The Power of God’s Call
Audio version of Jill’s sermon (WMA)
3rd Sunday after Epiphany Year B In Ordinary Time
Mark 1:14-20; 1 Cor. 7:29-31
Rev Jill Komura
Prayer: Gracious God, please illuminate your Word for us today so that we hear it with our whole hearts, embrace it with our whole spirit, and live into it with our whole lives. Amen.
Not too long ago, I walked into a hospital room and introduced myself as one of the chaplains. The patient was sitting up in bed, engrossed in a spreadsheet on his laptop. He looked up over the top of his computer screen, and said, in a polite, but distracted tone of voice, “Oh, I’ve been saved already. I was baptized four years ago. So, I’m good, thanks. No needs.” He smiled cheerfully and went back to his work. I know when I’ve been dismissed, and since my job in the hospital isn’t about preaching my theology to the patients, I turned and left the room.
Whenever I read this story in Mark’s gospel, though, I think of that patient. I also think of this game we used to play as kids sometimes, which you may or may not remember playing yourself. My mom used to call it, “Which superpower would you really want?” game. But you’re only allowed to choose one. By “superpower,” I mean, of course, the “extra-ordinary” capacities we usually associate with science fiction or comic book heroes, such as, the ability to fly, be “stronger than a locomotive;” be impervious to bullets; move with lightning speed, turn invisible, or morph into different sizes or shapes at will.
I still play this game sometimes, imagining how great it would be to possess such powers. A former teaching colleague of mine, currently juggling five children under the age of eight, was telling me just before Christmas how she often daydreams about having ten arms, all of them super-strong and “very elastic.” Two days ago, after shoveling snow in our driveway for several hours, attempting to open an adequate path for my car to leave the garage, I found myself wishing for the speed of Superwoman; imagining myself shoveling so fast I would basically become a human snowblower.
Other than the obvious situational moments when being able to dial up one of these superpowers could really be quite useful, I wonder if our tendency to imagine ourselves with these “super” powers may be a sign of the places in our lives where we’re feeling a little inadequate in the power category. Perhaps we really just want that “extraordinary” ability to get a handle on a situation that has us feeling uncomfortable. Maybe we’re just dreaming that “extra” power would allow us to assert more secure “mastery” and control over situations where we are not feeling in control at all.
As a minister, I spend my days trying desperately to reach out and establish some tiny thread of a spiritually healing connection with the suffering of creation. In the hospital, most of the folks with whom I work are in no condition, physically, emotionally, or psychologically, to even look at me, much less listen to me tell them about a realm of God where love reigns. I will confess, then, that the superpower that makes my jaw drop the most— that truly leaves me in awe– is the one demonstrated in today’s gospel story from Mark. You heard me right: I believe Jesus’ calling of his disciples amounts to the exercise of a “superpower.” You could label it, the “super power of God’s call.”
I realize that in our market-driven, individualistic contemporary American culture, “the power of God’s call” is not a very sexy-sounding superpower. I frankly can’t imagine drumming up a successful advertising campaign for it. It’s not a power that you can sell to people to help them escape the frustrations of a traffic jam, or allow them to disappear and escape a stressful workday by sneaking out for a nap. But the power of God’s call is a superpower in its capacity to catalyze change in communities, beginning with the alteration of individual lives.
This “superpower of God’s call” is about God’s ability to reach into our lives and heal us, wake us up, and galvanize us to action, action that helps to usher in what the Markan writer calls “the kingdom of God.” As a history teacher, I don’t get too put off by the “kingdom” language. “Kingdom” was just the word of the gospel writer’s time that denoted a particular territory under one rule or law.
The power of God’s call is a discomfiting superpower upon which to dwell, especially to us in the liberal mainline denominations, because we tend to avoid using the words tossed around by other more evangelical denominations that maybe best describe what happened to the fishermen that day on the lakeshore. Those are words like, “conversion,” and “being born again.” They heard the good news; they met Jesus face to face, and “immediately dropped their nets and followed him.” Bam! Turn around! After Jesus exercises that “jolt” of energy—which John Wesley once called, “a warming of the heart”—people become “re-oriented”/their lives renewed/given purpose/redirected– to live in relationship with God.
In the “flashes” of God’s superpower along the lakeshore that day, in those moments of transformative encounter with Jesus, the fishermen experienced the possibility and the reality of another realm of existence beyond the familiar one they had always known. In this other “Kingdom of God,” in which Jesus lived and about which Jesus taught, love is the only ruling power, and compassion the only coin of the realm. It’s a kind of miracle, what happened to the fishermen, and to us, I suppose, wrought by God’s superpower. In that moment of encounter, the kingdom was for them–and for us— not some future promise, it was a present reality, revealed and confirmed in a living breathing person. In a person with whom they would live in ongoing relationship, they could see that other reality, that Kingdom. And in that meeting with Jesus was the beginning point of their faith.
For the Markan writer, one of whose principal themes is about the meaning of discipleship, that is the beginning of his tale about the stumbling, often clueless journey of the disciples who follow Jesus. As Jack Kingsbury has noted, the moment on the lakeshore was just the beginning of a larger “process of growth,” which the writer of Mark alludes to more explicitly in chapter 4. In his use of the stories of the seed that begins growing secretly, and the more well-known story of the tiny mustard seed that grows into a huge plant, the writer of Mark tells us about how faith begins small and grows like a plant. This storied moment of transformative encounter between the disciples and Jesus on the lakeshore is just the seed moment for a life of faith, and that “superpower” jolt of God’s call is a catalyst for the unfolding of the rest of Jesus’ ministry and his journey to the cross.
As Mark points out repeatedly as he recounts the disciples’ journey during the rest of the book, faith is not a journey without challenges or setbacks. He recounts the reactions of families and community leaders to the disciples’ decision to join Jesus indicating that the disciples’ decision to join Jesus make even less sense to them than joining a church probably does to non-believers in the modern day. In those days, the decision to drop their fishing nets and become disciples resulted in considerable hardship for the family members whose material lives and social status were adversely affected by their decision. James and John are described in various places in Mark’s gospel as wealthy enough to own a boat and, apparently, their own homes. To renounce what wealth and status they had to follow a wandering preacher and healer was viewed as “crazy” at best.
At worst, because Jesus and his band were clearly living counter-culturally, criticizing those with status, touting an “upside-down” kingdom where the first would be last, the disciples were choosing to become a kind of threat. Maybe even more than now, a group challenging the status quo was perceived a threat to the community well-being. It’s not a surprise that Mark recounts moments where the work of Jesus and his followers was perceived as “rooted in evil.” It undermined the values that the wider society taught and enforced: pursue wealth and status. The would have liked John Leo’s quote: “Those who row the boat don’t have time to rock it.” What do you mean, love your enemy? What do you mean, calling us out for institutionalized passive discrimination against women, and gays, and people of color? What are you doing, standing up for the voiceless? For people in wheelchairs and people with no fixed address? I suspect that with every argument with their loved ones and dependents, the disciples probably had to re-visit their decision that day on the lakeshore. It wasn’t like that “superpower jolt” was so gripping that it blotted out the rest of their daily reality. They remained subject to anxiety about how they “stood” with the society around them, and (as was most obvious the night before Jesus’ death, when they abandon him) fears for their own physical well-being.
Scholar Michael Raschko points out that, for the Markan writer, the disciples having to continually reaffirm their rejection of their former values in the face of a hostile community was part of the meaning of discipleship. The Greek word for church, ecclesia, refers to the “gathered” faithful who have been called out of the main body of the community by that superpower of God’s call, to live into the alternative reality of God’s kingdom, and not the daily human one that ordinarily surrounds us. Like Mark’s fishermen, part of our experience of that superpower jolt means being able to imagine a better world and re-orient our lives to achieve it. That’s partly what that language of “repentance” means. Feeling remorse for the direction one traveled, and needing to choose a better path. Precisely because it involves the conscious choice to abandon one path in order to seek a new one, following the path of Jesus, “discipleship” by its very nature “dislodges and dislocates.” (Raschko)
The sense of urgency you can hear in Mark’s gospel, from the generation that witnessed Jerusalem’s destruction by the Romans, like Paul’s urgency in his first letter to Corinthians, can be a little hard to relate to, as a 21st century disciple of Jesus. Theirs was a generation whose decisions for discipleship to Christ were driven by the urgency of impending doom. They could hear the Romans pounding at the gates of Jerusalem before destroying it. One characteristic of the modern mainline denominations is that we don’t seem haunted by that same sense of urgency. Maybe that says how much our membership comes from comfort and privilege. We complain about losing power for three days; whole cities and countries have been without electrical power for years.
Like the early disciples, though, our task as a community of believers remains as much about keeping those powerful call moments of “superpower jolt” alive enough in ourselves and each other to overcome the anger, fear, suspicion, and jadedness of the secular world around us. We must tend to the small seed of belief born within us in our first meeting with Christ, and help it grow to something more. Two millennia have passed since that day on the lakeshore, but it remains the collective task of the church to witness to and bring about the reality of God’s kingdom.
The story of the fishermen in the gospel of Mark tells me that being a disciple is not about a one-shot moment of personal salvation with no questions asked later, and no further expectations. Unlike the man I encountered sitting in the hospital bed that day, I believe we are individually saved to serve the broader community, meeting people one by one and offering them whatever we can of the Kingdom of God in the here and now. That’s why I pick that superpower. Which superpower do you choose?
Amen.
JAN
