Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 21, 2024
Scripture Reading: Mark 1:14-20
This week I was talking to someone about growing up with my sisters in rural
Ontario. We lived at the end of a dead-end road, and there were a lot of
families with kids on the road. Even though I was one of the older kids, age
didn’t really matter and we tended to run around as a pack, usually with our
bicycles. This was in the day long before cell phones, so when it was time for
us to come home, either for supper or at bedtime, Dad would stand in front of
the house and blow his soccer coaching whistle. When we heard that whistle, we
knew that it was time to go home. And because we were generally pretty good
kids, when we heard that call, we went.
(In fact, the only time I ever remember our parents ever grounding any of
us, it was when my sister didn’t come home when she heard the soccer whistle.)
Dad called, and we responded.
Which is a cute story, but it ties in with today’s bible reading where Jesus is calling his disciples. As I read this familiar story this year, I started wondering – which is more important, the call or the response?
Usually when I read this story, I think about the act of calling. Jesus called those first disciples to leave their nets behind and follow him. Usually I think about Jesus coming across Simon and Andrew and James and John as they are fishing in the Sea of Galilee, looking them in the eye, calling them by name, and saying “Follow me.”
Usually when I read this story, I think about how God calls all of us, and how we need to have our hearts attuned to God. Usually I think about the times when I have sensed God calling me to something new, whether that was the first time I sensed God’s presence, telling me that I am their beloved child, or whether it was when I began to sense that I was being called into ministry… which was less like a voice calling softly in the night and more like an annoying itch that wouldn’t go away.
But this year when I read this story, I also started wondering about what happens after the calling. In the story from the bible, we read about how Simon and Andrew and James and John immediately leave their nets, their livelihood, and their families behind and follow after Jesus. I started wondering if the response to God’s call isn’t at least as important as the calling itself.
What would have happened if these first disciples hadn’t left everything to follow Jesus? They would go on to become Jesus’s inner circle and leaders in the very earliest church after Jesus’s death and resurrection. These fisherpeople from the backwater of Galilee would go on to preach and to teach and to heal and to proclaim the good news of God’s love made known in Jesus to crowds of thousands. In fact it is Simon who is later renamed Peter about whom Jesus would say, “Upon this rock that is you, I will build my church.” Would we have a church today if these four hadn’t responded to the call?
I also wonder if Jesus ever called people to follow him, and those people refused. Even these four in today’s story would have every reason to refuse. After all, they are leaving behind not only their families but also their means of providing for their families in order to follow after this itinerant preacher. How many people heard a similar call and then said no? But these four, we are told, left everything behind and followed him.
I do think that the response is at least as important as the call. (Just ask my sister who didn’t respond to the call of the whistle!)
Which brings us back to our own calling. Each one of us is called by God. Just by virtue of the fact that you are here today, God has called you. Maybe that call happened when you were too young to know, maybe it happened in such a gradual way that it crept up on you without you noticing, or maybe you can pinpoint the hour and the day when God called you by name, saying, “follow me.”
And I think that what all of us do with that calling is at least as important. We are called to be the church, as the new creed reminds us. We are called to be the church – to celebrate God’s presence; to live with respect in creation; to love and serve others; to seek justice and resist evil; to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.
Our calling, as disciples of Jesus, usually isn’t to sit back and say, “OK, I’ve been called, that’s all.” Instead, we are called to a living faith. We are called to let the Holy Spirit work in us, transforming us into who God created us to be; and we are called to let the Holy Spirit work through us as we live out the mission that God gives to us.
God nurtures us on the journey – nurturing us through the sacraments, nurturing us through being in community with each other, nurturing us through worship, nurturing us through the different spiritual practices. And then, with bodies and spirits nourished, we leave our literal or metaphorical nets behind to follow Jesus on whatever exciting paths we are called to follow, individually or as a whole church.
For the call is just the beginning, but it is the response that opens up new horizons to us – ones that we might never have imagined traveling before!
And may God give us the courage to answer the call with a resounding “yes”! Amen.
“The First Two Disciples”
by JESUS MAFA
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