Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 25, 2009

Propelled to Act

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20

But then things changed.  Two buildings burned down, and no one, not even the fire department, did anything.  Her brother, a Vietnam veteran, was killed near their home.  People around her moved away, and so did she.  “To be from the South Bronx,” Carter said, “felt like a stain.”

After college, though home was all she could afford, so, reluctantly, she moved back in with her parents.  And back into the South Bronx.  She hated it – both the neighborhood and her feeling of defeat at moving back.

It so happened, though, that at that very moment the city announced a plan for a new waste facility in Carter’s neighborhood. She described her own response as visceral:  “I was outraged.  It propelled me to act.  It moved my spirit in a way that I didn’t know was possible.  I worked hard with others … and, together, we defeated the plan.”

Having been empowered by her reaction to negative events, she next found a power to be proactive.  She and her neighbors developed a plan for a neighborhood park on the site of an old garbage dump.  The park became the seed for other plans for the community.  “Today,” she says, “the South Bronx is no longer a stain; it’s a badge of honor for me.”  (See www.thisibelieve.org.) 

Majora Carter’s essay is the story of a calling – I would say, God’s calling – heard and answered.  Listen, again to her description of the moment of the call to defeat the city’s plan for putting its waste in her neighborhood:  “I was outraged.  It propelled me to act.”

True callings are like that:  inviting not merely our ascent, but our action.  Carter was “propelled,” and her journey since then as taken her to her deepest, richest life.  She found herself, and her home, again.  Callings lead to action, and action is the core of life, including the life of faith.

So it was for God’s people in today’s lessons.  The disciples are called to follow Jesus, but more.  Blessed by him, empowered by him, they are also commissioned by him to do what he himself is doing.  “Follow me,” the Lord says to Simon (Peter) and Andrew, “and I will make you fish for people.”  Those disciples don’t write about it, but I guess that something in their invitation propels them, too.  They leave home and nets and boat and lake.  But they don’t think of it as a loss, I imagine.  Jesus gives two gifts to the disciples:  first, the task of ministry, and, second, the power to perform their ministries.  In that moment, they have a new purpose, even a new life.

So, too, God empowers Jonah, in the earlier lesson.  If asked to tell the story of Jonah, most of us start with the dramatic story, the one many of us learned in childhood.  Jonah?  He was swallowed by a big fish, or as we most often tell it, by a whale.  But the fish was merely a vehicle on the journey.  The core of the story is this:  Jonah is called by God to take a message to Ninevah, a foreign city. He is swallowed at sea only because he’s trying to run from his calling.  He’s headed away from Ninevah.  But God, acting in the life of the big fish, brings Jonah back.

So, here we find him in today’s lesson, chucked, as it were, up on the beach after the journey in the fish’s belly.  The Bible, however, puts the focus not on the fish, not even on Jonah, but on God.  Here on the beach, God is still calling.  Hear Jonah’s call, again: “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Ninevah….” (Jonah 3:1, NRSV)

It’s a bit amazing, isn’t it, that here as elsewhere in our holiest of books, God is so much less concerned with what people think or believe than with what they do?  “Get up,” God says to Jonah, “go to Ninevah…and proclaim to it the message that I [will] tell you.” (Jonah 3:2, NRSV)  Jonah runs, but God’s holy invitation keeps coming. Finally Jonah surrenders to God’s call. He goes to Ninevah.

And when Jonah does God’s bidding, the people of Ninevah believe both him and the word he brings from God, and they do something.  They repent.  They change. And God changes, too, and decides not to punish them as Jonah has foretold.

So here’s the question to each of us:  how and where is God calling each of us to do something in our own lives, in our own town, in our own families, in our own work, or in our own behavior?  What is God calling each of us… you, and me, to do?  Where do we feel, as Majora Carter felt, “propelled to act?”

I can’t tell you how it is that God is calling you.  It’s difficult enough, in our distracting and distracted world, merely attending to God’s call for myself.  Every now and then someone says to me, “I want to be asked to do something at church.  I keep waiting to be asked.”  It seems like a reasonable request.  Except that it isn’t, for two reasons.  First, even Pastor Jennifer and I don’t have time to ask everyone, individually, to do what we think is God’s calling for her of for him.  But, second, and more important, is that honesty, if not humility, compels our confession that even as pastors we can’t always know what God is calling someone else to do.

For some reason as I ponder today’s lessons, I remember a story my district superintendent told a gathering of pastors.  It involved a pastor whom a parishioner noticed left town every day at a certain time in the afternoon.  Intrigued, the church member finally follows the pastor up a road out of town to a bluff overlooking their little valley, where the pastor stops, gets out, and looks down at the town he had just left.  The parishioner joins him and asks him to explain.  “You see that train through the town?” quizzes the pastor.  “It comes through every day at just this time.  And every day I come up here for a few minutes just to watch.  It does me good to see something moving that I don’t have to push.”

You see? God calls us.  God calls each of us, in our own way, at our own time, to our own unique and important ministries.  That’s the message of this part of Epiphany.  Blessed by God in baptism, uniquely empowered by God in the moment of our spiritual birth, we are then invited, like Jesus’ disciples and like Jonah before them, to join in God’s work.  “Do what I do,” Jesus essentially says to the disciples.  And, after watching him at it for a while, Easter compels them to act.  They are propelled into the world by God’s spirit; and the world has never been the same.  Jonah is propelled, some would say as much by the big fish as by God’s big commission, to “get up [and] go!”

A couple of months ago, someone came to me to discuss a calling.  We needed a prayer ministry, this person said.  What I expected next was to be given an assignment.  Instead, this person said, “I want to start it.  Will you help me find a time and a place to meet weekly for prayers?”

Now, every Monday I give God thanks in my own prayers for someone who listened to God’s call, and then acted on it.

So I ask again:  What is God inviting, calling, even propelling you to do?  Where are you dissatisfied, uneasy, troubled, burdened, outraged, indignant, or just plain mad?  Where have you heard yourself thinking, “Somebody should just…”  Perhaps there, just in that discomforted place, God is calling you, too.

Hearing the invitation, we’re blessed to respond.  Who knows how our community, our families, our nation, and our world will be different as we do?