Jonah 3:1-5, 10                                                             The Rt. Rev. Arthur E. Walmsley
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.
Two years ago, when Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency, many who had read his books or heard his stirring address in 1994 at the Democratic Convention admired him and wished him well. The pundits doubted that this political newcomer would go very far in the free-for-all of presidential politics. But then something began to happen. Attracted to his message, a grass roots movement began to coalesce, fed especially by young people who dropped whatever they were about in life to campaign, making innovative use of the world of the internet. As we watched the Inauguration last Tuesday, what was singularly apparent across the faces of that enormous crowd was a kind of excitement and enthusiasm we haven’t seen in American politics since the turbulent years of the 1960s. Those were the years which saw the culminating events of the civil rights struggle, Martin Luther King proclaiming “I have a dream” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and another young president, John F. Kennedy, calling the nation at his inauguration to recover its sense of destiny in service: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Today’s gospel reading is from another moment in history, when another man strode on to the scene. This one was not a candidate for political office or otherwise destined to lead a people politically, this one would be heralded as God himself, incarnate among us. As today’s gospel has it, Jesus of Nazareth came out of nowhere to begin preaching about the Kingdom of God, and like Obama Jesus started a movement. We are at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry; in fact today’s reading is barely half way through the first chapter of St. Mark’s version of Jesus’ life.
Jesus came to Galilee, Mark writes, 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.He approaches a group of fishermen, and calls out to them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.Without discussion, Simon Peter and Andrew drop the nets they are casting. With no hesitation, two others, James and John, who have been sitting in their boat mending nets, quickly join him. These four will be with him to the end. After his death, they will become the backbone of his movement. Like him, they will taste persecution, they will give their lives as they announce to the world that in every generation God calls on us to “shape an uncertain destiny.” Those last words are Obama’s, challenging the American people to grasp the nettle of these times. The new day that Jesus invites Jesus calls his followers into is no less than the Kingdom of God, or, to say it better, “the in-breaking of the reign of God.”
Ever since John McCausland asked me to preside at the Lord’s Table and preach this morning, I have been asking myself, “Just how did Jesus persuade those fisherman to drop everything and follow him.” People don’t just drop what they are doing in life and start over.
Or maybe they do, at least sometimes. People don’t just hear someone speak, or read what she or he has written, and get behind a movement for changing the way government acts. Or maybe they do; we’ve just seen the powerful impact of Obama’s confidence, the audacity of his hope, the appeal he has made to our better instincts as a people. Whether you voted for him or not, and certainly whether or not you will agree with his policies as he goes about the task of serving the nation as its leader, he has somehow tapped into values upon which our success (as a people) depends – “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things,” Obama said, “are old. These things are true    . . . .”
I looked at the faces in the crowd on Tuesday, listened on Wednesday to a group of men and women with whom I met to pray, and recognized why our hearts were stirred. “Bless us with patience,” we said, using the words Gene Robinson had prayed at the Lincoln Memorial last Sunday, “and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.” “Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with (Abraham) Lincoln’s reconciling leadership.” We prayed for Obama, yes, but we prayed for ourselves and for our country.
Let’s say it out loud: we’re talking about the “c” word: conversion. Let me ask you: when in your life did you hear Jesus calling out to you, “Follow me,” and you did, however hesitantly, not at all sure what difference it might make in your life. No preacher can ever do more than tell you his or her own story about conversion. I think John McCausland does so with extraordinary honesty and integrity each Sunday.
I want to tell you a story about my own walk with Jesus, what leads me to be greatly inspired and heartened by where we are as a people, if we rise to the spirit of hope and the call to service which filled the vast mall on Tuesday. I was barely eighteen years old, had just finished my first year of college. The year was 1946, as the world slid out of World War II into the Cold War. I was the first member of my family to go to college, and confused about what would be my life career. I had thought about the priesthood, or maybe a helping profession like social work, or teaching, especially teaching history which I loved because it reflected on who and what civilization was. I took a summer job in a camp run by a large church on Broadway in New York, a camp not for the children of the movers and changers of that church, but those from a tough neighborhood of recent immigrants on the Lower East Side of the city. One of my assignments – I guess I got it because of the rumor that I was interested in the ministry – one of my assignments was to lead a chapel service every afternoon for the campers. Every afternoon!
With the best intention, I decided that somehow I could use the Catechism at the back of the Book of Common Prayer as a framework, and each day, I’d try to engage the boys in a sentence or question from the Catechism. There were about sixty or seventy kids there for a minimum of four weeks, and I don’t suppose more than a handful had a connection with any church, much less the very formal Episcopal Church. Came the first service, we sang something, and I launched forth;
What dost thou chiefly learn in these Articles of thy Belief? read the Catechism. Nobody, least of all kids from the slums of New York, talks like that, in the language of Shakespeare. Of course I cleaned the language up, and went on:.
The Church says it believes that God comes to us in three main ways: God comes as Father, who made me and all the world. God comes as Jesus, the Son of God, who redeems me and all people. And God comes as the Holy Spirit, who heals me and all the people of God.A squeaky voice from the front row answered loudly, “That SOB ran out on my Ma. I hate him.”So much for my lesson plan. I can’t remember how we got out of there, only that I had no clue where to go next. His name was Milton. When a fist fight broke out in his cabin, two of the fists belonged to Milton. Twice he ran away from camp, and on one of them stowed away on a day-line ship which cruised the Hudson and got as far as 125th Street in Manhattan. We couldn’t handle him, tried to send him home only to discover that has Ma had gone off on a long trip with her latest boyfriend.
Okay now, when you hear the word “father” what do you think?
That summer, instead of a camp nurse, we had a young medical student who would look after our health needs. He was a Melkite Christian from the Middle East, part of a very ancient branch of Orthodox Christians. “I don’t have any responsibilities during the morning program activities. Why don’t I just take him out fishing in a rowboat; at least it’ll keep him out of the way.” Sometimes, miracles happen when we least expect them. Over the next weeks, the camp “Doc” gave Milton what he so desperately desired, an adult – a male adult – he could trust. At the end of the camp season, eight weeks later, as we sat around the closing campfire, Milton was awarded the Best Camper certificate and we all cheered.
By the end of that summer, I knew the answer to the question of my life work. It would be to embark on a lifelong struggle to help the church be the kind of community which Jesus would have us be – a place where the Miltons of the world would find understanding, trust, and a place to exercise their talents. Where the words we speak become the marching orders for what we do. Call that conversion if you will. It’s not just about finding a reason for living which is bigger than oneself, one’s family, one’s nationality, even one’s religious faith. It’s about being joined to the whole human community, in believing that who we are and what we do can transform lives, even lives of those we are ready to give up on. Like it or not, my life and my ministry has been joined to all the struggles the church and society have faced: about race, about the place of women, about finding an alternative to war, about the place of gay and lesbian people. To be human is accepting that we can never give up on hope.
I saw something of that vision on the faces of African Americans and other minorities who until Tuesday could not pretend to believe that Dr. King’s dream would happen, in their lifetimes or perhaps ever. I saw it on the faces of young people ready to give themselves over to something besides making money. I see it on the faces of my generation and yours, people who struggle with all those disappointments in life which stare us in the face – the threat to our jobs, our healthcare, our retirement years – and yet find hope that we can turn these issues around. And I remember the faces of those we love and have loved, who were wounded or died in Europe and the South Pacific, the snows of Korea and the swamps of Vietnam, and the ghastly crucible of death which Iraq has become. After all, the invitation Jesus made to those fisherman in Galilee is the same one he makes to us, that we dare to believe in change – change in our own lives and in the life of the world itself.