Bad news, good news

3 Epiphany B 2012
Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; Ps 62; 1 Cor 7: 29-31; Mark 1: 14-20


I have bad news: we are all called by God.

Jonah could tell you all about that bad news. The short masterpiece that is the book of Jonah says that Jonah heard the call of God and ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction. The last place he wanted to go was Nineveh, an enemy city full of people with bad intentions. The last thing he wanted to do was walk alone in Nineveh and tell people that God was really unhappy with them.

Jonah took off in the opposite direction. You may know the rest of the story. A storm rocks the ship, the crew learns that God has picked Jonah, they throw Jonah overboard, the big fish swallows Jonah and warfs him up right back onto the road to Nineveh, the last place he wanted to go.

I’ve decided that Jonah is one of my patron saints. Some may think that a clergyman has the “call from God” thing all figured out. I don’t. A call from God is not as simple as choosing a religious career and going to school and having the bishop lay hands on you and adopting the lifestyle of a priest, week in and week out.

One can do all that and never really wrap oneself around a call from God. God’s call is urgent, God’s call comes in the midst of our ordinary lives. God’s call tells us that nothing is ordinary and that life is not the way we assumed it is and will be. God’s call asks us to do something unusual, to break from the ordinary, and it takes us beyond our comfort zone. What we do when we respond may be something very ordinary-looking, something that gets no attention or fame, like a life of deeper prayer or beginning a humble kind of service to one other person in need. Or it may be extraordinary, like helping lead a whole congregation into new life or witnessing to God’s justice in the public eye.

I am still struggling with how to respond to my ongoing call from God. I’ve done my share of running, running like Jonah even though I appear to stay in one place. I’ve been swallowed by my share of big fish and warfed right back where I did not want to go. Now I am struggling with a sense of call to lead renewal both right here at Saints Peter and Paul and also within the Diocese. Like Jonah, I sometimes find myself wishing that God would keep quiet and let me have a comfortable and predictable life.

But God is still speaking, and God is still calling.

I have good news: we are all called by God.

Every Christian soul is a called person. In our Baptism the voice of God says to each of us “You are my beloved”, not once only but every day. And God calls us like Jonah, like Simon and Andrew and James and John today.

Calls from God are not for the elites, for the spiritually sophisticated, for the religious professionals. Calls come to the ordinary; in fact, in the Gospel Jesus calls very unlikely people. We know nothing about Jonah’s life before his call. We do know something about the four men called today—fishermen, very ordinary hard-working practical day-to-day, check-to-check working guys. They can’t afford to miss a day of work, their duty is to their families. One novel about Jesus says that old Zebedee never forgave Jesus for taking his two sons away and was Jesus’ lifelong enemy.

But they got up and went—Mark says “immediately.” Some do.

Some do respond immediately. Some of us are more like Jonah—I know I am. Some ignore the urge, the unquiet, the itch, the deep longing, for as long as they can. But the call of God never stops. And the good news of the Kingdom is urgent.

I have bad news—we are called by God. We are called beyond our comfort, beyond what we thought was predictable about our lives. I have good news—we are called by God. We are loved with a love that we will never exhaust. We are known more deeply than we know ourselves. And when we set our feet and our hearts on the road in answer to our call, God will do wonders in us and through us that we cannot now understand.