“FISHING FOR LIFE”

Mark 1: 16-20

Jonah 3: 1-5, 10

A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

Epworth United Methodist Church

There’s a billboard on Highway 80 heading east towards Sacramento just before Dixon.  It reads, “Where are you going that’s more important than spaghetti?”

Now that’s a question that makes you think:  Where am I going?  Is it more important than spaghetti?  If not … 

Now it may have had something to do with the fact that I had not eaten, or my general state of carb deprivation, but even a pizza shack can raise the question, “Just how important is where I am going?” 

Sometimes a crisis, an epiphany, a conversation, a memory, a news article, a sustained sense of dis-ease, a vision, a time of transition, a challenge,  sometimes just a question…from a friend, a child, a stranger, even from a billboard … calls us to examine where we are heading.

This week I had a telephone conversation with Shelley, a member of this community, who is in Ohio preparing for her wedding and for a year of study in Guatemala.  Shelley had read in Epworth’s email newsletter about our Volunteer In Mission Team to Mississippi, about next Saturday’s team to Vacaville, and our Nicaragua Team scheduled for June.  She is excited about the spirit moving through this whole community. Those who go, send, pray, support, have visions and dream dreams.

Epworth has always had a heart for mission. That mission is lived out in the daily decisions of individuals, in generous giving, and in faithful response to local and global injustice. 

But Shelley said that what seemed to be different this year, as we launched our first, second and third Volunteer in Mission teams, was that we asked people, “Will you go?”  

This morning’s scripture readings are about … call and response…

call and response-ability.

Mark’s gospel begins with dramatic expectation:  Jesus makes the unsettling and reassuring announcement:  The time of waiting is over. God’s Kindom is here and now.

Jesus, wanders by the sea of Galilee, inviting working fishermen to fish for the living rather than for a living. Jesus called to Simon and Andrew, James and John …, “Follow me,” … and they did.  They left everything, their nets, their boats, their fellow workers, their families, and followed Jesus.  Immediately.  

I wonder why. Was it the way he said it? The person of Jesus?

Maybe…they were ready…. and needed to be asked.

Biblical scholar Ched Myers writes that the verse, “I will make you fishers of men (people)” does not refer to evangelistic hooking and soul saving in a narrow sense, but to radically new relationship, redemption and restoration. We turn the world around, by responding to the persistent call and grace of God that turns our lives around.

How strange to think we can participate in the new heaven and earth of the radical re-ordering of reality by engaging in business as usual!

Luise Schottroff writes that “Jesus begins with friendships, with the formation of groups…the growing community of children, women and men… They were not held together by class, blood, nation, or race.  The people around Jesus agreed to conform to the will of God in their lifestyle, their hopes, their actions and their suffering …What supported them and what Jesus shared with them was God’s indestructible nearness.”

We are called to live in God’s indestructible nearness … called to share a life of hope, healing and hospitality.

Ursula Hegi wrote a wonderful story called “Saving a Life,” about a 14 year old girl growing up in a village in Germany.  The story begins,

“The summer of 1960 I was fourteen and I wanted to save someone’s life.  It was the only thing I was sure I could do.  About everything else I felt uncertain:  my legs were too long, my face was too round, my hair was too straight … (but I could swim).  I’d passed each test with the highest marks, including the life-saving test and I had dreams of proving myself as a saver of lives.  It would be better if the drowning person were a man twice my weight ... Keeping his chin above water with one arm, I drag him to safety … In front of the bathroom mirror I practice different versions of that dazzling, yet modest smile I’ll flash when the mayor hands me the medal.” 

Later that summer this same 14 year old girl almost drowns while swimming in the Rhein river, caught in the whirlpool wake of a commercial barge … she uses all her strength to get free and collapses on the bank of the river.  The story ends, “It only occurred to me much later that the summer I was fourteen I had saved a life – not the life of a stranger as I had imagined – but the life I had taken for granted and which, in the years to come, I would take for granted again.”

Fishing for life can save your life. 

Responding to a call can change your direction. 

David Ford, Professor of Divinity at University of Cambridge describes how his life and theology have changed because of his work with the L’Arche communities.

L'Arche is a unique network of nearly 200 small homes and day settings across Canada, where caregivers and volunteers from diverse cultures and backgrounds share deeply committed relationships with people with developmental disabilities.

Professor Ford said in an interview,

One of the most powerful things for me has been to see people who are weakest, who are most marginalized, who well know that they are “nonpersons” in our society, and to see what happens when one centers a community on them –honoring them, seeing them as gifts of God, as having vocations, as having gifts, as being able to love and be loved.  One of the most repeated things in L’Arche communities is the testimony of (those) who have gone there (to help) and found that they are transformed by their friendships with these people.

L’Arche is doing something that’s prophetic for our culture.  It’s not so much about “doing good” for the disabled as it is about seeing that we are all God’s children and that we all have vocations.  And that is a sign of hope for our world.

Our Hebrew scripture reading from the book of Jonah begins, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time telling him to go to the great city of Ninevah … So Jonah set out to go to Ninevah.”  Sounds simple enough.

But the first time God spoke to Jonah and told him to go to city of Ninevah, capital of the Assyrian empire (modern day Iraq) as a Jew to prophecy to the people… Jonah refused… He was afraid, and he didn’t want to save the wicked Ninevites!  Jonah heard God’s call and immediately set out in the opposite direction to Tarshish!  What happened next, in the more well-known part of the story, is that Jonah ended up in middle of a storm in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea thrown overboard and swallowed by a “great fish.”

The “great fish,” … usually referred to in the translations as a “whale” … spit Jonah up on the beach, and it was then that God called again … telling Jonah to go to Ninevah, … the second time, Jonah listened, and went.

I’m a lot more like Jonah than Simon and Andrew. It takes a lot more than one call to get my attention or change my direction.  It takes more than one call to get through my fear, judgment and stubbornness. I’m more likely to be swallowed and spit out by a fish than to fish for life

I imagine the negative outcomes.  I rehearse the reasons why not.  But again and again I witness remarkable transformations when people say “yes” to questions, invitations, calls of the Spirit, to try something new, to go somewhere different, to stretch beyond the bounds of the comfortable.

Jeff Melvoin wrote a scene in the old televison series Northern Exposure, where Joel Fleishman, a displaced New Yorker fresh out of medical school ends up in a remote Alaskan village as the town physician … One night, fishing on the lake … his Rabbi from New York appears to him … and suddenly, in the vision, they are inside a great fish.  Rabbi Shulman speaks … “We’re inside, Joel.”

“Inside what?”

“The fish … the belly of the beast … You know, Joel, Jonah may be the key here.”

“Key to what?”

“the meaning of all this … think a minute, Joel.  Why was Jonah swallowed in the first place?  God told him to go to Ninevah, and cy out against their wickedness.  Instead, Jonah flees, hops a boat for Tarshish, God raises a ruckus, Jonah gets the heave ho … What’s the message Joel?”

“Next time, go to Ninevah.”

Response-ability.

Next time … listen.  Be ready to hear the call and go.  None of us knows when or how the call will come … but “next time go to Ninevah.”  Next time say “yes,” live “yes” and trust the rest to God’s love and care.