3 EPIPHANY, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE STANLEY
25 JANUARY 2009
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Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:6-14; 1 Corinthians7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
Where does a preacher focus today, given the various readings we have? There’s Jonah, the reluctant servant of God, finally giving in and answering God’s call and proclaiming God’s word to the people of Nineveh. And there’s the business then of God changing God’s mind and not punishing the wicked people in Nineveh. God changing God’s mind—there’s a theme for you!
In the psalm it’s the theme of trusting God, waiting in silence for God our rock. There’s plenty there for us to contemplate.
Or in the epistle, the apostle Paul tells his people to poise themselves for the in breaking of God’s kingdom, which is due any minute. Another theme for today.
And in the gospel, Simon and Andrew and James and John hear Jesus’ call and they follow him as brand-new disciples. Calling and following, two more themes. Or their mission; we could focus on their new mission to fish for people. That’s a theme that always troubles me, because all I can see is nets full of squirming, dying fish. We could talk about that image of fishing for people, and its double meaning: fishing for people as in spreading the Good News and gathering up new followers, on the one hand, or, on the other hand (more in keeping with my own squeamishness), fishing as in using fishhooks digging in as a way of punishing the wicked, an image several writers in Hebrew Scripture use to talk of God’s judgment.
So a preacher could go off in any one of those directions. It’s wonderful, I tell you, this preaching ministry!
But the theme I want to ponder today is the theme of transformation, God’s transformation of what is common into something new. God taking the ordinary and making something extraordinary out of it.
Jesus tramps around in Galilee and bumps up against ordinary citizens doing their ordinary thing, their day by day business. Regular folks. And one day he stops and looks at some of them and says, “Follow me….You come.” And they do. And for a long time nothing much happens with them, these ordinary guys, they just follow along and keep up with Jesus and don’t really understand him and not much happens. But one day Jesus is taken from them and they’re left alone and the bottom falls out of their lives, but somehow, miraculously, they are transformed into preaching, teaching giants. And we remember them today as Saint Peter and Saint Andrew and Saint James and Saint John. God took ordinary humans and made something of them.
Something extraordinary from something commonplace and ordinary.
Isn’t that what happened at Christmas? The Son of God born into ordinary human flesh? Isn’t that what we celebrate during Epiphany, God manifested in the person and life of the very human Jesus?
Yes, and in amazing ways, it’s what has been happening this very week, I’ve noticed, much to my great astonishment.
For starters, all of us, no matter how we voted, we all have a new president. This new president has spent time deliberately pointing away from himself as some sort of super-hero and pointing instead to us and to all ordinary people. He has called on all of us to join in the tremendous job of rebuilding our country and our world, wherever it is broken. He has told us to wipe the dust off our feet not because it’s a cute image but because he knows and believes and is telling us that each of us has at least one skill that, when combined with everyone else’s skills, can make a huge difference. An extraordinary result from millions of quite ordinary individuals.
That was one thing. Then on Friday, two days ago, an energetic group of Christ Church colleagues-in-Christ gathered for our church’s 110th Annual Meeting. Good food, wonderful fellowship. Barbi Tinder gave each of us one green grape. One measly grape, she gave us, that green grape looking very lost, sitting in the middle of each person’s large, yellow napkin. It’s not much, one grape per person. But then Barbi collected the grapes and plopped them into a glass bowl. One grape by one grape by one grape, until the bowl was nearly full--a healthy arrangement of luscious fruit. One grape by itself doesn’t amount to too much; but a bowlful, now that’s a different story! Individual grapes changed into a mound of available dessert.
And so we continued at our Annual Meeting, each individual one of us quite regular people, taking our single imaginations, thinking of special projects our church community can do, until we collected them and filled sheet after sheet with stunning ideas, eminently doable! Like the glass bowl full of grapes, the easels were packed with our collective brilliance. We who were many became one. An extraordinary result from a motley collection of ordinary people! Or put another way: something ordinary transformed into something new and quite remarkable.
Then yesterday, Saturday, the very next day, I attended a local, long visioning-for- Oxford Hills-session sponsored and run by Healthy Oxford Hills. I went because I had been invited and thought I should, not because I was excited to spend a large chunk of my Saturday sitting around with a bunch of people, dreaming. Imagine my delight when once again a roomful of individuals, united by a common purpose, which was to think of ideas for our community, came up with hugely creative and imaginative plans, and notions of how, actually, to make them work. An extraordinary thing, those ideas, created from us regular, ordinary folks.
Jesus, walking, chose his followers not because they were unique and unusual but precisely, I think, because they weren’t. But by the spirit of God and over time, one by one they were transformed and became the church. Who’d have “thunk” that Simon and Andrew and James and John would one day be among the saints of the church?
Or us, for heaven’s sake. “We are all of us saints of God,” says the hymn, “and I mean to be one, too!”
The power of God to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary is the root of our faith. And it includes all of us, each of us, one by one. Common bread and common wine become for us Christ’s very Presence and we come to the Table, each one of us, to be filled with that Presence. And like the bread and the wine, we, too are transformed. And off we go, then, off and out into the world, empowered once again to be Jesus for everyone we meet. We who are many are one Body. That is very Good News indeed.