The Third Sunday after the Epiphany [Proper 3]
ISAIAH 9:1-4; PSALM 27:1, 5-13; 1 CORINTHIANS 1:10-18; MATTHEW 4:12-23
by grace alone you call us
and accept us in your service …
Strengthen us by your Spirit,
and make us worthy of your call
I discovered a bit of a curiosity, or at least something that’s a curiosity to me, as I prepared for this sermon this week. It has to do with what it means to be called by Jesus into discipleship, and what disciples might know concerning what they, or we, are getting called into.
Elaine Storkey, an Anglican, puts it this way: “Matthew gives us no information about why [the disciples] accepted [following Jesus] as the right thing to do.” This is the way things worked in the ancient world, she goes on to say; it is simply honour enough to be called to share life with a rabbi, and there wasn’t much you needed to know about what that life might look like, except that it would be shared with your teacher.
Pope Francis, though, saw things a bit differently, saying that of course Jesus calls us into something, and that Jesus always shares something of the mission we are being invited into. “Jesus never says, ‘Follow me’ without mentioning the mission,” says Pope Francis. “No! ‘Follow me and I’ll do this to you.’ ‘Follow me for this.’ ‘If you want to be perfect, leave and follow me.’ There is always the mission. We follow Jesus’s way to do something: it is the mission.”
So what is it? Does Jesus give us a sense of what we are called into? Or is it a simpler matter of invitation to be a disciple, and to follow or not to follow?
I’m not sure that our passage from Matthew’s Gospel helps that much with this question! Because both things happen. Peter and Andrew get some hint as to what they are being called into, and we can assume that what Jesus has to say was compelling in some way: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people,” says Jesus. But then we have James and John, just down the beach. There is no dialogue, no explanation, no convincing phrase coming from Jesus: we hear just that Jesus “called them, and that “Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.”
I’m not sure though, that being called to “fish for people” has as much explanatory force, really. Many of us are familiar with this part of Jesus’s call to James and John. But familiarity doesn’t necessarily mean clarity. It’s kind of fun to imagine for a moment if Jesus had encountered people in some other sort of industry, and called them, if even just to highlight the obscurity of what it means to fish for people. What if Jesus, rather than calling fishermen, was calling lumberjacks? Would Jesus have said, “Follow me, and I will make you cut down trees as though the trees were people”? Or what if they were miners? “Follow me, and I will make you mine for people, pulling people out of a big hole in the ground”?
We can grasp something about gathering people up, bringing people together; but the analogy breaks down pretty quickly, because I’m sure Jesus didn’t mean to include in the life of discipleship sending people to the sawmill, or bringing people to the smelter, any more than we are invited to gut people like fish in order to sell them at the market.
If Jesus had a marketing department, I’m not sure they are earning their pay with this lack of clarity; if Jesus paid a consultant to come up with this vision statement, he did not get his money’s worth. Jesus’s call, here, even as it explains, it obscures. Even as we learn something about what it is to be called by Jesus, we are confronted with the mystery about what exactly it is we are called into as Jesus’s disciples. It seems to me that we land somewhere in between a simple call to follow, and our response; clearly it is more than that. But neither do we, even when Jesus explains it, know much about what this mission of God will look like for us.
Perhaps this is a question of God’s mercy. We rarely know what we are getting ourselves into when we make similar commitments, and it is just as well. Stanley Hauerwas is fond of the marriage analogy, when it comes to discipleship. Would any of us get married, if we knew everything about what it is we were actually ourselves into, when we say “I do”? It’s perhaps something of a mercy that we don’t! Would any of us take a new job if we knew everything about what it is we were actually ourselves into, when we sign that employment contract? I think about my clergy colleagues in Minneapolis this weekend, and it’s hard to imagine them having the foreknowledge that they would be so close to putting their lives on the line, in the way they are, simply in the act of bearing witness according to their vocation of service for the sake of their people. Any more than Peter and John knew, that day on the beach, that they would be crucified themselves, or that James knew that he would be killed by order of Herod. Not to know the cost, before we are given the grace to bear it, is something of a mercy.
So I wonder what we can say about what it is to hear Jesus’s call to follow him. We may have a general sense of what it means, but we won’t know what it means in any specific sort of way. We say yes before we understand, even as God gives us a glimpse of what that life will be like. To be a disciple is to gather others together, and to be gathered together with others. To be a disciple is to be gathered into Jesus’s life, but the shape of that life is underdetermined—we could say in broad strokes that to follow Jesus is to take part in God’s mission of the healing of the world; we can say in broad strokes that we are invited, as we follow Jesus, into his perfection, but a perfection which is as colourful as each of us already are.
But we aren’t brought into a program that is planned and predictable—we are brought into life, the life of Jesus himself—a call that is authenticated not by predictability, but by the ways in which our life is drawn into a participation in the ongoing life of Jesus himself: crucified, resurrected, ascended; a life of suffering and of glory. We are drawn into the life of his body, the church; it is a life given to us from without us, in the sacraments and by way of the Holy Spirit. A discipleship doesn’t always make sense from the outside—it is not a matter of cost-benefit analysis, of measuring pros and cons, of brainstorming possibilities, and then saying yes.
Kevin Scoggan reminded me last week of something Rowan Williams writes about, that that Christians make God believable in the way we live our lives, that through our own faithfulness and trustworthiness, God becomes a trustworthy, and faithful proposition for others. But this is only another way of saying that it is in following Jesus that we become disciples, and that disciples follow Jesus; and we do so not for personal benefit, but in order that we can be like him—and that in following, in being discipled and discipling others, he lives in us, strengthening us for challenges we would probably not choose if we knew the cost ahead of time.
But, in following Jesus, and as his life grows within us, in the community that is the church, in the reception of the sacrament that transforms us, we are able to face what we could hardly face if it weren’t for his life animating our life. We are able to be disciples because we are invited by the one who makes discipleship possible, each of us becoming followers of Jesus according to our own unique, and unpredictable, Christ-like vocation.
This is captured by the collect, which I will recite here in conclusion:
“Almighty God, by grace alone you call us and accept us in your service. Strengthen us by your Spirit, and make us worthy of your call; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.” AMEN
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.