"A Sense of Urgency." A sermon on Mark 1:14-21 from Littlefield Presbyterian Church on the Third Sunday of Epiphany.

"A Sense of Urgency"

Mark 1:14-20

            What would make you drop everything and pursue a whole new life?  A great job offer? An educational opportunity? The chance to make a difference?
            Can you imagine picking up and leaving everything to follow Jesus?  I think, if we’re honest, most of us would find it really hard to leave work and family and friends and everything that’s familiar and safe to venture out into an unknown, uncertain future.

            Right after Jesus' baptism, the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness.  He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan.  Then, after John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.  Repent, and believe in the good news.”

            Turn.   Change.  Come and be a part of the kingdom. 

            Jesus’ time has come, but he needs help.  He’s passing along the Sea of Galilee, and he sees Simon and his brother Andrew casting a fishing net into the sea.   He says, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”  Just like that. Immediately.  

            A little further on, Jesus sees James and John in their boat, mending their fishing nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father in the boat with the hired men, and they followed him.

            Jesus sees some ordinary people working at their ordinary jobs, and he enlists them to help in his mission.  The way Mark tells it, they don’t seem to agonize over the decision.  Immediately, they leave their nets on the shore, say good-bye to their families, and they take off with this strangely compelling itinerant preacher who tells them of Good News and a new way of life and calls them to help him bring in the kingdom of God.

            Follow me, and I’ll make you fishers of people.

            Now, that would be a different kind of fishing for them.   It would mean casting out nets to gather people in to be part of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed is manifest when human beings embrace God’s rule through repentance and faithful living, about a total re-orientation of our lives. 

            When Jesus called the Galilean fishermen to discipleship, he didn’t just ask them to add one more task to their busy lives.  He calls disciples into new ways of being… a new identity… a new way of living their lives in the world.  Jesus calls each of us to repent—to open ourselves to transformation of our relationships, work situations, social commitments, and political allegiances and our church communities.  
            We may not all be called to leave our occupations and families and homes behind. But all of us are called to look at our own lives through the lens of the gospel of Jesus Christ and allow them to be shaped and transformed by the values of the kingdom of heaven.
            Every Christian has a calling—a vocation to serve Christ wholeheartedly in whatever occupation, or network of family relationships or context in which we have been planted.

            Jesus called Simon Peter and Andrew and James and John by name, but he didn’t call them to be individual disciples.  He called them together to form the basis of a new community.   The little band of disciples formed a community right from the very beginning – they were already becoming the church.

            The community the New Testament calls, in the Greek, ecclesia, literally means “called out.”  The church is a called-out community whose purpose is to exhibit the kingdom of God to the world."   We, the church of Jesus Christ, all of us, are the "called out" people of God.

            Peter, Andrew, James and John were not called just to hang with Jesus and enjoy his company.  The church today isn’t called together to enjoy each other’s company and be comfortable together.   A congregation that’s focused only on its inner life and on survival has forgotten why it exists. 

            You may have heard the parable of the little life-saving station, but I think it bears repeating.  On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur there was a once a crude little life-saving station.  The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea. With no thought for themselves, they went out day or night tirelessly searching for the lost.

            Many lives were saved by this little station, so that it became famous. Some of those who had been rescued, and various others in the surrounding areas, wanted to become associated with the station and give of their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews were trained. The little life-saving station grew.

            Some of the new members of the life-saving station were unhappy that the building was so crude and so poorly equipped.  They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those who were rescued from the sea.

            So, they built a bigger building and replaced the emergency cots with beds and got nicer furniture.  Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they re-decorated it beautifully and furnished it as a sort of club.

            In time, there were less of the members who were interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired life boat crews to do this work. The mission of life-saving was still given lip-service but most were too busy or lacked the necessary commitment to take part in the life-saving activities personally.

            About this time, a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boat loads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick, and some of them had dark skin. Some of them spoke strange languages. The beautiful new club quickly showed signs of damage and wear-and-tear from all the people. So, the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwreck could be cleaned up before coming inside.

            At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club's life-saving activities and focus on their comfortable club activities with each other. Some members insisted that life-saving was their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the life of all the various kinds of people who were being shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. And so they did.

            As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. They evolved into a club and yet another life-saving station was founded.

            If you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore.  Shipwrecks are still frequent in those dangerous waters, only now most of the people drown.

            We have a mission in the world. As theologian Emil Brunner said, "The church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning."

            For the first disciples, it was costly to follow Jesus.  Jesus and his gospel challenged a lot of their understandings about family and society--even about faith. It threatened the systems of privilege, patronage, and loyalty to the emperor.  All of the values and institutions that seemed to be fixed realities were called into question by the Christian vision of a new way of being in the world--a world in which there would no longer be "slave or free, Jew or Gentile, male or female, because all are one in Christ Jesus."[1]

            Jesus calls us, and the call challenges our center of gravity and wants to shift it from being centered on ourselves to God’s call—God’s dream for us and God’s world. It can be a real adventure in faith.
            In Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf urges the hobbit Frodo Baggins to leave behind his comfortable existence and set out on a quest.  Frodo resists, saying, “We are plain quiet folk, and I have no use for adventures. Nasty, disturbing, and uncomfortable things.” ` If you’ve read the books or seen the movies you know that Frodo does leave his comfortable hobbit hole and goes on a great adventure, and it changes his life completely.

            Some of the financial and other challenges this congregation has faced over the past few years threw us off center for a while.  It’s easy to get so thrown off-center that we could forget why we exist, turn inward, and focus on survival.   That’s why we’ve spent time over the past few years working on our mission statement and core values.  That’s why we need to keep discerning God’s will for us.

            Jesus calls us to follow him.  So, we need to be praying for God’s guidance and power.  Pray for the courage we need to look at our context and challenges and possibilities.  Pray that we will trust in God to provide whatever it is we need, as we cast out the net of God's love and bring in those who need to know God's love and acceptance and healing. 

            Pray for our leaders, that they will be strengthened to lead the congregation with love and energy and imagination.   Pray that this community will be energized to deal with the kind of changes we need to make in order to go fishing with Jesus.         

                         

            Have you heard the good news?  The kingdom of God is near.    Jesus calls ordinary people like you and me to help bring in those who are sick and afflicted, those who need to hear the good news. 

            Follow me, Jesus says.  Follow me.

Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor

Littlefield Presbyterian Church

Dearborn, Michigan

January 21, 201

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[1] Galatians 3:28

"Courage for New Vision". A sermon on Mark 10:46-52 and Isaiah 43:18-21 for Reformation Sunday at Littlefield Presbyterian Church.

"Courage for New Vision"

Isaiah 43:18-21; Mark 10:46-52

One of the major themes in Mark's gospel is how spiritually blind the disciples were.  Last week we heard Mark's account of how James and John were so spiritually blind that, in their grasping for worldly privilege, they asked Jesus to let them sit on his right and left sides in glory.  They didn't seem to know there was anything wrong with their vision.

            In today’s gospel lesson, we find Bartimaeus sitting by the side of the road, begging for his living.  He doesn't have a perfect understanding of who Jesus is.  But he knows what he needs.  Even though Bartimaeus is physically blind, he's clearly focused on what he wants more than anything else in the world.  He wants to be able to see.   And so, when he hears that Jesus of Nazareth is coming down the road, Bartimaeus calls out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

            Now, in asking to be healed,  Bartimaeus is taking  a risk.  It'll be the end of his old life.  If he regains his sight, he won't be able to sit by the road and beg for a living.  He might see some things he won't want to see.  His new life will be strange and new. 

           

            Mark holds Bartimaeus up as a model of faith.   He knew what he needed and wanted more than anything else in the world.  He had the courage to see strange, new things.  He believed that Jesus could heal him.  So—even though there were people trying to discourage him, telling him to be quiet-- Bartimaeus dared to cry out to Jesus--  over and over--  and ask for vision.   "Let me SEE again."

            And just like that.  Just words.  No mud or spittle this time, like the last time Mark told about Jesus healing a blind man.[1]  Not even a touch.  In the blinking of an eye, Bartimaeus can see!  His faith has made him well!

            "Go your way,"  Jesus tells him.  But Bartimaeus doesn't go his way.  Right then he decides that Jesus' way will be his way, and he chooses to walk with Jesus, on the way.  His faith and his new vision enable him to follow Jesus as his disciple.

            "Go your way,"   Jesus says.   Jesus doesn't force or coerce us.  He invites us to choose freely which way we go. 

            After years of blindness, I imagine there were places Bartimaeus might have wanted to go...  things he wanted to see.  Yet it's clear in the story that immediately Bartimaeus becomes a disciple   and follows Jesus on the way.  It’s as if—once he can really see--  there's no other way.

           

            From earliest times in the church, restoring of sight has been a metaphor for the new life experienced in Christ   and for spiritual discernment.  In the early days of the church, the act of baptism was referred to in Greek as “enlightenment.”  The story of the man born blind and the story of blind Bartimaeus became part of the curriculum of instruction for new church members.  

            When we open ourselves to Christ’s healing grace, we begin to see things differently.  As we begin to see the world through Christ’s eyes--  the eyes of love--  our values are changed...  and our priorities are re-ordered.  We’re re- formed.

           

            Today on Reformation Sunday, we remember our history as a church...  to remember that our Reformed tradition is a living tradition. One of the great watchwords of the Reformed tradition is “Semper Reformanda":  The church Reformed, always being reformed, by the Holy Spirit, according to the word of God.

            Reformation Sunday commemorates the occasion in 1517 when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.  Just as God worked through the reformers who came before Martin Luther and John Calvin--  Jan Hus and the Czech Brethren, the Waldensians, John Wycliffe, and the Hussites,  as well as those who came after them--  Zwingli, John Knox, and others,   God has continued to work through the Spirit during the whole sweep of Christian history. 

            In several recent books, Phyllis Tickle describes the time we live in now as “The Great Emergence,” and offers a big-picture theory of how Christianity is changing and why.  In her book The Great Emergence, Tickle observed that about every 500 years the church cleans out its attic and has a “rummage sale.” 

            Going backward in time 500 years before our time is the Great Reformation.  Five hundred years prior to the Great Reformation is the Great Schism, around 1054, when the Greek or Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity and the Roman branch separated. 

            Five hundred years prior to that takes us back to Gregory the Great, who became pope in a time of total upheaval following the fall of the Roman Empire… a time of bitter dissension, when the Oriental branch of Christianity—Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syrian-- was separated from both Western and Eastern Christianity.  Pope Gregory is known as “Great” because he was able to build on the work of St. Benedict in the monastic movement in building a kind of church-political coherence of monasteries and convents that were centers of learning and service, and that would protect, preserve, and characterize the Christian movement for the next five centuries through the Dark Ages.

            If we look back approximately 500 years before that, we’re looking at what Tickle and others call the Great Transformation 2,000 years ago--  the age that gave us the Christian faith in the first place.

            I’m grateful to Tickle for her big-picture framework of how the Spirit of God has worked over the centuries to reform the Christian faith, and for how she shows how the re-formation in the church has always been related to the political, economic, and social upheavals that were also taking place.

            Tickle and others point to historical forces that combined to produce the Great Reformation:  the invention of the printing press, the rise of nation-states, corruption in religious institutions, and the emergence of an educated elite.  Every religion is tied to the culture in which it exists, just as it informs the society.  Five hundred years after the Great Reformation, we are experiencing corresponding challenges in communications, politics, religion, and scholarship.[2]  Think of the changes in our society in just the past few decades!

            This is a whole new time in the church, and for a lot of people it can be scary.  In a major study released earlier this year, the Pew Research Center describes a “changing U.S. Religious Landscape,” in which Christians have been delining sharply as a share of the population, while unaffiliated and other faiths continue to grow.         

            This is the context we live in.   I agree with Diana Butler Bass  when she writes: in this new context, “we need to know who we are with great clarity and personal commitment.   At the same time, we need to be able to love our neighbors and work beyond faith boundaries to create a new shared sense of common good.  This will call for a different sort of church than the one we knew in the centuries that came before.”[3]

            The church is being called to a new way of life.  We’re being called to re-create our identity building on the wisdom of the past, and to embrace the questions of an emerging future in which Christians may be a minority in a pluralistic society.  Part of the good news of this is that Christians have often been more faithful and creative when we are not in charge of the society.

            On this Reformation Sunday, we could celebrate what happened 500 years ago…and then hold on for dear life to the way we’re comfortable with doing church.  We could do that.  But I don’t think that’s a faithful way to celebrate the church’s journey in faith.

            We live in a broken and fearful world, and we could find so much to be afraid of.  As a congregation, we could retreat into our familiar ways of doing church, and try to find comfort and security in being a nice and friendly little congregation. 

            Or we can ask Jesus to give us the ability to see things in new, fresh ways.  We can hear the call to “take heart”—to have courage—and follow Jesus gratefully into new opportunities and possibilities. 

            We can remember how God spoke to faithful people in a hard time, saying, “Look.  I’m doing something new.  Don’t you perceive it?”

            God is still working on us, leading us further into the truth.  The church does make progress.  It comes through the painful process of repentance...  changing our minds...  and correcting our practice.

            The good news is that--  in God’s presence--  miracles do happen.  And so, my friends, take heart.  Do we have the courage to see? 

            Jesus offers us the gift of vision, so we can see to follow him.  He  invites us to come and see the world through HIS eyes...  to see new possibilities...  and have new values and priorities, both as individuals and as the church.    He invites us to have our eyes opened to the truth of God’s redeeming love...  and to follow him in an adventure of faith.

            And so, my friends, take heart!

            Amen.

             

Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
October 26, 2015

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[1] Mark 8:22-25

[2] Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story (Harper One, 2009), p. 154.

[3] Diana Butler Bass, “What Can the Church Become?”    Posted October 25, 2012 at http://seaburynext.wordpress.com/