Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church - New Paltz

Today’s lessons center on the theme of being called and sent, of attending to how God has need of us more than we attend to anything else in our lives.

Let me begin with a story I may have told some of you before.

When I was growing up my family had a small camp in the Adirondacks alongside other small camps owned by a number of families. Among those families there was a contingent of men particularly dedicated to fishing. They calculated the weather, the right time of day, the best locations and more in order to maximize their chances of catching large fish. I well-remember the season in which they were having a terrible year of fishing and in which we all heard a LOT of grumbling. I also vividly remember the 8 yr old from next door who headed down to the docks whereupon we sunned and launched to swim or boat at water’s edge. She had her pink Barbie fishing rod in tow, along with a few worms. One half hour later the whole camp heard screams and squeals and came running to the docks to see what had happened. There was this little girl, Barbie fishing rod bent in half, bringing in (with some help from a few others) a two-foot long fish; at the wrong time of day, in the wrong kind of weather, with a pink Barbie fishing rod. She had accomplished that which all of the grown men had failed, with just her pink Barbie fishing rod.

Jesus, in today’s familiar story from the Gospel of Mark, calls the brothers James and John to leave their fishing nets and join him to become “fishers of people.”

It is not the right time and not the right weather. After all, James and John are running the family business. Their parents are likely counting on them to sustain their own livelihood. Sure, there are hired men with whom they leave their father, but we all know how hard it can be to find good, trustworthy help. There is no one with quite the same commitment to a family business as well, family. So far as we hear, James and John also have no particular gifts with which to embark on this grand mission. Perhaps they leave armed with some Barbie fishing rods and not much more, who knows...

If there is discussion between the sons and their father and mother about this radical decision they are making, we do not hear it. If the men are questioning this decision within their own hearts and minds, we do not hear about it. The writer of Mark says that when Jesus asks James and John to follow him they “immediately” left and followed him. Mark uses this word, “immediately,” hundreds of times throughout his Gospel. It is clear that for Mark there was and is urgency about everything that God has done and is doing, including those tasks which God seeks to accomplish through us.

In our house we do not answer the phone during dinner so that we can focus on eating and on being together as a family for these precious few moments. Though I have become used to ignoring the ring of the telephone, there are still times when I have to fight the urge to stand up and go answer that silly device. I guess we humans are much like Pavlov’s dog, when you get right down to it.

Does God’s call stir an immediate response in us like our telephones, or do we say we are busy with more important things? Does God’s call evoke the immediacy of Mark’s writing, placing its insignia, its imprint upon our lives, changing us? Are we waiting to answer God with all of who we are and what God has given us until we are sure of the weather, until we believe we have the right tools for the job? Until we have surrendered our Barbie fishing rods of faith for the high-end gear we believe necessary to carry out God’s work?

The local churches of Brewster, NY, are not waiting. They heard God’s immediate call in 2005 after 2 Hispanic men froze to death because of no warm place to stay, no where to go to get out of the cold. They convened a meeting of those interested in helping and now, nearly 7 years later they have 185 trained volunteers who provide food, hygiene products, and support to guests arriving to three different rotating locations. Stories from this ministry of welcome include the arrival of a couple one Christmas Eve, the woman “great with child,” and a guest who returned several years later and made it clear he was there to volunteer and to thank them because their help made it possible for him to get back on his feet, get a job, and become self-sufficient. Now he wanted to help others.

Sometimes it can feel like our lives are filled with demands placed upon us: Demands of our jobs, demands of our families, demands made of our checkbooks. Today’s Gospel reminds us that there is one demand placed upon us that is more important than any other – to follow Jesus and share the Gospel with our fellow people in whatever shape that sharing may take. And because our God is so very gracious, so very loving and holy and wonderful this most important of tasks is communicated to us not as a demand, but as a request. It is communicated as a request from the One who took on the greatest demand of all - conquering Sin through his own despairing death. And in that death was rebirth and hope begun again for all of us. The self-serving, selfish whirlwind that consumed the earth and all that is in it was no longer the ultimate power. Christ who conquered in humble love, self-giving sacrifice is the ultimate power, the ultimate winner in the field. The self-serving, selfish whirlwind is still more than active in the world and even in our lives today. It is all the thoughts and feelings that still seek to capture us and make us think life is about us, about our needs, our wants.

Jesus is not truly calling James and John away from anything, but rather towards a task more important, more central than all others: telling people the good news that God has set them free. Free for life, free for family, jobs, and for their neighbors around them. Free to truly live grounded in Christ’s love instead of this half-life we manage by our own devices, our own strength, trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

Free to meditate ever-more on Christ’s sacrifice and thereby find our true vocation: to become fishers of people, throwing out the hook as God leads, that others may be drawn into the net of Christ’s mercy. Free to serve as the ELCA missionaries who helped found Arusha Lutheran Medical Community in Tanzania. Called by the ELCA and supported by people like us through mission dollars, Dr. Mark and Linda Jacobson are making it possible for clinical physicians or physicians assistants to learn in two additional years of training that which they need to know to perform life-saving surgeries. They just graduated their first class, thanks be to God, in many places doubled the staff of medical outfits. Tanzania is the second largest country in Africa, yet has fewer than 2,000 medical doctors. Yet two people who have come to understand that God calls them in service are helping to change the face of that country. Two people serving the One whose cause is the whole world, serving a God who calls, equips, and sends us to serve others.

Jonah was sent to Ninevah and the people were changed for God. Paul was converted and his travels and writings continue to change the generations who read of his story, who live again the Gospel of grace and promise through his words. Jesus walked by and in a few words of invitation, changed the course of James and John’s lives forever. Who will be changed through God converting us to lives of service, to lives free to serve the one and only purpose worth living? In meditating on God’s sacrifice in Christ we are stirred to serve and we can be sure that in serving we will be changed by the faces and lives of those with whom we minister.

God in Christ, through the hands of this congregation has touched countless lives: families accompanied in joys and celebration, as well as crisis and grief, countless children educated to know the God who loves them more dearly than anyone or anything; people fed in Newburg, students fed in body and spirit at SUNY New Paltz, a place given for brownie troops and AA groups to meet, individuals discovering gifts to serve the wider Church as pastors, now serving other congregations; countless stories of ministry, countless lives changed that in turn change others.

Few among us feel equipped to share the Gospel. More likely we see ourselves with flimsy fishing rods in hand stuck in a rainstorm amidst situations we do not understand and do not know how to navigate. From the outside looking back Paul’s ministry, Jonah’s story, they look so neat and clean. Sure they had struggles, but they all worked out in the end, God’s will be done. It is much harder to live in the middle of the story than to watch it once it is done. It is much harder to daily struggle to listen and respond to God’s call to us. Yet we can take comfort that God called Moses who lacked the ability to speak in public. God called Mary and Martha who were sisters radically different in temperament and disposition. God called James and John, who knew how to fish in the sea, but probably knew little or nothing about how to transform the faith of others. Take comfort! This is God’s mission, God’s work, accomplished through our hands. So if God intends it to be possible through us, God will find a way to make us ready, to equip us as needed.

God called and sent James and John and God calls and sends us. And God wrapped the arms of grace and light around these humble servants and their pink plastic fishing rods, and they became a blessing to others. Not because they had the right equipment or had God’s purposes all figured out, but because God called them, equipped them, and sent them into the world to share Christ’s saving hope.

Amen.