Back to sermons

Phil Blackwell

“The Call”
Mark 1:14-20

Here Jesus walks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and sees two brothers, Simon and Andrew, casting nets out into the water and calls out, “Follow me.” And they lay aside their nets and follow.

Just down the shore Jesus sees James and John with their father, Zebedee, out in their boat mending their nets.  And Jesus calls out to James and John, “Follow me,” and they row ashore and jump out of the boat and fall in behind Simon and Andrew.

No one asks, “Who are you?  What is your plan?  What do you believe?” It simply is an invitation to belong to the core of folks who are accepting the call, after which they will engage in doing the ministry yet to be laid out before them by Jesus.  And then, it will be in the doing that they eventually will believe.  Belong, doing, believing.

We of more cautious faith try to do it the other way.  We study the faith to determine what we believe.  Then, we look for ways to do things in the world that reflect our basic beliefs.  And finally, we join a community, maybe it is a church, which supports us in our living out our beliefs.

And that is very honorable.  For centuries the Church has offered catechetical teaching for those searching for something to believe.  Easter Eve was the ultimate moment in the Christian Year when seekers were confirmed in their faith through baptism, adults not children.  There have been creeds and confessions devised by the Church to outline the beliefs and then to ask people to subscribe to them.  “Yes?”  Or, “No?”  But here in the gospel account there is the reverse approach.  Start with belonging, then doing, and finally believing.

That is what is true in my own life.  I was loved into the Christian faith.  Yes, I was brought up in it, too.  My parents took my brother, Dave, and me to St. James Methodist Church in Danville, Illinois, every Sunday.  Dad sang in the choir, and I sat in the pew and colored in all of the os and p’s in the bulletin.  I do not remember many q’s.  But it really was during my college years that I received the faith as my own.

I had gone to three high schools in four years.  My first two years were in a school in suburban Milwaukee, and then Dad was transferred by The Sherwin-Williams Paint Company to the Chicago area, and we moved to Mundelein, north of the city.  My junior year was at the consolidated school serving both Mundelein and Libertyville.  Then, Mundelein opened a high school of its own, and I went there for my senior year.

Perhaps because I had no coherent peer group from school I sought one in the church, and the youth group at the United Methodist Church in Libertyville was very strong back then.  I made friends and did interesting things, including a trip to Washington, D.C. to discuss religion and politics.

After we all graduated and most went off to college, the associate pastor, Gary Phillips, called us together every summer so that we could check in with one another.  Every Sunday night we would meet in a home, 30 or 40 of us, and talk about how things are going, what have we learned, what are we thinking these days, maybe with a little Tillich and Bonhoeffer thrown in by Gary.  It was during one of these Sunday night discussions after my junior year in college that I was loved into the Christian faith, though I did not know it at the time.

Junior year . . . when I finally “hit the wall,” to use a good marathoning term.  College is like that, if you are lucky.  You find out what you really are not good at and maybe discover something that you love.  Well, that year I had thrown myself into being an English major.  For two years I had proven that I was not good at chemistry and math and languages, but I loved to read and ponder great thoughts.  So, in the second semester I signed up for three reading courses, as well as the second part of a course in which we read all of Shakespeare’s plays.  For these three reading courses I had to read 45 novels.  I told you I was not very good at math.  I read Moby Dick in a day; it is about a fish.  Or more precisely, a marine mammal.

I panicked; I read day and night.  I could not keep the plays straight.  King Lear was raging at Juliet, while Hamlet stabbed Richard II and Lady Macbeth was out in the garden dancing with Puck.  I survived the finals with acceptable grades, but I returned home shattered, exhausted, and selfish.  I had had no time to think about anyone but me.  Now back in the Sunday night discussion group for the third summer, about 30 of us were in a living room on a July evening, and the subject was something I did not find interesting.  I grew impatient.  Someone told a joke, and I immediately told a funnier one.  And then, Harold Nicol, a close friend, said, “Phil, why is it that when one of us tells a joke you always feel that you have to top it?  Why do you always have to dominate the discussion?”

Others chimed in with their critique of what a jerk I had become.  It went on a long, long time.  I was furious, I was hurt.  I could not sleep that night, or the next, or the next.  So, on that third evening I drove out to the edge of town, parked the car, and walked along the apron of the railroad tracks so that I could think without getting lost.  I had checked the train schedule and knew there would be no more Metra trains for hours.

It was a clear, moonless night; the stars were spectacular.  Orion’s Belt, the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, the North Star.  As I walked along and looked up, I cried to God, “What kind of friends are these?  They complain, they criticize, they find fault, they pile on.  Don’t give me any enemies, Lord; I can’t stand my friends.” But as I continued my rant, I looked up and saw that not one star was falling out of the sky, not one meteoric tear from God’s sympathetic eye.

And it began to dawn on me that what that group had done for me that night was to confront me because they loved me, they cared about me.  If you do not care about someone and that person is acting obnoxiously, you just get away and leave that person alone.  But they did not do that to me.  They hung in there and told me what they wanted me to hear because they cared.

The next Sunday night I was there, but quiet, respectful, appreciative, humbled.  I belonged in a way that I never had before, and for the first time I accepted the Christian faith as the loving context within which I wanted to live my life.

The call to be a disciple of Jesus Christ . . . first through belonging, and then learning how to act in order to include others, and ultimately searching for the beliefs that undergird the community.

Most of us are here today, I suspect, because we are searching for a community in which to hear more distinctly the call of God to be a disciple.  Even if we belong to the community for just an hour on this day, we listen for a word of invitation that will lead us to action which will open us to deeper understanding.  The call seldom comes by God calling out our name and sending us to proclaim salvation to the very people we despise, as was Jonah’s story.  The call rarely comes as a burning bush, as it did for Moses.  The call almost never comes as a shaft of light knocking us out of the saddle, as it did for Saul becoming Paul.  Most often the call comes as a word of welcome, a gentle “come and see,” or even a generous word of correction.

People who join us at our site on South Dearborn every Saturday morning to feed people who are hungry . . . in the preparing of the food, the serving of the meal, cleaning up afterward, sitting and talking with our guests, distributing clothes to those who need them most . . . by belonging to that community in order to do those things, some have found their way into a new way of believing.  Now we are working with the DePaul University School of Law to provide a legal desk twice a month to help people get I.D.’s and work on expungement of past arrests that led to acquittals but still remain on their records, thereby making it impossible to get a job.  That may prove to be a way by which even more people will approach faithfulness.

There are tutors who begin to work with our grade school students from Ruben Salazar Bi-Lingual Center on Wednesdays after work, and by joining with others in this obviously useful project, have begun to sort through what they believe to be most important in life.

Others have joined the choir and found faith.  Gone to Chile to build desks for an agricultural school and found Jesus (who, after all, was a carpenter).  Come to a 12-step group (we have 17 of them a week here at the Temple) and discovered their own spiritual capacity to believe.

Belong, do, believe.  The call is extended to all to become part of the community of faith.

We re-present the call to become part of the community of faith every time we extend the invitation to Holy Communion.  We say, “You need not be a member of this congregation or this denomination, but simply in the name of Jesus come forward and receive the bread and dip it in the cup, and in that way we share the Holy Meal together.” It is an invitation to belong, and then to do, receiving the elements and ingesting them, and then to reflect on what it means to have gathered with others at the table.

Not all Christian traditions observe an “open table,” and I can accept that, if grudgingly.  There are those who say that Communion is reserved only for those who believe rightly.  That is the presumption which leads to participation.  Yes, having a clear understanding of the significance of the sacrament makes it a rich moment, but that narrows the field pretty drastically.  I suspect that if it depended upon complete understanding of God’s activity in the sacrament, most of us would be excommunicated.

John Wesley, always the good Anglican, knew that Holy Communion was a “confirming”  ordinance.  It is a sacramental activity confirms what we believe.  But always a good Methodist, John Wesley also sensed that sometimes the Holy Spirit colors outside the lines and that Holy Communion can be a “converting” ordinance, too.

And I have seen it.  A young man who is present for the worship service because a friend has invited him comes forward for Communion.  He joins with others approaching the altar; he belongs as part of the community.  What I do not know is that he has never received Communion before in his life.  He certainly could not answer catechetical questions about the true meaning of the sacrament, if I were ask.

He simply receives the bread and the cup in response to God’s open invitation, and he comes back the next week, and the next.  Eventually, he goes to seminary and becomes a minister.  So, watch out!  There is power in these symbolic actions.  When Jesus calls, “Follow me,” we do not know where it will lead.  And over time we have to make sense of it, sort out what we believe.

Yes, there is an honored tradition in the Church of — believe, do, and belong, and sometimes it works that way.  But, the gospel account suggests the reverse order –   belong, do, and believe.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit is at work in us long before we know it and can believe it.  “Follow me,” invites Jesus.  Do not wait for the footnotes before you answer the call to belong.  Amen.