I have changed my work at least three different times. My first two professional jobs after my masters degree were at non-profit health services organizations, where I was a kind of data cruncher and writer of program grants. The second job was particularly fulfilling work, as I was helping to move health policy toward more home and community-based services for older people needing long-term care. I was the assistant director in a very small organization however, and I knew I didn’t want my boss’s job which required lots of political wrangling and negotiation with local, state and national Medicaid staffers and even congressional representatives. I knew I was more suited to teaching, which required me to go to school again. After more graduate study, I began teaching and doing research in this same area of health services for older people, moving down from Michigan to the University of Kentucky. I found a niche there for my skills and talents, but after 9 years, began to be a little restless and took up writing. I even quit my tenured position, which made many people gasp with horror. But to me, it was a new freedom to do many things I had wanted to explore.
As my money began to run out, doing local consulting work, I found another position at UK as a research professor. All this time, I was very involved in my church, having become Episcopalian some years before. At my church I was not quite like a Henry Johnson, but I was active in pastoral care work and in small group studies and spiritual growth groups, in which I made many very close spiritual friends. The pastoral work was very fulfilling and the small groups wonderful. I began to serve at the altar and found I liked that more that I could have predicted. All these church activities fed me, and I was comfortable in them. But then I began to hear questions from God about who I was and what I was doing. One particular challenge came that made me see that my life was merely going along without a lot of investment from me. At work I applied and was accepted into a leadership training program. And after a few months, I was sitting in church confused about why I would do such a thing, since I had already done academic leadership as a department chairperson and knew it didn’t interest me. It came to in church that day that I was being called to leadership in the church, and slow as I was to discern what was going on, I could only think that I didn’t want to serve on another vestry.
Well God finally got my attention and I got into the discernment process for taking holy orders as a priest. As soon as that process started, I began to lose that feeling of comfort. I began to be challenged in ways I had always avoided before—to be asked personal and probing questions about who I was and how I had lived my life, and especially who God was for me. The process of going into the priesthood leaves no stone unturned, no wrong turn from the past unexplored. This process of intense scrutiny only sped up in seminary, as I was challenged in other ways by pastoral care, preaching, and leadership roles that were so different from the kinds of pastoral care, study and writing and leadership I had been used to.
You may think that the process of becoming a priest ended in seminary, but it continues for the rest of your life after ordination. The priesthood is a vocation that never goes away, even if you don’t spend all your hours doing priestly tasks. Of all the professional roles I have taken on over my career, it has been the least comfortable, the least warm and fuzzy. While I was a professor I had many days when I could say I was successful and felt on top of my field. In the priesthood, I seem to have more days of questions and appeals for God’s help than days when I can say everything fits into neat categories and falls into place spiritually.
When I read this gospel today I see it was always thus. The calling of the brothers doing their fishing at the Sea of Gallilee begins not with warm and fuzzy proclamations about how following Jesus will make them elite apostles of a famous rabbi, it starts with the statement—“after the arrest of John the Baptist”. If a story ever had a warning, this one does. People who are in the business of spreading the good news of God’s kingdom are stepping into dangerous territory. They make people upset, they bring a message that doesn’t sit well with some people. The apostles themselves may never have a permanent home again, as they travel around to give their message. It’s a portent of dangerous activity and serious consequences.
When we understand that this is what being a follower of Jesus is, perhaps we can understand that this message is also becoming even more subversive than it was perhaps in times past when everyone went to church. Like Jesus’s time, people are seeking but what are they expecting? Are they like me and my seminary classmates who came from comfortable small groups in our churches and wanted more warm and fuzzy times? Did they expect to have respect for hanging out with this man of God?
The calling Jesus offers is one of giving up your past life, just like the fishermen were giving up fish and taking up fishing for people. How different can that be from their former life of toil in the sun, with a catch to count at the end of the day? How could they possibly know whether they had brought people into the fold of God’s love? How do we know today whether someone’s life has been transformed by our bringing the good news to them?
In short, brothers Simon and Andrew and two other brothers James and John left their comfortable life, where they knew their business, to enter something they could not have known would change them forever. They were asked to change their entire identity, their profession, to leave their nets and to enter into the challenge of trying to bring spiritual awareness to people who were seeking for perhaps something altogether different.
All Christians are called from their comfort zone into something that will challenge them for the sake of God’s kingdom. May God be with us all as we drop our nets and take that step toward into the unknown with Jesus to do our new work.
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