Whaley Bridge Parish
November 7th 2021
Jonah 3: 1 -5; 10
Mark 1: 14 – 20
This week we’ve had a friend staying who recently retired from teaching and was moving into a new phase of life as a retired person. We talked quite a bit about what that was like. It was great having more time for things she enjoys - but she finds it hard when the question comes up “What do you do?” She hadn’t realised how much of her sense of identity had been tied up with being a teacher.
That’s probably true for most us – work takes up a lot of out lives, and whether that is work of raising a family, or paid work outside the home, or both – the roles we occupy in our working life become very much part of who we are. I spent nineteen years in social work before I was ordained, and I remember my last day as a social worker, walking through a hospital car park, and even though I was excited about being ordained, I was feeling that I was letting go of my social worker self. Every move towards something new involves a kind of letting go of the old.
What do you do? It’s an obvious question to ask when we are getting to know someone. I’m a social worker, I’m a plumber, I’m a nursery nurse, I’m a fisherman. But of course there are other things we could ask. What gives you your deepest sense of purpose in life? What brings you joy? What do you pray for? What is your most heartfelt hope?
These are questions that connect not so much with what we do, but with who we are. These are questions about our spirituality, about who we are before God. We like to be busy; we like to be doing. But we are not a human doing, we are a human being. The God who meets us in Jesus is concerned with our being, with who are and who we are becoming. With the person we are now, and who we will be in eternity with God. God’s call to us is to become ourselves: to become the most complete version of ourself. Finding God and finding ourselves are two things that go hand in hand.
In the past we have tending to think about God’s call on our lives as a “what do you do?” question. We have tended to believe that call is about a call to ordination – which of course lets 99.9% of us off the hook!
I don’t think God’s call works like that at all. The evidence from the bible points to a God whose call is for every Christian. That may involve a new role, a new kind of working life – but mostly not.
In the Bible we are faced with a God who makes a claim on the lives of very ordinary people, who meets them where they are and invites them to go on a journey with him for the sake of others. This is what we mean when we talk about the call of God on people’s lives. God calls Moses to free Israel from slavery. It all culminates in Jesus who calls followers to start his new community to witness to the kingdom of God, God’s new world that begins with Jesus.
Both our readings today are call stories. Jonah is a kind of comic anti-hero, an example of how not to respond to God’s call! When God invites him to challenge the people of Nineveh about their ungodly behaviour he runs in the other direction, gets shipwrecked and even swallowed by a whale before he eventually falls in with God’s plan. The Jonah story is a fantastical parody of how we imagine a prophet to behave. It’s a fable, designed to make us laugh – and yet it’s easy to recognise ourselves in it and the lengths we will go to in order to avoid listening to God’s call.
Our gospel passage tells us about ordinary fishermen, mending their nets, trying to scrape a livelihood together. And then one day Jesus walks into their life and everything changes. What had seemed a normal working day turns out to be their last working day. The nets, the fishing boat; these are the tools of their trade. These are their financial security. Jesus invites them to leave them behind and go with him - and they do. He has a new role for them to become fishers of people but – here’s the rub – it doesn’t come with a pay cheque! The rewards will be of a different nature -
There’s a lovely Iona hymn that expresses God’s call to the first disciples and to us. It goes “Come leave your possessions, lay down what you clutch, and find, with hands empty, that hearts can hold much.”
This invitation to come and follow Jesus is an invitation for all of us. It’s not just for people who happen to be ordained, or who have studied theology. All through the centuries God, by his Holy Spirit has been calling ordinary people and continues to do so. It always means some letting go - letting go of some of our comforting and comfortable ways of seeing ourselves and the world. Being open to God’s call mean being open to the possibility that God wants to change us.
There’s only one way to find out, and that is to listen. We think of prayer as words, but the heart of prayer is listening, listening and loving. Tuning into the love of God and opening out our questions and uncertainties into that love, the love that claims us and that will never let us go. Finding some quiet and still ness in our day, and into that stillness bringing ourselves, with all our loose ends and unanswered questions. Rather than asking things of God, we need to tune into what God is asking of us, to tune into that whisper we sang about in our last hymn. “Are you following me?”
And that following simply begins with us, as we are and where we are. In our Start group we began to think about our lives, drawing a life-line to represent our life with its highs and the lows, and starting to reckon with the possibility that God has been at work in and through the moments and days that make up our time on this planet.
“The time is fulfilled says Jesus, repent and believe,”
That word repent means turn around. If we turn around we face a different direction, and the view is different. Jesus’s call to us to turn our lives around is a call to see our selves and the world through fresh eyes and kingdom values. In the world’s eyes personal wealth, power are the markers of a successful life. Yet Jesus comes along to turn this upside down. He comes to bring in a different world order in which the hungry, the humble, the peacemakers and those who long for justice find blessing and inherit the joys of God’s kingdom, now and in eternity.
Who are we? Not what do we do, but who are we? What gives us our deepest sense of purpose in life? What brings us joy? What do we pray for? What is our most heartfelt hope? Where is God’s call to us in our life together? Is God calling us to let something go, to leave something behind?
Being the church means being the community that is asking these questions together and listening to God together. God calls us as individuals, and God call us together to be his people here in Whaley Bridge at this particular moment in the flow of time. Let’s pray for grace to listen to his call to us as individuals, and as a community. Amen.