January 25, 2009
The Third Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
Jonah 3:1-5; Psalm 62:6-14; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31;
Mark 1:14-20
This week, I think, we have three interesting lessons. The first from Jonah is actually the middle part of the story of Jonah, and it doesn’t show Jonah at his whiny worst, either before or after his prayers and the prophecy intervened to save Nineveh. The second is the short passage from Corinthians speaks of the fact that human institutions and social arrangements will be very different in the Kingdom of God, that the lives we live in this world need to be dictated by the values of the eternal kingdom not the values of this world. So we become aware that Paul is not speaking against marriage so much as he is speaking for the transformation of marriage, as one can be transformed through mourning into rejoicing. Finally in the gospel we have one of my favorite all time lines in scripture which has sadly been made inclusive – probably the only inclusive language change I will ever mourn, “I will make you fishers of men!” Jesus said in the King James Version (KJV), whereas in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) this morning he told Peter and Andrew, “I will make you fish for people!”
As a woman who has been single most of my adult life, the idea of fishing for men has always had great appeal, and although admittedly fishing for people in the pastoral, evangelical sense is the center of my passion and faith, the impish part of me still hopes for the exclusively male kind of fishing to be possible for all women!
Together these three lessons say a lot of about faith and about human relationships with each other and with God. They are stories of how God calls us to follow. Jonah resisted God’s call mightily and, as I said, with much whining and self-justification and nearly perfected self righteousness. Jonah was not the perfect specimen of a human being of faith to say the least, but he ultimately did what God asked of him and told the people of Nineveh that if they did not repent and change their ways, the Lord would allow the Assyrians to overthrow them and they would become a conquered nation. And the people believed him! No one was more surprised than Jonah. The people believed him! And that really made him mad! God spared the people of Nineveh! Imagine that??? Jonah was outraged and went on a real whiny tear. We learn from this that that is how God is with God’s people: “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; and ready to relent from punishing.”
However much more delicious it is when God punishes our enemies and those we feel need to find “justice!” as it was delicious for Jonah to contemplate God’s righteous anger with the Ninevites, alas, that is not God’s way.
And with the people of Corinth who were dealing with how to be a Christian community without the Hebrew law but with a consciousness of the Hebrew law, as they were trying to figure out how they were to live in the world but still not be of it, what did that mean for marriage? What did that mean for any human institution? They believed that the world was passing away and that the Kingdom of God was very near. That being so, how were they to behave in the world? Marriage or not? Families were being redefined by the relationships people had with God rather than by the blood of the parentage that defined their birth in the world. Paul was never big on marriage, but he was very sure that the Kingdom of God was coming almost immediately, and at the time this passage was written he was getting surer and surer that God was coming at the drop of a hat so foregoing human institutions was, of course, his preference. Yet as time passed and the Kingdom of God did not come, the faithful had to look at what else Jesus may have meant by his teachings. And what comes out of this passage for me is not so much a teaching on marriage but rather how to live as a person transformed by faith. A God who is slow to anger and steadfast in love, ready to relent from punishing, would want for our tears of mourning to turn to tears of joy, to live as though we had everything when we have nothing. For in truth the thing we have that cannot be taken from us in this world and the next is our faith, our ability to love and be loved.
And God, I believe, will be with us steadfastly through times of plenty and times of little if that faith in the coming Kingdom of God is what under girds our lives. We will not have more – do not misunderstand me. I think God does not give a single thought to who is rich and who is not, or how our worldly position is related in some way to anything we have done, deserve, earned, are being rewarded for, etc., etc., etc. I believe that our worldly place is based not on what God determines or predetermines, but rather it is determined by the good (or bad) fortune to being born in the 20/21st. century, of good middle class American stock, with education and other incredible opportunities available to us. It is not our doing that we are so blessed; and it certainly is not God choosing us over the poverty stricken people in Africa or the poor orphans of Brazil. In truth, it is what we do with what we have been blessed with that reflects our faith and our trust that the Kingdom of God is coming. It is what we do with what we are blessed with that will show our understanding of this passage Paul has written. It is not because the Kingdom of God is coming tomorrow and we will try to be good, but because if we believe, our lives will reflect that belief with a fervor for addressing the inequity of the world as we use our blessings to show others the depth of our faith and generosity. We become a people, who like God, are “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; and ready to relent from punishing.”
The gospel lesson adds a bit of a new dimension, doesn’t it? In fact two new dimensions! Repentance is the first. One way to know we are people o faith is to be “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love; and ready to relent from punishing.” But another is to truly repent when we fail to live as though we were following God into the new place, the new world of the Kingdom of God. It is to be able to see ourselves as having made mistakes and wanting to turn around and go in a truer, righter, more Godly direction, on the path that leads to the Kingdom of God.
The second dimension that is added in the gospel is evangelism, that fishing for men, and women, and children. Fishing for people! It is to be so overwhelmed by the reality of our own faith that it oozes out of us in the form of generosity and forgiveness and relenting from justification, judgment and retaliation. Evangelism is not always about pounding the words of the gospel into the ears of people we think are failing to catch the joy of Jesus. It is more about being the Kingdom of God to others so that God might flow through us and into the lives of those who have not yet encountered God. Perhaps even more challenging would be God flowing through us so constantly that even those who know us the best can still see God through us and all our human failings.
Poor old Jonah had to spend time in the belly of a whale rather than face his own stubbornness and desire for what he thought was justice against a whole city, and further he let himself wallow in his own humanity. And the end result? God forgave him, as God forgave the city! But, oh, what a miserable time Jonah had in the mean time!
If we are living in the deepest of ways as though we not only believe in the Kingdom of God, but are reflecting that Kingdom of God in our very lives and ways, repenting, forgiving, listening to God’s voice, then we will be able to learn from Jonah and skip the whale’s belly. If we live as though the Kingdom of God were already here, practicing for when it will be, either close by or far away, then we will go not into the belly of the whale, but directly to forgiveness. We will go directly to accepting that God’s ways of slow anger, steadfast love, and relentless relenting from punishment are the keys to our lives and the keys to being ones who fish for people (or women or men or children).
This is a tall order in the world in which we live. It means forgiving enemies, personally and corporate. It means letting go of needing to find revenge or justification or justice. It means we know the answer to the question the poet at the inauguration of president Obama asked: “What if the answer was love?” We who are members of the Kingdom of God, we who want to avoid the whale’s belly, we who know that all institutions are human and that we are called to a better place, we would say to her, “Indeed, that is the only answer and it is the same for everyone. Love. Abounding love.” And our evangelistic hearts would sing. “Welcome friend to the Kingdom of God.”
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd
