Quick info
Services:
Sundays
8:15 & 10 am
Child care provided
Office hours:
Tuesday - Friday
9 am - noon
Location:
5705 Lacy Rd.
Fitchburg WI 53711
View map
Phone:
608-273-1008
Calendar
Our events
Contact info
Names, e-mails
"Like" us
| Mending the Nets |
|
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
(please feel welcome to email a question or a response) January 25, 2009, Memorial UCC Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; mark 1: 14-20 Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Psalm 19: 17) What a bunch of characters we have in today’s readings from Scripture. There’s Jonah, most familiar to us as the guy who got a free ride in the belly of a whale. There’s the people of Nineveh, who lived in what was the capital city of the Assyrians, a fierce enemy of the Israelites. Our reading today is a little vague on exactly what bad things the people of Nineveh were doing, but other parts of the Book of Jonah and a sense of the history at the time suggests that this was a place where captives were tortured, where violence was used by the strong to exploit the weak. It’s a place physically near modern-day Mosul in Iraq. It’s a place psychologically near any great entity that abuses its power. The people there were comfortable with that until they encountered this character Jonah, smelly from being vomited up on the shore by the fish, a foreigner from Israel wandering the streets shouting that they were about to be overthrown. And amazingly enough, they believed him and changed their ways. Jump ahead to Mark’s Gospel. We’re at the shoreline again, only this time the characters are a bit more established. Simon and Andrew are busy fishing. James and John along with their father and their hired hands are in their boat, mending their nets. Along comes Jesus, a stranger on the shore, who calls out to them -- and changes their lives. There are many different ways to interpret these stories. They are stories of repentance, stories of answering God’s call, stories of taking risks. The story of Jonah is one of the great tales of the Hebrew Bible, a fanciful account that you can imagine the Israelites telling with laughter at its absurdity, with smiles at the recognition of Jonah’s very human foibles, with smugness at their enemy’s repentance, with wonder at the way they sense God’s presence setting everything right. What I’d like to do this morning is to suggest three ways of thinking about these stories, ways that link them together. It seems to me that both of them are stories about who we are, stories about who God is, and stories about the ways we grow into a response to God’s grace. We may never exactly have gone for a ride inside the belly of a whale, but there are sure are times in all of our lives when we feel like Jonah. Let me take you on a quick tour of the highlights of Jonah’s story on either side of today’s reading. First God, asks Jonah to “go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” Put yourself in Jonah’s sandals. God asks you, an American, to go all alone to Tehran in Iran and call upon the citizens there to change their ways of threatening others. Or God asks you, a Pakistani, to go all alone to Washington and call upon the people of America to stop sending bombs down on their houses. We might do exactly what Jonah did – run away as fast as we could. Then there is that storm at sea, Jonah telling the sailors to throw him overboard since God was punishing them for his reluctance. The fish rescues him and God gives Jonah a second chance. He goes to Nineveh, somehow touches the hearts of the people there and then watches as the city repents. So is Jonah happy? No way. He’s unhappy that God did not destroy Nineveh. He has trouble grasping the whole idea of God’s mercy, so God works with Jonah a little more to help him get the part of about mercy. We know what it is like to be fearful in the face of great challenges in our lives. We know how fear can paralyze us from taking a step forward, from confronting the wrongs we see around us. We know how we can get angry when we think someone did not get what they had coming to them. It’s not hard to know how Jonah felt at each step along the way. For Simon and Andrew, for James and John, there was another kind of problem. They were quite secure doing what they were doing. Sure, there were ebbs and flows in the fishing business, but it seems that here on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, they were doing quite well. Andrew and Peter had their own house in Caparnaum. James and John’s family had hired hands. Then this guy shows up asking them to walk away from all of that into an unknown future. He was asking them to take a risk. It was a real risk. They set out on a path that would ultimately lead all of them to facing violence from their foes. I suspect a lot of us here know how hard it is to go somewhere we don’t want to go. A relationship fails and it is so hard to take the next step to rebuild our lives. A job goes away and we have trouble figuring out what to do next. We suddenly face an illness or the death of a loved one. We are being called to do something new, something different and we are terrified, paralyzed, looking for a way to cling to the security of the past or to run away from the uncertainty of the future. That’s why what these stories tell us about God is so important. With Jonah, God is persistent. Jonah tries to flee from God. God pursues him, rescuing him when he needs rescue, challenging when he needs challenging. With the people of Nineveh, God is responsive. There is nothing in this story to suggest that the people of Nineveh had any redeeming qualities, and yet for some reason, once they encountered Jonah, the people recognized that they needed to change. Maybe somebody started chanting “Yes we can.” In any case, they recognized that their violent and exploitive ways were putting them at risk of annihilation. God was using Jonah to get the Ninevites to abandon a culture of exploitation. They changed, they repented for what they had done and God responded. God’s grace was there for them and they somehow grasped that. And this was a God whose grace was universal. That’s one of the amazing elements of this story. God’s grace was not just for the Israelites. It was also for one of their fiercest enemies. That’s a remarkable understanding that emerges in this story. Jonah had trouble grasping that, but that was precisely the point for the Israelite storytellers. The barriers of the past were crumbling. The same images of God come through in the story at the lakeshore, although a bit more subtly. Jesus calls these four people to be his followers. Their response is the next step in a continuing interaction with God. And in the telling of the story, Mark includes the name of Andrew – a Greek name, not a Hebrew name – as a signal of how Jesus’ message was going to reach out beyond the confines of the Jewish community. What really makes these stories stand out for me is the third way of thinking about them, about how they tell us something about the way we grow into responding to God’s grace. That is there in both stories, even if it seems more obvious in the Jonah story. There’s Jonah, resisting God’s call, then answering it, then regretting that he got himself into this mess, then being reassured that he did the right thing after all. It seems to me this is something many of us go through on our journeys of faith and as we try to figure out how to respond to God’s call in our lives. The interpretation of the story of Jesus calling the four fishermen often focuses on their immediate response. Mark likes the word “immediate,” giving a sense of urgency to his telling the story of Jesus. And so the four fishermen immediately left their nets and followed Jesus. So often, that seems just impossible for us to do. Join me for a moment in the boat of James and John, where they were mending their fishing nets. That’s the way it is with life, after all. There are times when we need to tend to repairing so that we can go ahead with the task at hand. There is more to fishing than just throwing a net in the lake. The net needs to be made whole, just like our relationships need to be tended to as we head out along the way of Jesus. Not everyone jumps out of the boat to follow Jesus. Those who do will be part of the inner circle, bringing particular skills to Jesus’ work of proclaiming a new way of living. But they all of a role to play in that task. And then there are the words. The translation of Mark that we use puts these words in Jesus’ mouth: “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” It sounds like an instant transformation. But other versions of this story that follow the Greek a bit more literally say: “I will make you become fishers of people.” Another version says “I will show you how to fish for people.” It’s an invitation to begin a journey, not an instant transformation. Of course, this quartet of fishermen still had to respond. But Jesus did not expect them to have it all figured out. Here’s another bit of wordplay from this story. The literal translation of ‘follow me” is “come behind me.” In other words, put Jesus first in your life. He didn’t just ask the fishermen to add another task to their to-do list. He asked them to put him at the center of their lives. I think that’s the real Good News for us in this story. When we become followers of Jesus, that does not mean we’ve got life or God all figured out. It means we are willing to put the call of Jesus at the center of our lives, to take seriously the change that doing that will bring about and then to live into the journey. We do that with our children as they grow up as part of this community. We do that with new members who join this community. We do it with each other, whether we have been here for a lifetime or for only a few months. We all work together to figure out how we become followers of Jesus, recognizing that we understand that in different ways, recognizing that none of us does it perfectly, understanding that God is always there to help us start over again. So let’s tend to our nets, to repair them along the way as needed and then go out and do our best to understand and to live out the way of Jesus. |