3 EPIPHANY, YEAR A
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE STANLEY
27 JANUARY 2008
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Isaiah 9:1-4; Psalm 27:1, 5-13; 1 Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
“Now when Jesus hears that John had been arrested, he withdraws to Galilee….” Thus begins Jesus’ public ministry.
Remember, Jesus has recently been baptized by John the Baptizer, whereupon he was led into the desert for forty days of temptation. In the meantime, John the Baptizer has been arrested and now, Jesus having come out of the desert, he’s has heard the news of John’s imprisonment and right away he moves north to the relative safety of rural Galilee….And his work begins.
“Repent,” Jesus is preaching, as the Baptizer had preached before him.
And he begins to gather disciples. “Come, follow me.” The first ones called are lowly fishermen: Simon (later renamed Peter), Andrew, James and John.
“Come, follow me.” The fishermen leave their nets and follow.
It’s a new beginning for them, a changed life forever. “Come and see,” we heard Jesus invite last week. “Come and follow me,” he adds today.
Have you ever noticed how many times God makes it possible for us to begin things again, to be renewed, to start over, to make a new beginning?
Way back, God made a covenant with Noah that “never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth…” Begin again, said God. Later, God called Abraham to leave his land and travel to a far away place and “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing…and to your descendants I give this land…” Another new beginning. Much later God led the people out of exile in Egypt. Again, God rescued the Israelites from the wicked Assyrians: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” sang the prophet Isaiah. And again, God brought the people out of exile in Babylon. Every one of those events was a brand new beginning.
“Come, follow me.” So Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John drop their nets and follow. A fresh start for them, too.
Now you may be troubled, as I have been, by the metaphor of fishing and catching. “Come, follow me and I will make you fish for people,” says Jesus. I imagine the poor fish, caught in those huge nets with other squirming fish, dragged up to die in the deadly air. What a dreadful image of our Lord and his invitation to us. What may be a new beginning for Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John was most certainly an ending for the fish!
Or so it seems. But think about this: As one helpful commentator puts it, “Jesus said to ‘fish’ for people---not to ‘eat’ them.” So the question for us is, “How can we fish and not devour? Look to Jesus (himself). He never coerced anyone into belief.” (HKO, Synthesis). This was a message from last week’s gospel text, too. We heard Jesus last week invite people to come and see. Just that, no coercion, no lecture and certainly no devouring.
It’s simply an invitation, with the distinct possibility that some will follow and others won’t. Jesus calls, and then he releases. And the people who follow are freed. Which is, of course, a message of Easter itself: the freedom of the Cross of Christ. That even though we follow and are held close by Jesus, we are at the same time mysteriously released and free into new life, free from sin and fear, free to be Christ for others. We are redeemed and released into a new beginning. Redemption and release.
There’s a hymn that ends with those words. I remembered that hymn when “redemption and release” came to me as I was preparing this sermon. I remembered the hymn but I couldn’t at that very moment, off the top, remember the hymn’s first line, so I couldn’t look it up. Right away I phoned Jeanne Byers, who knows every hymn in the book. I sang the tune to her, including the last words, “redemption and release.” She told me the first line, of course, and I told her why I was bothering with these words. “I think we sang it recently, or maybe it’s that we’re going to be singing it in the near future,” I said. “We are singing it THIS Sunday,” Jeanne replied. Is that a little God-gift, or what?!?
Called, redeemed and released into the possibility of a new beginning, something new.
Like our Annual Meeting. A wonderful, bigger-than-last-year and very hungry group of people downstairs Friday night. Have you ever smelled wonderful lasagna, in ovens not twenty feet away but you couldn’t eat it because the middle was still frozen hard, so you had to wait surrounded by that delicious aroma? Well, we did that last night and we got on with our meeting anyway. We adjusted the schedule and eventually the lasagna was done and it was exquisite and we ate. Then came the ice cream with Barbi Tinder’s chocolate and butterscotch sauces. And we talked and talked and we dreamed of new beginnings for Christ Church built on some wonderful things that are already highpoints here, and have been for a long time.
The vestry, you see, presented its Provocative Proposal, developed over the past many months, beginning with a vestry retreat last May, when we thought of all the things that are life-giving about our parish life and how we might amplify what is already working here. Our affection for and work with children was one highpoint that came to the vestry’s mind. So last fall we took that to our Cottage Meetings, as you will recall, and you came to those Cottage Meetings and you looked ahead ten years and dreamed of what you’d like to see us doing with and about children. The vestry poured over everything you had said at the meetings and distilled a theme, a Provocative Proposal. The Proposal states that we at Christ Church believe that every person matters and that in our common life we will try to include children and youth together with adults in everything we do. That the way to live out our Baptismal promises is to make sure that nobody is left out.
Last Friday night we looked at some specific ways to make that Proposal come alive: children and adults making Altar bread together, children and adults mentoring each other on projects of mutual interest, children and adults worshiping and studying together as we all continue their Christian Formation, children and adults plunging into a slew of activities that even the Cottage Meetings hadn’t even thought of. Some of the ideas are recycled things from previous eras, others are brand new and untried. All of them, under the Proposal’s rubric of intergenerational life together, point to a new beginning, the following of a call to be faithful and open to Jesus in new ways.
The vestry will meet again in retreat next month and further develop some of the ideas for intergenerational life at Christ Church. Then we’ll be ready to return to the whole parish and together we will create and, building on what is already life-giving here, make a new beginning in Jesus’ Name.
Might not some of that be risky? Maybe. For who knows how those, or any of the things we do in Jesus’ Name, will turn out. But redeemed and released to try things, we will always, in some way, succeed!