Something Peculiar is Happening

Pastor Kyle Clark

Gospel Lesson: Mark 1: 14-20

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Third Sunday after Epiphany

The Random House Dictionary defines peculiar as something that is strange or odd, uncommon, belonging exclusively to a particular person, group or thing. We generally associate “peculiar” with things that are obscure or infrequent. I wanted to share this definition with you because something peculiar is happening here this morning. You are going to hear a sermon.

According to statistical data, there are 306 million people living in the Untied States. Of those 306 million something like 60 to 70 million people (about 20 percent) will be in a church this morning – 60 to 70 million folks who, like you, will also hear a sermon! And this practice, this uniquely Christian undertaking, is repeated every week.

While for many of you sitting here this morning, this thing we do every week might not seem all that odd or uncommon and people listening to sermons is certainly not an infrequent occurrence, there are many other religions in this world in which people do things like pray and recite particular acts of worship, there are religions in the world that encourage adherents to cultivate individual acts of piety, perform certain rituals or engage in various forms of quiet meditation – all of which are intended to bring the practitioner closer to God.

But sermon listening is something that only a minority of peculiar people do, a people calling themselves Christian. We don’t come by this peculiarity by accident. You see, we worship a peculiar God – a God that acts in peculiar and unexpected ways. We see the peculiarity of God at work in our Gospel reading today.

Mark tells us in his own wonderfully unique way about the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry. I love Mark. He is direct. To the point. No wasted ink or paper on ancillary details. What the other Gospel writers spend half a chapter or more on, Mark says in only a few verses. Matthew, for instance takes two complete chapters (3-4) to say what Mark says in the first 20 verses of the first chapter. So Mark has already told of Jesus’ dramatic baptism and the wilderness temptation. Now Jesus is about to get down to business. And the first thing he does? He sees a couple of guys by the sea repairing their nets, and he says to them, “Follow me.” So, they do.

Does anything strike you as strange or odd or peculiar?

They didn’t ask a single question! Not one! And one short sentence later, remember this is Mark, one sentence later it happens again. There is no, “Who are you?” “Where are you going?” or “How long will we be gone?” They don’t ask, “What about my family and my business?” “Why exactly do you want me?” or even “Once we catch all these people you’re going to teach us to catch, what are supposed to do with them?” Four guys, trained only as fishermen, just doing their jobs, and out of nowhere some strange, itinerant preacher comes along, shouts out an invitation and keeps walking, and immediately they drop their nets and stumble along after him.

Preachers for centuries have pointed to the disciples’ call stories as examples for us to follow. The Lord calls, drop everything and go – now! I don’t know about you, but I really struggle with that interpretation. Now Jonah’s call (Jonah 3:1-5, 10) I can understand. Jonah was reluctant. God wanted Jonah to go to Nineveh, a terrible place, and Jonah didn’t want to. So he didn’t, at least not a first. I can relate to that call story. I was reluctant when I first really became aware of my call. For five years I ignored it. These fishermen, though, theirs is a response with which I am unfamiliar. I don’t even know anyone who has responded to God’s call in their lives like these four did. So maybe all these sermons I’ve heard, all the lessons I have been taught about how we should respond to God’s call in our lives based on these four fishermen have been off base. What if this peculiar story in Mark’s Gospel is not really about Simon and Andrew and James and John?

Preacher and theologian Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that this is really a story about God, not about the disciples, not about us. To focus on what the disciples gave up and what they knew or didn’t know about Jesus before he came along that day is to “put the accent” in the wrong place. The focus should be on God – the power of god to walk up to a group of fishermen “…[create in them] faith where there was no faith, creating disciples where there were none just a moment before.”

This is not to imply that we have no choice in the matter. But too often we have the mistaken notion that it is all up to us – we have to determine, we must fix things, we have to take hold of the future and make it what we want it to be, we have to make things right. We believe that we have to do this in order to please God. We believe that the better we are the more likely we are to earn our salvation so we can “get into heaven.”

And this, folks, is a lie.

The truth is, God will do what God will do. The story of Jonah is about the persistence of God. God doesn’t take no for an answer. God was going to get his message to the people of Nineveh one way or another. Jonah finally came to understand this and got on board, so to speak, albeit reluctantly. If Jonah had refused, I’m pretty sure God would have sent someone else. That’s the way God works.

God acted again in and through Jesus Christ. The time had come for God to announce the coming of Kingdom. Like the Jonah story God recruits people, regular people to help get the message out. That’s the peculiar thing – God chooses not to work alone. Jesus joins hands with simple, ordinary, untrained, unprepared folks to do extraordinary things. Like Jonah and those four fishermen, we are invited to be part of what God is doing. Our freedom to choose, our decision is not about what is going to happen. That’s already been determined. Our choice is simply whether or not we are going to participate.

Jesus' first words to the future disciples were not to believe. They were simply to follow. Belief for them came through watching Jesus act, hearing Jesus speak, and receiving Jesus’ love. But their first call was to follow. They would struggle along the way as they learned and experienced more. But always they were invited to follow.

You are here this morning because in some peculiar way you have been called. In the coming weeks we will talk about what it means to be disciples, but today, Jesus is calling to us all, “Follow me.” It’s an invitation of real promise and real demands. It may make us uncomfortable. But we will never go alone. The peculiar thing is that some of you will leave here this morning and just like those four fishermen, not knowing where you will go our how you get there or what you’re going to do with whatever you catch. But you will follow anyway. And along the way you will be transformed in some peculiar way by God’s grace. And you will know that the Kingdom of God has indeed drawn near; that God has come closer to you than you to God. That is the Gospel. That is the Good News. Peculiar. Peculiar indeed.

Amen!