there are some faith communities that use gimmicks to ensnare people. There’s the obvious things, like offering childcare—I used to know a lot of parents who would send their kids to a local church in east Tulsa because it had a fleet of old school buses that would drive through the neighborhoods, and they could send the kids off to this church and get a couple of hours to themselves while the church kept the kids busy on a Sunday morning. I know other churches that advertise coffee bars, and climbing walls, and even Mixed Martial Arts bouts and fashion shows, or who play to the very attractive idea that those who DON’T belong to the church are losers, outsiders, cast off from God—like God’s love is an exclusive offer to only the right sort of people. Then there are churches where people go to make business connections, or to be “seen”—a story as old as time.

This week’s readings continue last week’s theme of being called by God and the mutual recognition that is involved in call, as we are given more depictions of being called by God and the various ways we can respond.

To review: we could respond with innocent eagerness, like the boy-prophet Samuel last week.

We can respond with skepticism, like Nathanael did last week in John’s gospel.

We can respond with a desperate and angry “NO!” until one gets FORCED to surrender, as in Jonah’s story--and surrender he does, but he resents the hell out of being forced to offer a chance for repentance to his most hated enemies.

Or we can respond with shocking abruptness, like our two sets of brothers in our reading from Mark. Here we see them drop everything that they are doing—leaving behind bewildered (and undoubtedly angry) fathers and unmended nets and following this stranger with a handful of words.

I don’t know about everyone else, but for me, choices two and three have definite relevance for my life. After all, saying yes to God sometimes means ceding control, letting God’s will triumph over our own will. And there are few things more unsettling and potentially scary than that. We live in a culture, after all, in which sacrifice, compromise, joyful obedience and being malleable are seen as signs of weakness, signs of being a patsy. We have been conditioned, after all, to always seek to win—to demand “What’s in this for me?”—and the way our churches are set up can be no different.

So maybe that’s why some of us feel sorry for those poor fish-people. Visions of that scene in Finding Nemo might be flashing through your mind’s eye right now—the one where poor little Nemo has been caught in the net of the trawler along with hundreds of other fish, and they panic at the prospect of their impending doom as the net inexorably cranks upward.

But Jesus’s Good News never starts by tricking or guilting people into conversion and repentance. Jesus’s Good News, one that we are called to proclaim and embody, emphasizes living a life of discipleship rather than an emphasis on how to suffer through life until you get a reward of heaven when you die. My life was hard enough growing up. “Get used to it, kid,” or, a million times worse, smugly being told “It’s all God’s will” in answer to the real deprivations and chaos in which I grew up did NOT entice me into feeling like I was on the winning end of a bargain.

Jesus met people where they were, and invited them into relationship by being spiritually and intellectually welcoming. Again and again, he invites us to bring our questions and our doubts and not be rejected or shamed for them. And the places in my youth that operated with baiting nets and condemning some people as “garbage” worthy only of destruction when they got caught in God’s net did not appeal to me one bit.

In calling us, Jesus doesn’t offer us a bargain. In calling us, Jesus offers us our lives.

Rather than vengeance and punishment, Jesus calls us to mercy and grace. Rather than a transactional mindset like the rest of the world around us, run by merciless parameters like “dog eat dog” and “take advantage of others before they take advantage of you,” Jesus’s Good News is instead an orientation toward compassion and helping others without stopping to refuse those who were deemed “unworthy.” An emphasis on helping the struggling rather than ignoring their struggles or seeing those struggles as “God’s will.” A proclamation of how Jesus’s incarnation is meant to remind us of how precious we are in God’s sight, rather than how fallen and corrupt the material world is—and letting Christians off the hook from trying to make the broken places in the world better.

It's a question of emphasis. As our gospel passage begins, Jesus is walking along the shores of Galilee proclaiming GOOD NEWS. Good news, of mercy and grace, rather than suffering and smiting. That’s what entices people to leave the nets that have ensnared them and follow Jesus.

We can hear Jesus’s call with a different emphasis.

Instead of “Follow me, and I will make you fish for PEOPLE.”

What if we heard, “Follow me, and I will make you fish FOR people.” 

To live for others, to live for God, and in doing so, living lives that really matter.

Jesus calls Simon and Andrew and James and John and you and me to actively join with him in proclaiming the Good News to those we encounter in OUR lives. To take stock of what God’s love does for us in each moment, and to be so overjoyed we share that love with others. And that’s how we get out of the net and off the hook, and instead live lives of richness and abundance.

Jesus’s call to us, as disciples, is to not to trap people in our nets, but to leave the nets and the manipulations and seek reconciliation and good news for ALL.

Jesus’s call to us, as disciples, is to have faith in God’s love for us—and for our own ability to share that love in a world that DESPERATELY needs it. Immediately.

Preached at the 505 on January 20 and the 8:30 and 10:30 Eucharists on January 21 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville. MO.

Readings, 3rd after Epiphany B:
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:6-14
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Prayer 2356

In humility and joy
let me praise You,
O Lover of Souls
marveling at the delicate beauty
your hands have knit
into the very fibers of creation.

My heart sings out to You, O God of All,
whose loves pours over the Earth
like a cooling breeze in summer.
Preserve me
in walking the way of hope and lovingkindness,
rejoicing in the power of your Spirit.
Lead me deeper
into the pathways Our Savior blazed for us, Holy One,
that we may live a fully human life,
a life grounded in the goodness and mercy
Jesus makes known to us.
Blessed Redeemer,
let me put my shoulder to the wheel
of reconciliation and healing,
in imitation of Christ.

Lord, You know what is inscribed
in the deepest reaches of our hearts:
place the kiss of your blessing
upon those for whom we pray.

Amen.

God calling: Speaking to the Soul, January 17, 2018

One of my favorite “comfort movies” is a sweet little gem from 2000 starring Edward Norton (who also directed), Ben Stiller, and Jenna Elfman called Keeping the Faith.

The basic outline of the film is the friendship between Brian, a Roman Catholic priest, and Jake, an Orthodox rabbi, whose lives are turned upside down when their childhood friend Anna, a hotshot corporate executive on the rise, comes back into their lives after moving away when they were all in middle school. Immediately, a love triangle ensues, yet through all the emotional and romantic turbulence, we also get a surprising meditation on the persistence of call, and of the importance both of friendship and also of religious faith among a generation whose religious commitments are often (wrongly, in my opinion) denigrated as being shallow-to-nonexistent. For both Brian and Jake, their love for Anna causes them to question their call. Obviously, for Brian, his (unrequited) feelings for Anna are out of the question, and cause him to question his calling as a priest. Yet Jake, also, faces problems in his Orthodox congregation (and in his family) at his potential relationship with a non-Jewish woman. Each of them ends up re-examining their sense of call and vocation, Anna included.

In Year B, we have been given several stories about call during this season after Epiphany. Last Sunday, the second after Epiphany, is also known as "Call Sunday," since the readings include multiple stories of God calling individuals out by name and setting before them special tasks such as prophecy and discipleship. Even last Sunday’s responsorial psalm, 139, marvels at how intimately God calls us and makes us partners in the reconciliation of creation. The boy Samuel is called by God; the disciples are continuing to be called to follow Jesus.

This Sunday we will hear more stories about discipleship and call. We will hear Jonah finally giving in and traveling to Nineveh, the main city of the Assyrian Empire in what is now northern Iraq, to preach God’s call to repentance to the people there, even though Nineveh had been one of the traditional enemies of Israel. The story in Mark of God calling Simon and Andrew away from their nets as fishermen, promising instead to make them “fishers of people.”

Jesus’s call to Simon and Andrew seems to come out of the blue, startling and beautiful and enticing, much like the throbbingly purple winter iris I spotted while walking with my friend John this last week—a true Epiphany for this refugee from the Midwestern winter, a burst of intense beauty in what is usually a sere, severe time of the year, in my experience. That iris also kept faith with its call to testify to God’s beauty, choosing to bloom despite all that might call it to slumber instead.

How about you? Are you called?

Do you even want to admit it, if you are?

Let's face it: as the movie makes clear, start talking about God talking to you in this day and age, especially in 21st century America, and people start shaking the wrinkles out of the straitjacket. I imagine it's even worse in Europe, the former seat of Christendom. Just admitting to being a person of religious faith is at times a risk, socially and culturally.

For many of us, we walk a delicate line as we seek to take seriously the call of God in our lives. For years, I sought to answer the call I felt, but not so much that it would turn my life upside down either. In other words, I kept saying, "Here am I, LORD. Please don't ask me for too much." Until finally, that just didn’t work anymore.

God’s call can cause us to abandon our nets and our befuddled father, like Andrew and Simon did, and set out on a completely different life. Yet it can also cause us to seek to be a witness to God’s blessings in our lives in other, more subtle ways, calling us to minister to each other in our secular vocations, which in many ways is a more delicate balancing act than just throwing it all away and renouncing everything we have ever known. Call also involves recognizing and pointing to the presence of God among us each day, a task every bit as risky and daring as the dropping of one’s nets along the shores of Sea of Galilee and wandering off in at the word of the local holy man.

Most of us aren’t led to abandon everything in order to follow Jesus and let our lives testify to his impact in our lives. God is calling all of us as God’s beloved children to bear witness to God’s beauty out into a world that desperately needs that light. Do we dare answer, "Here am I, LORD, Your servant is listening?" Even if it comes out more like, "Here am I, LORD. I give in," that’s still such a leap of faith in any time and place, a flash of beauty and joy in our lives, God’s love of us breaking in to help us keep the faith in spite of ourselves.

This was first published at the Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on January 17, 2018.

Confronting the Not-so-Great Divide

Can we remember that this is a motto of our country?

I have been trying very hard to reflect on the events of the last week. One of the worst things that has happened in this country is that we do not listen to each other, even when-- especially when-- we do not agree. I just had a friend unfriend me on Facebook because she thought I wasn't listening to her regarding our political differences, and I am very sad about that right now.

We MUST listen to each other. There is too much "talking past each other," and we have been encouraged to do just that as we isolate ourselves more and more in the echo chambers we live in, where all we hear is a constant drumbeat from information sources whose only purpose is to reinforce our disdain and hatred of "the other side." One of the things I think that too few of us realize is that there is more pain and uncertainty about where our lives are going on both the left and the right (meaningless terms, really) than we realize. And we are MEANT to not be able to see that in each other. That's what really dismays me.

One thing I think many of us on both ends of the spectrum can agree upon is that the whole damn system IS guilty as hell. We can never rebuild this country, though-- and it seriously needs rebuilding; that's another thing most of us agree upon, I think--if we play into turning on each other, which is exactly how the system has been allowed to be set up so that the needs of the many, the common good upon which our country has been founded, can be ignored so that a few people can remain in power.

Look at the Constitution. The genius of the Constitution is that it has remained flexible enough to survive and even grow during the 227 years it has been in existence. It has been able to remain functional because it is subject to interpretation based upon the changing needs of the times (same thing with scripture, by the way). But its basic vision is laid out in six guiding principles laid out in the Preamble, which starts out with these very important words: WE, THE PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES. We. People. United.

These principles are: 
1- to form a more perfect union (and look at what we had before the Constitution- it was chaos!) 
2- establish justice 
3- ensure domestic tranquility 
4- provide for the common defense 
5- promote the general welfare 
6- secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity 

 (Who's singing the School House Rock song now? C'mon- admit it.) 

Notice that ALL of those things talk about the fact that we live together IN COMMUNITY. All of those things are about living TOGETHER. That's the only way good government can work-- to start with the undertsanding that government is generated from community. Anything else is not freedom but anarchy, which serves no one and leads to everyone's doom (think about South Sudan, and Iraq, and Somalia, and the Philippines right now. We Americans better never forget that we REALLY don't have anarchy in the streets, and that most of our protests are actually signs of that). 

We formed and continue to form this government SPECIFICALLY so that ALL may live in peace and security. Now, over the years, the "we" part has expanded. To be honest, at first it just included white men of property. For a LONG time. And we have to be careful that we do not fall back into that default, because when that has happened in other countries, anarchy and warfare has ensued (at the time the Constitution and Bill of Rights were being written, a terrifying example was happening in France, for instance). But over the decades, the hopefulness of those six promises have been seized upon and rightfully demanded by more groups as they have gotten the right (and I would say the responsibility, former US history teacher that I am) to vote. Universal white male suffrage (regardless of property qualifications) didn't really get introduced until the 1820s. African Americans in 1865. Women in 1919. Native Americans in 1923. Asian Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color in 1965. So, not that long ago, actually, and certainly the rights of these groups are still not in any way universally secure, to put it mildly.

BUT. Here's where I am perhaps to be criticised as an optimist. And I will plead guilty to that. As one of my favorite hymns goes, "Through many dangers, toils, and snares, we have already come, 'tis grace that brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home." Yes, US. Not just "me." 

So, yes, BUT. There is more that unites the majority of us in this country than any political party wants us to know, since political parties are themselves a sign of the tendency we all must fight against to division. So we are urged into a frenzy against each other that not only harms the political and social unity which is required for our political life, but our spiritual life as well. At the heart of the gospel is a message of community and caring for each other that I too often do NOT see reflected in the actions of those who use religion in this country as a political tool to instead turn on others, to exclude, rather than include. That is bad enough when we are talking about hurting others. It is worse when it used to deny people basic dignity and justice, not to mention compassion and mercy. 

Real peace and justice cannot be built on a foundation that deliberately deprives others of their basic dignity and worth. Not in the name of politics. Not in the name of religion. 

And that, I fear, is exactly how some people use religion in this country: to draw boundaries that fly in the face of the plain teaching of Jesus. If we were to take very seriously the very real pain that many of us endure and protest on both the LEFT and the RIGHT, we could begin to work for REAL peace and justice in this country. Whenever the idea of "freedom of religion" has been perverted to mean the freedom to divide us and to impose our own will upon others, then it is wrong. True religion is not tyrrany. True religion is founded on hope and faith, not fear. For Christians, that means hope and faith in God, AND hope and faith in EACH OTHER (the Great Commandment, Matthew 22:36-40). I believe that if someone tries to tell you that you, as a Christian, can have faith and love for God without having faith and love for each other, they are merely using the guise of religion. They are one of those false prophets many of us were warned about in the gospel (Luke 21:5-19) this past Sunday. And that includes having faith and hope in those with whom we disagree. ESPECIALLY then. 

We HAVE to understand that there are a lot of hurting people on both sides of this political divide. It's the DIVIDE that is the problem. It is the DIVIDE that is the threat to democracy. 

A political divide that keeps the vast majority of us in chains. 
A political divide that keeps us from considering each other's perspective and pain, by creating an artifical "us" versus "them" that serves to prevent us from working together for real change, especially at the economic level. 

For regular folks like us, for workaday America, economic questions are not about having "more"-- it's about having enough, about having peace of mind. About feeling at home-- that's the Greek root of the word "economy." And when we have that peace of mind, we are a greater country, because we are not prone to respond to the exaggerated fears from theoretical directions. Our economy right now does not serve the most important needs of a vast majority of the peope of this country, but we are distracted from that by arguments about other things like guns or abortion that have nothing to do with making sure we REALLY feel secure and at peace. Because democracy, like religion, only works if we have faith in each other. 

I hope and pray that we can come to see that the real threat to our well-being is mistrust and hatred because we were created by nature itself (whether you believe that is through God or not), to live in community with each other. Mistrust and hatred of liberals, of conservatives, of immigrants, of refugees, of blacks, of whites, of gay people, of atheists, of Christians, of Muslims, of poor people, and so on and so on. It all serves to wound us, not help us. "US' is better when "US" includes everybody, and we get RID of the idea that we should be comfortable with calling some "THEM."

One of the worst things that the current political leaders have done is to attempt to divide us in order for them to keep a grasp on power and take of themselves rather than the common good. And we must resist their use religion as one of the best tools to help them do that.