Calling...

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:6-14; 1 Cor. 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley 1/22/12
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

It seems that soon after Jesus emerged from the wilderness, having been tempted by Satan, and surrounded by wild beasts, he decided he did not want to go it alone.

He began to assemble his tribe soon after he emerged from the wilderness, perhaps becoming aware of how easily he could be approached by temptation when all on his own. Particularly after the death of John the Baptist, he must have felt the need to begin to create his own community.

He wasn’t very choosey about these first members of his tribe. Or maybe he was. Fishermen, like shepherds, were the uneducated, low-status and unpretentious equivalents of our truck drivers or street-sweepers. He was not looking for erudition, brilliance or ego. He was, perhaps, looking for faith, and for people willing to leave everything- if only because they had so little to leave. But still- their livelihood, their fathers.

I think as Christians, as people of compassion, we are constantly called away from that which we do not want to leave. We are called into community- called away from our material obsessions, called out of our technological worm holes.

I was musing about the meaning of my dependence on my Mac Book Pro, which sometimes seems like my little instant community, when I began to meditate on the apple symbol on the cover. It is not just a symbol of a apple, but of an apple with a bite taken out of it. This, of course, brings to mind a certain biblical story, whether or not that was the conscious aim of the designers. Not just the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, but specifically, the bite that was taken from the apple that hung on the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the fall from grace that it engendered. It made me think that we may have bitten off more than we can chew.

In the early church it was traditional to pray five times a day, as is still required by Islam. If you had a burning question, you might take it to God. You had five times a day to do that. I am sure I consult Google or Wikipedia five times a day. My dependence was unveiled last week in London. I had seen the initials IHS on the chalices in the Tower of London, and although I had learned this long before, and I knew they were Greek initials, I just couldn’t remember exactly what they stood for. Since my Iphone wouldn’t work in England, I had to ask several people in the tower itself. Although none of them knew the answer (except that it meant Jesus Christ, which should have been a big hint for me) I had several lovely conversations. When I got back to the states, and first sat down at my computer to look it up, I found that Wikipedia was on strike to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. So I had to look it up in my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. I was forced to speak to 2 humans and open a book because of my enforced fast from Wikipedia. It is a corruption of the first three Greek letters in the Greek name for Jesus- Iota, eta, sigma. Finally!

There is a kind of safety we find in true community which we do not actually find in the fraudulent communion of zinging electrons that sometimes pose as company, or even as “friends.” Sometimes I think that humans are not so very different from any herd featured in a National Geographic’s special. We are like that lovely flock of Wildebeests, hewing together, roaming over the hills and valleys in one great mass. It is the strays, the loners, who get picked off by the jackals, just as we are much more likely to get felled by depression or addiction when we stray too far from community. So we feel the call to stay with our herd, we sense the danger of an isolated life. This is one good reason we are called to come to church!

Bishop Gene Robinson, was asked why he went to Zocotti Park to participate in the Occupy Movement. He first of all said that, as a Bishop, he was always looking for God. And he saw something of God in this movement. He said that the Occupiers were trying to move away from the “every man woman and child for themselves” model, and back into community. He said it was the most peaceable kingdom he had ever participated in, with food and clothing being freely handed out, a library and think tank, a profusion of art in every imaginable form. He said the movement is being called to a time when my wellbeing depends on your well-being. A time of community.


Very recently, I experienced an unexpected call in the middle of my all-too short vacation in England. This journey did not end up being the vacation of my dreams. The first thing I was confronted with was that my daughter had chosen to follow a call of her own. Right in the middle of that beautiful face of hers, right under her perfectly shaped lower lip, there was now a big silver stud. It looked to me like the Mona Lisa had been slashed in half with a razor blade. But she had felt a call- perhaps a call to freedom from the good graces of her mother. I realized that if I had liked it would have ruined her required rite of individuation. So I was already off balance when the next strange thing happened which was a call for me to leave my family. My brother called to say that my father was dying in the ICU in Baltimore and that I should come home. This was a horrible choice. Do I leave my father, as it were, in the boat with the hired men, or do I stay with my family who I had reunited with only 3 days before? I have rushed to my father’s bedside (not a simple matter when you live 3,000 miles away) at least twice before, and he always perks up. The first time this happened was 15 years ago.

I remembered Jesus’ words to the disciple who wants to follow him, but had to bury his father. “Let the dead bury the dead.” Said Jesus, in one of his more severe moments.

But I followed the call. I left my family in York and sped down by train to Heathrow where I just missed the flight. I booked the next flight which was to leave in 6 hours. While at the airport I got on line and my niece had left me a message saying that my father had stabilized, and that I should go back to my family and come to Baltimore after the end of the vacation, which we did. Predictably, my father had revived, was very weak but absolutely lucid. But perhaps lucid in a different way. He saw me and said, unfortunately in the presence of my two brothers “You have an aura of love around you.” I found this very touching, and both my brothers found it hysterically funny. After I left, my brother sent me an e-mail saying: “Thank you so much for coming to Baltimore. And of course, thank you for your aura.

I was glad to be back in my community, in California

Maybe we should all be looking for God, like Bishop Robinson. And maybe we will find it in Community. We are all imperfect- more like Jonah than Jesus. Jonah refused the word of God, got swallowed by a whale, and it took him three days to figure out that he better start praying. Jonah was a different kind of fisherman- actually, I guess maybe he might be more in the category of bate! But he was called by God, as the fishermen were called by Jesus.

Jonah’s experiences with community were not great. He was thrown off a ship by his on-board community, and then, even as he succeeded in changing the hearts of the people of Nineveh, he boiled with anger when God chose not to punish them, as he had said he would do. In the end Jonah said he was angry enough to die.

But God continued to reason with Jonah, continued to provide him shelter and then remove it, as Jonah still had lessons to learn.

We are a community of imperfect disciples, sometimes making the right choice, often fishing in all the wrong places. But Jesus brings us the good news that our imperfections are not indelible. That he loves us precisely because of them. And that we can always experience metanoia, repentance, and that is what Jesus comes to bring us. He brings us not judgment, not even comfort, but the experience of transformation and the journey from isolation to communion, because the Kingdom of God has come near.