Every few years, when today’s set of stories comes around in the church’s cycle of scripture and prayers, I find myself getting a little…resentful, maybe?
You see, right near the beginning of the service, we prayed “Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ….” And then we read these little excerpts of God’s story in which there is a very clear call to action, and a quick response.
And I notice, every time, how much that’s not like my life. And I suspect it’s not much like many of yours.
Most of my life, the “calls” I may have gotten from God play out a lot more like those times when there’s a garbled voicemail on your phone but it didn’t even ring, or show a missed call. (Maybe that’s just my phone?)
Or like the phone call went to someone else, who’s trying to tell me about it - but they don’t remember exactly what the caller said, or when they called, or really what I’m supposed to do about it, anyway.
Tell me in text messages.
While we’re both driving.
It’s hard to “answer readily” a call like that.
When I tell my story about feeling “called” to be a priest, it sounds a lot clearer and simpler than it actually was, or felt at the time. I quite frankly spent years pushing back at God with the emotional equivalent of “if you actually want me for something, or to do something, you’re going to need to spell it out in a certified letter.”
Being “called” to be a priest – or to come here to Trinity, or to teach Sunday School, or to heal people, or to get closer to God -- or share good news by the way you parent, or manage, or engineer, or feed people, [or sing,] or befriend someone – is almost never as clear and clean as it looks in the Jonah and Jesus stories we read today.
In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that for Simon and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee it wasn’t quite as simple as
“Follow me and fish for people!”
“Okay, let’s go and not look back!”
And I know it wasn’t as simple as
“Get up and tell the city my message”
“Okay, city, here’s what God said!”
for Jonah.
Jonah’s story, in fact, is mostly about not being very ready to answer the call to share God’s good news. The first time God calls Jonah to go tell a message of repentance to Ninevah, Jonah more or less sticks his fingers in his ears and then jumps on a boat going as far from Ninevah as he can.
And Jonah never really gets comfortable with what God calls him to do. He never gets quite convinced that telling Ninevah – city of God’s historical enemies – to get reconciled with God is going to be good news for him, or the world - even after Nineveh figures out it’s good news and instantly follows God.
It can be messy, being called to proclaim God’s good news. Unclear and confusing, often.
The things God wants you or me to take on, tell people, do, or change, may look and feel uncomfortable, silly, or unwelcome. (I still can’t figure out why God seems to think I should live in the suburbs, when I’m absolutely a city girl at heart. And yet, it’s good – I believe it’s the call of God – that I get to live and love here with you.)
Sometimes the messiness of God’s “calls” is more serious – a need to end a relationship, a need to share a painful truth, a need to take on a task I’ll never feel ready for.
There’s evidence in the gospels that Simon and Andrew and James and John did have to end relationships, wrestle with and share painful truths, keep picking up work that never got easy, when Jesus told them to come and fish for slippery, complicated, people (instead of income-producing actual fish). It stayed complicated, too, even the parts where they knew, without a doubt, that they were doing the right thing, that they wanted to say “YES” to Jesus over and over again. Evidence that that shiny moment we read today was potentially as confusing and messy and hard as it is for me. Maybe for you.
It helps me when I speculate, with other preachers and scholars, that maybe Andrew and Simon and John and James found that particular moment possible because before the day when Jesus walked along the shore of Galilee and said “come fish for people with me,” John and James and Andrew and Simon had actually gotten to know him over some weeks, or months, or years. Maybe Jesus and the guys had already speculated about all going off together to work for God, to work on gathering people instead of fish. Maybe they’d joked about it, or made careful plans (which probably didn’t work out just the way they expected – this is Jesus, after all!), or started to dream about what might be possible, or work out how to help each other with the things that were going to be hard.
And I wonder if one of the things that makes it possible for them, or you or me, to “answer readily” the call of Christ is trust. Trust that Jesus, that God, builds with us before as well as after the particular moments in your story, or mine, that someone else might point to as when God “calls” us.
The psalm we read this morning is about being steeped in trust with God. Feeling God as the solid ground under our feet, our safety, the place we can “pour out our hearts”, be sheltered and protected, and be strong, whatever happens around us.
When I read all of Jonah’s story – the messy, funny, awkward “not me! Not that!” parts as well as the “Okay, city, here’s what God says” part we heard today – I sense a deep level of fundamental trust that Jonah has in God.
Jonah is in a sulky snit through the whole entire story – but you get into those snits with people you trust.
And when he’s stuck in a fish’s stomach – when obviously God’s all done with him – Jonah sings about his confidence in God. He repeatedly grumps at the Good News Telling God sends him to do because – I believe – he knows, deep down below the level of his sulk, that there’s nothing he can do to break the love of God, to make God drop him. That there’s nowhere he can go – not the ends of the earth, not the belly of a fish – where God will lose him.
I think it takes Simon and Andrew and James and John a little longer, in their story, to get to that deep of a trust in Jesus.
I know it’s taken me longer than one brief shining minute to build up the trust in God that I need.
You might be one of the souls that’s always had that trust – or it might take a lifetime for you, too.
But I’m pretty sure that James and John and Simon and Andrew had some kind of reason to trust their future to Jesus before they left their boats that one particular day. And pretty sure that Jesus isn’t going to call you or me to something we can’t trust Jesus to help us do.
I’m completely sure that no matter what task, or news, or place that challenges us that God may call you or me to, God is never going to let our fears or griefs or worries or sulks or uncertainties disconnect God from us. That God is never going to lose us, no matter how far we go, or how ridiculous a fish-belly situation we might land in.
So when I pray that we can “answer readily” God’s call, I think I’m praying for Jesus to keep showing you and me and us how much we can trust God. How deeply and far, how strongly and truly, we can trust God’s love and protection and care for us – so that it’s possible for you and me to risk the impossible. Or more likely, just the inconvenient, or unexpected, tasks and places and news and opportunities that God calls us to share.
So will you watch with me – this week, this month, this year – will you pay attention with me to all the reasons we have to trust God?
Will you try to notice, with me, the ways that Jesus likes to just hang out with us, so we can know him when it’s time to get up and follow?
The ways that God builds our community to strengthen, and protect, and support us, when the unexpected comes? Because that’s how we become ready to answer.
And because, in the end – and the beginning! – what God wants you and me to respond to – to “answer readily” – is love.
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