What can we say January 21? 3rd after Epiphany

    Jonah 3:1-5, 10.  Last go-round, I called this “a lectionary groaner.” The story of Jonah is so rich, dramatic, and theologically shrewd! Today’s passage is sort of the lame set-up – which we know didn’t happen, and the first listeners to this story back in ancient Israel knew it didn’t as well! But they kept it as the foil for the marvelous “gourd” moment for Jonah. I’d add that I only recently realized what’s obvious: Jonah flees to Tarshish – which must have meant Tarsus, the coastal port best known as Paul’s hometown!

    1 Corinthians 7:29-31. A short, pregnant passage with piercing implications for how we live in this world. We might get diverted by Paul’s mistaken notion that the time was short, or by his suggestion that if you’re single, just stay single. The rabbis of course taught that if you’re about to plant a tree, and you learn the Messiah is coming later that day, you continue and plant your tree.

   “Deal with the world as if you have no dealings with it.” Our listeners buy, borrow, accumulate, invest, watch TV, go to work, take their kids to soccer – none of it inherently evil, most of it seemingly good. How to maintain some detachment while being involved? This may be the ultimate spiritual challenge, to live our lives, and well, but never forgetting there’s another hidden plot unfolding, and that our worth and identity can get muddied by the swirl of dealings with the world. So, lowered anxiety? A less tight grip on resources, or time?

   I doubt it’s a negative so much as a positive, transcendent attachment to God – reminding me of Oscar Romero’s words: “I don’t want to be an anti-, against anybody. I simply want to be a builder of a great affirmation: the affirmation of God, who loves us and who wants to save us.” So it’s not being against something so much as for something else – of immense urgency. 

   Notice the Greek: the “form” that is passing away is schema, which rightly sounds like “scheme,” which has a sneaky connotation, doesn’t it? These things can trip us up. And notice also how we typically want a both/and instead of an either/or. Jesus, we may recall, didn’t marry, and didn’t have business dealings or possessions! So Paul could be urging us to be like him. And, Jesus issued similar, disorienting warnings about not burying your dead or turning sons against fathers. Hard, stark choices are involved in this Gospel life.  

   Mark 1:14-20. These early texts from Mark invite us to walk slowly with Jesus through his earliest days of ministry in Capernaum. Depicting the place can matter: small village, waterfront, on a road where merchants pass and trade, a warren of semi-attached houses – one of which archaeologists are sure what the home of Peter, Jesus’s home away from home during his ministry days. If you’ve not been, google pictures (from now, or this artist's depiction of the city back then), read up on the city and its life in the first century.

   Here on Day 1 of Jesus’ ministry, having survived 40 harrowing days in the wilderness, Jesus strides onto the public stage. Mark, as if issuing fair warning to any who would dig into this story, mentions that “John was arrested.” Dangerous business. The forces of evil are already getting organized. The Greek for “arrested” is paradidomi, which usually in the Gospels means “handed over.” Jesus too will be handed over, acted upon, arrested and killed. With that foreshadowing, Mark explains how Jesus arrived at the same destiny as John.

   Jesus arrives at the shore of Galilee, picturesque even today. His message intrigues: it’s all about “time.” Not chronos, as in clock time passing, but kairos, as in “it’s time,” a pregnant moment, the turning point. In his lovely book, Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, Gerhard Lohfink elucidates the way the urgency of time, the now! is what defines Jesus more than titles or identities. He showed up and named that God’s dreams and their dreams – it’s now, it’s dawning, it has dawned, can you notice it? Urgency: you have to decide now, not tomorrow, not next year. We think the miracles are Jesus’ healings or stilling the storm. Maybe a bigger one is he walks right up to guys at work who’ve never heard of him, and after the briefest exchange, they drop everything, livelihood and family, and traipse off after him to…. Well, they don’t have the slightest idea where they’re going, what they’ll be doing, or how it will all come down. Jesus must have been beautiful, or compelling in some unfathomable way.

   My new book coming out next month, with video and study materials for your people, has its first episode on this calling by Galilee, looking also at Francis's calling in (outside of, actually!) Assisi, and that of James Baldwin in Paris. And I'd mention now: my favorite Jesus movie, Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew, depicts Jesus walking briskly, talking over his shoulder to disciples and onlookers breathlessly trying to keep up. That's about right.

   And how unusual! From the thousands of stories we have of rabbis in those days, not one of them asked students to follow. How did old Zebedee manage his boats the next day? What did he say to Mrs. Zebedee when he got home? The preacher can and must underline the radical nature of the impact Jesus had on people. He didn’t say Hey, nice boats, I’ll come visit you again next week! The pearl of great price had materialized, and they dropped everything to follow. 

Find something to illustrate this, maybe like Will Hunting abandoning his new job and old friends and driving across the country for Skylar. But you might just trust the story as it is. Jesus said Follow me. And shock of all shocks, and yet Grace of all Grace, they did. 

   It could be a time to tell your call story, if you can clarify “call” isn’t into ministry but into a life of following Jesus. My story involves this story. After years of zero church interest, some friends dragged me to their church. I started going – kind of in a back row kind of way. Some invited me to a small group. I laughed, not being that kind of guy. But then I had a dream one night. Jesus (how did I recognize him?) was by the sea, and he said to me, Follow me. I woke up, and thought I might try that Bible study. When I got there, my discomfort ratcheted up exponentially when the leader sat down and said This evening, let’s explore Mark 1:17, when Jesus said, ‘Follow me.’ That wasn’t a call to ministry for me – yet. It was a call to get serious about following.

   Speaking of dreams: when preaching this text, I’ve told about a dream the novelist Reynolds Price reported. After being diagnosed with a malignant tumor in his spinal cord, he dreamed of Galilee. Jesus said to him, “Your sins are forgiven.” Price answered him, “That’s not exactly what I am worried about.” I don’t have any takeaway from this story, but dang, it’s so good.

   Clearly, this story helps us see that Christianity isn’t about being nice, or goodness, or judging other people. It’s getting in motion, dropping some stuff, off on a new path. And it’s real world stuff. There are some vivid details in the story that remind us of this: the verb, “casting their nets” is amphiballontas, which means throwing around, circular tossing, whirling something heavy. Archaeologists found a boat under the mud in the Sea of Galilee dating to the time of Jesus. If it only had S.S. Simon Peter carved into the prow!

   I like to show my folks images from classic art. Caravaggio’s stunning “The Call of St. Matthew” shows Jesus with a raised arm and slightly cocked finger, clearly echoing Michelangelo’s fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling of God creating Adam. Notice the posture and seeming hesitancy of the disciples, a bit of a Who me? look about them. And this: evidently Caravaggio, when painting this, went out into the street and rounded up the first guys he found loitering around, sat them down in his studio and painting them as the disciples. And there they are! Our people, you and me included, might just find ourselves caught up in the picture of Jesus’ now.