Matt. 4:12-23
January 24, 1999
James R. Gorman
There is a standard romantic tradition of how the call of God comes to a person. We tend to think of the lonely individual, out one night meditating under the stars, hearing a voice out of nowhere that challenges him (it's usually a him) to a new vocation, a new way of life. Our hero tends to think of this voice as the call of God; he sets off on his travels, ready to give life and limb for the one who has called.
Surely there are various passages in the Bible which seem to connect with that romance. The call of the prophet Isaiah, for example--a vision in which God meets Isaiah in the temple and calls out "Whom shall I send?" And Isaiah says, impetuously, "Here I am, send me." From which we get that marvelous song, "Here I Am, Lord."
There is the call of the boy Samuel: "Speak Lord, thy servant heareth." Paul on the road to Damascus. Peter, James and John in the fishing boats. And, above all, the call of Abraham to leave his family home and come to the new home that God shall give him and his family.
Now in a sense, this tradition gives a true picture. There are moments when each individual must stand alone before his or her maker, and business must be done on a strictly one-to-one basis. And none of that cam be gainsaid. But I suspect that we rather enjoy too much the romantic tradition of the lonely individual hearing the voice of God and going off at once to obey. We enjoy it because it's so remote from our own everyday experience that we don't feel either threatened or challenged by it. It's like a Superman movie: we watch the hero in amazement and awe, we get some sort of vicarious enjoyment and satisfaction from his achievements, and then go home feeling better but without any real personal engagement or sense of responsibility. And is that really all there is?
The Old Testament story moves us from the call of Abraham to Isaiah to Amos through the Maccabees and then on to a simple family headed by a carpenter named Joseph and a very young woman named Mary. And this is where the story opens up and becomes our story. Because when Jesus comes into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the Kingdom of God, the first thing he does is to issue a call which is remarkably like God's call to Abraham. Remember how it went for Abraham? "Leave your country and your father's house, and go to the place I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation."
This time, the call goes more like this: "Leave your business, your father's workplace, and come with me; and I will give you another job to do, a job which will stretch you in new ways, drawing out of you a potential you never could have known you had."
This call, of course, did not come out of the blue entirely.
There were certain kinds of preparation in the hearts of the hearers of the call. There had been messianic rumblings and nationalist stirrings in Palestine for some time by the time Jesus arrived on the beach at Capernaum that day, and we can be pretty sure that Peter, James and John were ready to go, taking a couple of swords with them. I imagine that they were the sort who would want to go. They were ready to fight the Roman occupation. They resented having to pay the burdensome taxes. They might have longed to bring up their children in a free country. They might even have wanted to have the freedom to worship their God with more leisure and study--though I'm not too sure that Peter would have liked the idea of studying. Somehow the idea of Peter hitting the books doesn't ring true to me. It doesn't really ring true that this rugged character Peter enlisted in the Jesus army so that he could win the war and then go to "shul" (Synagogue) and read Torah all day long. That doesn't fit my picture of who Peter was, but anyway.
The motives of these first disciples were, as would become clear in the rest of the Gospel story, pretty thoroughly mixed, and the mixture was not equally good and bad. Yet they obeyed this odd call to follow Jesus. This ragtag bunch of non-heroes, with a homegrown zeal and a homespun philosophy; these were the ones who were going to be set on fire.
It was this motley crew, this mixture of obedience and disobedience, this mixture of loyalty and betrayal; it was these guys who had their hopes shattered in turn when Jesus went to Jerusalem to die instead of swooping down like Superman to save the day from the Roman occupational forces. These pieces of shredded cloth who ran away when push came to shove, these became the people of God who fundamentally transformed the world in which they lived.
God's call is not designed to make of us Supermen or Wonder Women. We are called, like these fishermen, out of our own humble settings to do the work God has called us to do. We are called, not to impose a solution on the world, but to work from within to change the way the world thinks about itself. To change the world as it is. And the one place where these twelve disciples learned to listen to the call of God is in the voice of those in need--in physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual need; the voice of the Spirit who is groaning within the pains of the world, the voice of God who calls us not to force upon the world a new program of enlightened political ideals, but to be his feet, his hands--and remember what happened to his feet and hands--to be his healing touch, his tears and his laughter within the midst of his world.
We are called, quite simply, to be ourselves with all our background and our baggage, our needs and our wounds. All of us strangely transformed and taken up into the purposes of his love.
And we don't really have to feel guilty about not being Supermen and Wonder Women. Nor should we be worried if we don't experience the great romantic conversion out there under the stars, hearing God's voice (though I'm quite sure that such conversions still happen from time to time). Most of us don't have such experiences and that's normal and that's alright. What we, each of us, are called to do is to listen to that still small voice that calls in the midst of all of the noises of our time and be ready to obey.
We need to maintain a balance between the song of the angels of Christmas that speaks to our joy, and the songs of the sirens on the wine-dark sea in times of our deepest distress.
What is the nature of the voice that calls some to care for others against their own better interests? What is it that calls each of us out of our own countries, our own occupations, our own better judgment toward a lifetime of service? What calls some of us to a lifetime of looking after someone else's handicapped children? Or someone else to enter politics in our time in order to make a difference in the moral order of our day? What causes some of us to sit down and write a heartfelt letter to our congressman or senator or president? Or someone else to offer himself or herself for ordination in the church of Jesus Christ?
All in all we may hear the voice of God calling us to be wise and gentle in all our relationships with one another; to be sensitive and forgiving, to be creative and sustaining, to lift up the brokenhearted and bind the wounds of the war torn.
In the final analysis, the voice of God, I'm convinced, calls each of us toward celebration and joy despite all of our puzzlements and confusions and fears. It is for us quite simply to listen with the ear of our hearts.