Homily for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

Lectionary Text Link

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation

On Sundays when I’m not here with you at St. Mark’s, I am often traveling to parishes around the Diocese of Virginia as part of my diocesan ministry, talking about vocation and call.  In my role as the Vocations Minister, my days are filled with people engaged in various aspects of responding to God’s call on their lives.  One of my most frequently used words during those conversations is discernment: a prayerful, thoughtful process that often accompanies a time when one has an experience of feeling compelled or called to a new aspect of ministry in their lives.  Discernment of call requires a focus not on doing as much as listening: that means both listening through the interior, spiritual discipline of prayer as well as through outer engagement with others in community. 

Our Christian faith doesn’t come with a discernment manual.  But, as followers of Christ, we base our understanding of vocation and call from the lessons we hear from our Holy Scriptures and the examples of faithful disciples and followers of Christ through the ages. On Sundays like this, our Gospel lessons invite us to pause, to listen and to think about what it might have been like for others to respond to God’s call.  We hear it in the story of the prophet, Jonah and we hear it again in the lives of the disciples of Jesus who were having their own “Epiphany” of realizing that Jesus was not just Joseph and Mary’s son from Nazareth, but also the Messiah, the Son of God.  The stories are profound. Today’s Gospel lesson reads like a movie: Simon, Andrew, James and John each working along the shore of the sea of Galilee, and each hearing God’s call with such unambiguous conviction that they confidently drop the nets of their livelihood and unquestioningly follow Jesus.

At least, that’s how the story goes when we hear it echoed through history.  Sometimes reading this Gospel text makes it sound like it was all very easy for these disciples.  I’m not so sure about that.

I’m not doubting the magnitude of faith it required of Simon, Andrew, James and John to choose to follow Jesus in that moment.  But, I am also reminded that it’s easier to convey stories looking back in retrospect, confident in their outcome through the wisdom of history. Moving forward step by step, day by day into the still unfolding future as followers of Jesus was the real act of faith. 

I was invited recently by someone who was at the beginning of their own discernment journey to tell my own story of call. It was a particularly compelling invitation because this person had met me on a discernment retreat and what their take-home was from our earlier conversation had been gnawing away at them…he remembered me saying that my first experience of God’s call brought me to the field of social work. Up to that point, the people he heard talk about “call” did so speaking about ordained ministry. But vocation and call is so much more than that.

As the story of call in my own life spilled out of me during that conversation, I began to see and hear the movement of God through all the events of my life with a whole new clarity.  Like the Gospel lesson, told in retrospect it all seems to fit together in ways too beautiful for me to have concocted on my own.  And that is because that story of call isn’t about ME.  It’s about God.  If I were in charge of my life, I would have made entirely different choices and screwed it up massively.  I managed to do that along the way a few times, too.  But, as I said to the person who asked me to tell my story of call, I know that living it as I did…step by step…was about following Jesus.  It has involved prayer…both the quietness of contemplation and my loud shouts for God’s help.  The journey itself is filled with ups and downs, twists and turns, leaps of faith and chasms of doubt.  And yet, when I reflect back, I know with certainty that God has always been present with me, sometimes through a sense of inner calm but often through the people that I need to help guide me at exactly the right moment.  And that knowledge keeps me moving forward in my following.

That is the nature of following Jesus: not just for me, but for every single one of us.

We aren’t all going to have a journey that looks the same.  Jesus’ disciples didn’t, either.  And I think that confusion about what “following” means is what can trip us up about today’s Gospel lesson.  We sometimes think of responding to God’s call as having to do all the right things to get ourselves from Point A to Destination Z.  But getting ourselves to a destination isn’t following.  Following requires us to be in relationship with the one that we are following, so that we can be guided along the way.  We think we hear a story where the protagonists are Simon, Andrew, James and John who just dropped everything and became disciples.  But the protagonist here is Jesus, the one who calls us.  We can quickly forget that what they actually did was choose to prioritize relationship with Jesus over the certainty of the status quo that they already knew.

I can assure you, it was not easy.  In fact, even the Gospel stories we hear about the disciples tell us repeatedly that it was neither certain nor easy to follow Jesus.  And yet, they persisted: through doubt, despair and arguments over who was the greatest; through miracles and persecution; through mountain-top experiences and rough waters.  They brought themselves…their gifts, their skills, their lives…into living out this relationship with Jesus who could see their strengths as gifts for ministry and transform them to God’s purpose. Some fishers of fish became fishers of people.  Some menders of nets became healers of broken souls. 

And all that you bring, too, will be transformed as you take steps forward in faith.  The call to discipleship is an invitation to each and every one of us, a living out of the promises made at our Baptism.  Answering that call as “I will, with God’s help” is what we do, step by step by step.

I had another experience last week where I saw a profound example of the way in which this call to discipleship is lived out beautiful and profoundly in our daily lives.  I was sitting right up there, in the back of the choir.  Our friend, Mike, came up at announcements time.  He told the story of how years ago, he had been invited into a ministry that wasn’t something he’d considered before.  He named both his willingness to learn and the uncertainty he felt when starting out in the new ministry of being a Eucharistic Visitor.  His story focused on a relationship that emerged with a home-bound parishioner that he previously didn’t really know well at all. And now, their deep spiritual friendship is a gift to them both.

As I listened to Mike, what I heard was the story of incredible discipleship in following the invitation to serve: a relationship between siblings in Christ emerging over the sacramental sharing of the bread and wine, transforming the gifts of visiting and sharing into a visceral example of how we become, together, the Body of Christ.  And then, even more amazing, Mike offered us all a chance to join him in a part of that journey. Less than a minute later, Amos was sharing his musical gifts on the organ, the choir were lifting their voices, Mike as well as Sandy brought out their phones to catch all the joy, the Zoom congregation were all sending hellos, all of us here were rising to our feet, waving and outpouring our love and joy while singing “Happy Birthday!” and making Doris’ 100th birthday an absolute priority for us all to celebrate within this entire gathered community.  Because that kind of beautiful outpouring of spirit is what happens when we follow the call to be disciples in relationship with Jesus and with each other…there may be some uncertainty, some doubt…but then we focus on Jesus, who draws us all together and we are caught up into that beautiful, relational becoming where we know the absolute joy of what it means to be the Body of Christ.

On that first day as a Eucharistic Visitor, I don’t know if Mike could have imagined the joy of the journey.  He probably didn’t guess he’d be mentioned in a homily, that’s for sure. But that is how this walk of discipleship goes: step by step we all grow stronger, together, in Christ.

Today, we have heard stories of call in our Holy Scriptures and in our midst.  And we have a chance to experience the Good News of knowing a bit of what it means to share in the transforming relationship with Christ and each other.  So, I urge you: don’t be afraid to follow Jesus.  You don’t have to be certain of the destination.  We are called to relationship, to building each other up, to sharing the Good News through being all of who we are and bringing all of who we are to be transformed by the one who calls us by name and invites us to share this journey: fishers of people and healers of the world through our willingness to walk together in love.