Called to Living
January 22, 2012
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 62, Mark 1:14-20
We’ve all heard the question, and many of us have asked the question: What do you want to be when you grow up? And most of us have probably answered this question in many different ways through the years. I was going to be a doctor all through grade school - that came to a screeching halt when I found out that although I liked math and science, they didn’t come easily to me. Then when I was a teenager, it became clear to all of us that I had some real gifts at arguing, so the practice of law looked like a good fit. I developed a strong faith in high school and early in college began to have a sense of call to ministry - but even so didn’t begin seminary until I was 38.
That’s a big difference between my journey, and that of the disciples, who responded to Jesus immediately. The word euthus means immediately, or all of a sudden. It is a word Mark used often. Unfortunately, most modern translators translate this word differently as it is used again and again, sp we don’t notice this emphasis. And it would - because Mark used this word 41 times in his gospel, the shortest of the Gospels. The gospel with the next highest use of this word is Matthew, whose gospel is 28 chapters compared to Mark’s 16...and yet Matthew only uses the word 8 times. Clearly Mark is intentional in using this word so often - 5 times more often than Matthew.
Mark is making a point here - in our verses, he uses it twice, both times referring to the response of those who became disciples to the call from Jesus. We could easily use this as an occasion to feel bad, or be skeptical - seeing that the disciples responded immediately to Jesus, while we are aware of our own fits and starts in faithfulness. But we should remember, the disciples had their fits and starts in faithfulness, too. The whole Gospel of Mark portrays the disciples as failing to understand Jesus again and again. Mark describes a journey for the disciples of two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back, and so on. While they may have followed Jesus immediately, they did not follow him consistently... just like most of us.
And what exactly did Jesus call them to? They were fishermen, and Jesus invited them to become “fishers of men.” But to understand better, we need to understand the context in which Mark was writing. It’s not only important what was happening in the time of Jesus, but also what was happening when Mark was telling this story. In the year 66 of the Common Era - about 35 years after the death of Jesus - the Jews in Jerusalem rebelled against the Roman Empire. Amazingly, it took about 4 years for the mighty Roman Empire to put down this rebellion. Many scholars that Mark was writing right about the time of this rebellion - some think he was writing right beforehand, others think that he was writing during the time of war, and still others think he was writing right afterwards. In any event, he was writing at a time when tensions were high, and when there was a lot of ambiguity for Jewish Christians - for the Christian community was still functioning as part of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Should they fight? Or not? Mark, in writing his gospel, is urging his fellow Christians to resist going along with violence as a solution to Roman oppression. His understanding is that Jesus calls us to a different way of looking at the world.
As he began his ministry, Jesus went around proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe this good news.” Now, the word repent, that we understand to mean something like - stop doing evil and start doing right - doesn’t actually mean that in Greek. The word that was used there, metanoia, means to put on a new mind - to see the world differently. Jesus was saying that the answer to the challenges of life is to learn to see life differently, to learn to participate in the flow of God’s love for the world.
Perhaps the Kingdom of God is not a change in the circumstances of the world so much as a change in our understanding of the world - we begin to see the world as God’s and to understand ourselves as participating in God’s mission. This is a profound shift - one might describe it as a Copernican shift.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer - indeed, he was a Renaissance man for he was not only an astronomer, but a lawyer, a translator, a physician, a mathematician, artist, and additionally studied for the priesthood. Anyway, shortly before his death in 1547 at age 70, he published the book for which he is most well-known, in which he disputed the way that people understood the universe up until then - he explained that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of our solar system, and that the earth revolves around the sun. To say the least, that shift in understanding was very profound.
The metanoia of the kingdom - the new mindset of God’s kingdom, is a similar shift - Jesus is asking us to see our lives with God at the center, instead of ourselves. Instead of understanding God as someone who is involved in our life and helping us, we begin to understand that we are part of God’s life, and helping God. Instead of asking for God’s assistance in our plans, we begin to seek ways that we can assist with God’s plans.
I heard or read recently, and I’m sorry, I can’t remember where, that it is likely that the disciples didn’t actually leave the fishing trade forever, but that they continued to fish in order to support themselves as they served alongside Jesus in ministry. After all, there was no church hierarchy to support them. So how would they support themselves?? Clearly they no longer fished all the time, since they were often traveling around the countryside with Jesus. But it is reasonable to think they continued to fish some of the time to support themselves- but that they began to understand their lives differently: their purpose was serving God and fishing enabled them to do that.
Sometimes a change of heart leads to a change in circumstances - other times it means that our circumstances remain outwardly the same, but our understanding of life is different and so we experience it differently.
One of the significant contributions of the Protestant Reformation was to recognize that all people serve God through their work - not only those who work for the church. It’s all in how we understand our work, or as one writer has described it, “God is hidden in human work.” Is our work just the way we earn money? Or is it a calling, through which we serve God and love our neighbor?
I grew up outside of Philadelphia in a very small college town called Swarthmore. Very close to Swarthmore is a city about the size of Stevens Point, called Chester. Chester has been a pocket of poverty whose residents have been struggling economically since before I was born. In the last census, per capita income in Stevens Point was $23,510 and per capita income in Chester was $9,052. Ours is not a wealthy community, but our per capita income was 2-1/2 times Chester’s. They are hurting. Chester has also become what is known as a food desert with almost no grocery stores within the city limits anymore. Last weekend, the school system in Chester, Pennsylvania was on the brink of shutting down - it has been on the edge of crisis for some time, and had almost run out of money. There was no longer enough money to pay salaries. So last weekend, the union teachers in the Chester school district voted to continue teaching whether or not they were paid, even though doing so would disqualify them from receiving unemployment benefits. They did not want the students‘ education to be disrupted. Clearly the Chester teachers, like many teachers, have a sense of call to teaching the children in their schools. It’s not just about the money.
Religion professor Doug Schuurman at St. Olaf College has written this about vocation: “… Put in general terms, the purpose of God’s call is for the people of God to worship God, and to participate in God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world, to enjoy, hope for, pray for, and work toward God’s shalom. This is what it means for Christians to be in Christ and to follow Christ.” Let me repeat that: the purpose of God’s call is for the people of God to worship God, and to participate in God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world, to enjoy, hope for, pray for, and work toward God’s shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace, but it means much more than the absence of conflict - shalom describes the circumstance in which we are at peace with God and at peace with one another, and are enjoying health and balance in all dimensions of our lives: physical, financial, social, emotional, spiritual. It’s what we might describe as holistic wellness. We worship God by working for a world where are can enjoy the world and each other.
Notice that Professor Schuurman’s definition connected worship and work as part of the same process. Last week in Confirmation Class, we were discussing worship, and what it is - we agreed that worship was how we love God, and isn’t just limited to the time we spend together in church. And some kids suggested that maybe one way to worship God was to be kind to others, and to follow the ten commandments - which I thought was pretty perceptive. And then one of the kids said something really profound - he asked, “Would one way to worship God be to live fully?” This is why I love confirmation - YES!
Living fully, caring for each other, investing ourselves in the work of God - this is most certainly worship. So worship isn’t about making ourselves feel good, it’s about loving and serving God. As one of our members wrote me last week, “In my estimation, being a Christian is a really demanding thing to do on a daily basis. Loving God and loving your neighbor are really two very demanding chores. That's really all Jesus asked us to do.” Well said! And and our work is part of the way we do that. We develop what abilities we have so that we can participate in God’s work in the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke so eloquently about so much, spoke about this as well, to a group of students in Philadelphia in 1967. He said,
Jesus is classically described as being fully human and fully divine. I’m convinced that an essential dimension of his ministry was to show us how to be fully human, and the first step is to learn to look at the world with kingdom eyes. He was teaching us to understand the world as the place where God is at work, and at work through us. Even though I didn’t begin seminary until I was 38, I understood myself to be serving God in my work before then. When I worked as an accountant for the ballet, I felt that my calling was to help with the financial management so that the director could focus on art management. When I worked as a supervisor of grant accounting, I felt that a key part of my work was to help the young adults in my department be the best they could be.
How will you serve God through your work this week? And our work serving God doesn’t end when we retire -- if you don’t work for pay, how will your efforts this week help others to know the love of God? How will your day to day activities embrace the life and opportunities that God has provided you, and how will what you do bless God?? If you are in school, how will you develop your abilities this week to make good use of what God has given you? How will you influence the people around you?
Yes, living fully is a form of worship. And yes, it’s not always easy. But we’re called to serve God immediately, again and again, in this and every day, seeking to understand the world as God does, and to become part of God’s continuing creative work in the world.
Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 62, Mark 1:14-20
We’ve all heard the question, and many of us have asked the question: What do you want to be when you grow up? And most of us have probably answered this question in many different ways through the years. I was going to be a doctor all through grade school - that came to a screeching halt when I found out that although I liked math and science, they didn’t come easily to me. Then when I was a teenager, it became clear to all of us that I had some real gifts at arguing, so the practice of law looked like a good fit. I developed a strong faith in high school and early in college began to have a sense of call to ministry - but even so didn’t begin seminary until I was 38.
That’s a big difference between my journey, and that of the disciples, who responded to Jesus immediately. The word euthus means immediately, or all of a sudden. It is a word Mark used often. Unfortunately, most modern translators translate this word differently as it is used again and again, sp we don’t notice this emphasis. And it would - because Mark used this word 41 times in his gospel, the shortest of the Gospels. The gospel with the next highest use of this word is Matthew, whose gospel is 28 chapters compared to Mark’s 16...and yet Matthew only uses the word 8 times. Clearly Mark is intentional in using this word so often - 5 times more often than Matthew.
Mark is making a point here - in our verses, he uses it twice, both times referring to the response of those who became disciples to the call from Jesus. We could easily use this as an occasion to feel bad, or be skeptical - seeing that the disciples responded immediately to Jesus, while we are aware of our own fits and starts in faithfulness. But we should remember, the disciples had their fits and starts in faithfulness, too. The whole Gospel of Mark portrays the disciples as failing to understand Jesus again and again. Mark describes a journey for the disciples of two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back, and so on. While they may have followed Jesus immediately, they did not follow him consistently... just like most of us.
And what exactly did Jesus call them to? They were fishermen, and Jesus invited them to become “fishers of men.” But to understand better, we need to understand the context in which Mark was writing. It’s not only important what was happening in the time of Jesus, but also what was happening when Mark was telling this story. In the year 66 of the Common Era - about 35 years after the death of Jesus - the Jews in Jerusalem rebelled against the Roman Empire. Amazingly, it took about 4 years for the mighty Roman Empire to put down this rebellion. Many scholars that Mark was writing right about the time of this rebellion - some think he was writing right beforehand, others think that he was writing during the time of war, and still others think he was writing right afterwards. In any event, he was writing at a time when tensions were high, and when there was a lot of ambiguity for Jewish Christians - for the Christian community was still functioning as part of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. Should they fight? Or not? Mark, in writing his gospel, is urging his fellow Christians to resist going along with violence as a solution to Roman oppression. His understanding is that Jesus calls us to a different way of looking at the world.
As he began his ministry, Jesus went around proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe this good news.” Now, the word repent, that we understand to mean something like - stop doing evil and start doing right - doesn’t actually mean that in Greek. The word that was used there, metanoia, means to put on a new mind - to see the world differently. Jesus was saying that the answer to the challenges of life is to learn to see life differently, to learn to participate in the flow of God’s love for the world.
Perhaps the Kingdom of God is not a change in the circumstances of the world so much as a change in our understanding of the world - we begin to see the world as God’s and to understand ourselves as participating in God’s mission. This is a profound shift - one might describe it as a Copernican shift.
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer - indeed, he was a Renaissance man for he was not only an astronomer, but a lawyer, a translator, a physician, a mathematician, artist, and additionally studied for the priesthood. Anyway, shortly before his death in 1547 at age 70, he published the book for which he is most well-known, in which he disputed the way that people understood the universe up until then - he explained that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of our solar system, and that the earth revolves around the sun. To say the least, that shift in understanding was very profound.
The metanoia of the kingdom - the new mindset of God’s kingdom, is a similar shift - Jesus is asking us to see our lives with God at the center, instead of ourselves. Instead of understanding God as someone who is involved in our life and helping us, we begin to understand that we are part of God’s life, and helping God. Instead of asking for God’s assistance in our plans, we begin to seek ways that we can assist with God’s plans.
I heard or read recently, and I’m sorry, I can’t remember where, that it is likely that the disciples didn’t actually leave the fishing trade forever, but that they continued to fish in order to support themselves as they served alongside Jesus in ministry. After all, there was no church hierarchy to support them. So how would they support themselves?? Clearly they no longer fished all the time, since they were often traveling around the countryside with Jesus. But it is reasonable to think they continued to fish some of the time to support themselves- but that they began to understand their lives differently: their purpose was serving God and fishing enabled them to do that.
Sometimes a change of heart leads to a change in circumstances - other times it means that our circumstances remain outwardly the same, but our understanding of life is different and so we experience it differently.
One of the significant contributions of the Protestant Reformation was to recognize that all people serve God through their work - not only those who work for the church. It’s all in how we understand our work, or as one writer has described it, “God is hidden in human work.” Is our work just the way we earn money? Or is it a calling, through which we serve God and love our neighbor?
I grew up outside of Philadelphia in a very small college town called Swarthmore. Very close to Swarthmore is a city about the size of Stevens Point, called Chester. Chester has been a pocket of poverty whose residents have been struggling economically since before I was born. In the last census, per capita income in Stevens Point was $23,510 and per capita income in Chester was $9,052. Ours is not a wealthy community, but our per capita income was 2-1/2 times Chester’s. They are hurting. Chester has also become what is known as a food desert with almost no grocery stores within the city limits anymore. Last weekend, the school system in Chester, Pennsylvania was on the brink of shutting down - it has been on the edge of crisis for some time, and had almost run out of money. There was no longer enough money to pay salaries. So last weekend, the union teachers in the Chester school district voted to continue teaching whether or not they were paid, even though doing so would disqualify them from receiving unemployment benefits. They did not want the students‘ education to be disrupted. Clearly the Chester teachers, like many teachers, have a sense of call to teaching the children in their schools. It’s not just about the money.
Religion professor Doug Schuurman at St. Olaf College has written this about vocation: “… Put in general terms, the purpose of God’s call is for the people of God to worship God, and to participate in God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world, to enjoy, hope for, pray for, and work toward God’s shalom. This is what it means for Christians to be in Christ and to follow Christ.” Let me repeat that: the purpose of God’s call is for the people of God to worship God, and to participate in God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world, to enjoy, hope for, pray for, and work toward God’s shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace, but it means much more than the absence of conflict - shalom describes the circumstance in which we are at peace with God and at peace with one another, and are enjoying health and balance in all dimensions of our lives: physical, financial, social, emotional, spiritual. It’s what we might describe as holistic wellness. We worship God by working for a world where are can enjoy the world and each other.
Notice that Professor Schuurman’s definition connected worship and work as part of the same process. Last week in Confirmation Class, we were discussing worship, and what it is - we agreed that worship was how we love God, and isn’t just limited to the time we spend together in church. And some kids suggested that maybe one way to worship God was to be kind to others, and to follow the ten commandments - which I thought was pretty perceptive. And then one of the kids said something really profound - he asked, “Would one way to worship God be to live fully?” This is why I love confirmation - YES!
Living fully, caring for each other, investing ourselves in the work of God - this is most certainly worship. So worship isn’t about making ourselves feel good, it’s about loving and serving God. As one of our members wrote me last week, “In my estimation, being a Christian is a really demanding thing to do on a daily basis. Loving God and loving your neighbor are really two very demanding chores. That's really all Jesus asked us to do.” Well said! And and our work is part of the way we do that. We develop what abilities we have so that we can participate in God’s work in the world.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who spoke so eloquently about so much, spoke about this as well, to a group of students in Philadelphia in 1967. He said,
And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don't just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn't do it any better.If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.
Jesus is classically described as being fully human and fully divine. I’m convinced that an essential dimension of his ministry was to show us how to be fully human, and the first step is to learn to look at the world with kingdom eyes. He was teaching us to understand the world as the place where God is at work, and at work through us. Even though I didn’t begin seminary until I was 38, I understood myself to be serving God in my work before then. When I worked as an accountant for the ballet, I felt that my calling was to help with the financial management so that the director could focus on art management. When I worked as a supervisor of grant accounting, I felt that a key part of my work was to help the young adults in my department be the best they could be.
How will you serve God through your work this week? And our work serving God doesn’t end when we retire -- if you don’t work for pay, how will your efforts this week help others to know the love of God? How will your day to day activities embrace the life and opportunities that God has provided you, and how will what you do bless God?? If you are in school, how will you develop your abilities this week to make good use of what God has given you? How will you influence the people around you?
Yes, living fully is a form of worship. And yes, it’s not always easy. But we’re called to serve God immediately, again and again, in this and every day, seeking to understand the world as God does, and to become part of God’s continuing creative work in the world.
Amen.