Epiphany III B A Change of Work

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.

A drop of water or pouring out of the spirit?

In Jesus’s time, the act of baptism was not what we think of today as a rite that is performed by the priest.  In those times, the person immersed themselves in water, performing their own baptism as an act signifying their repentence.  The Greek word is metanoia, which means changing one’s mind, in the sense of a change of perspective, a fundamental shift in perspective.

When I think of a shift of perspective, I think of suddenly getting a concept in mathematics as a young student, such as the first time I understood long division or plane geometry.  Such a shift comes with an “aha” moment of clearer perception, incite and relaxation of powers of hard work to grasp something that seemed beyond our reach.

Because I was a pre-pharmacy student at Illinois Wesleyan, I had to study a lot of chemistry, which was okay until I got to physical chemistry. Think of quantum physics applied to chemical compounds, with lots of calculus to describe the movement of molecules--that’s physical chemistry.  Many days I left the classroom shaking my head as if I understood but whenever the test came around, I found I had been fooling myself.  Needless to say, my worst grades were in this subject.

But take Shakespeare, my best class. It was taught by a really exciting professor who loved words, who made the strange cadence and language of Elizabethan English come alive, so that I finally got what the characters were really saying.  It was an epiphany, an opening up of Shakespeare to me that gave me a new perspective on the language, helped me learn how to read Shakespeare to really get what the play was all about.

Most of have had experiences of the thing that eludes us entirely, like my physical chemistry, and the thing that we grasp and learn to love because we now understand what it means to us, like my experience with the class in Shakespeare.  The first experience may make us feel lost, out of the loop, or even dumb, because we just don’t get it, can’t see the connections or grasp the importance of major pieces of the puzzle.  Not only do our minds remain closed or unable to be opened, but our hearts can’t engage because we don’t understand the meaning of what we are experiencing.

The second experience of understanding lightens us up.  It is not only our minds that are changed, but our very hearts.  What was once a blank, dark space becomes enlightened, bright with meaning and connected to us in a new way.  This opening up happens not only in our mind but in our hearts as well, and we may even come to love the thing we now understand.

The same can also be true of people. A person we didn’t know or understand, who we spend a little time getting to know can suddenly come closer to us, be opened to us and then we open to them.  Our hearts were not engaged but now they are.

These are all experiences of metanoia, of changing not only our minds but our very hearts, as we engage more deeply with things we now understand.  You can’t embrace what you don’t know, and the metanoia that we experience with Christ is just that.  Understanding Christ does not mean studying him, but entering into his life in order to make meaning of his coming among us in the manger, his ministry and his death and resurrection. What does this mean to you that Christ came into a body like ours, lived a life like ours, and suffered a death like ours so that we can enter a resurrection like his?  Christ is not meant to be studied but to be loved, in a turning around of our life from focus on things that pass away to things that last.

Baptism is the basic symbol we Christians have chosen to mark this new understanding, this change in our hearts and minds to the things eternal.  That Christ himself baptizes himself at the invitation of John the baptizer shows us that baptism means entering into the world of God and God’s will for us.  Baptism means rinsing off all our former selves to take on a new self.  In Christ’s baptism, God descends in the spirit and declares Jesus to be the beloved Son.  God acknowledges the new life in Christ, and in a sense anoints Christ at his baptism for ministry, and ultimately for resurrection.

It is said that some of us are sprinkled with water and that’s all that happens, but others are baptized into new life.   It depends on what we take from our baptism that makes the difference. For those of us baptized as children, our parents helped to make the difference for us in whether we merely got wet or got transformed into new life.  Whether it was some water poured on us or the Holy Spirit poured out for us.

Like Jesus in his time participating in his own baptism, we too participate in our own baptism.  Are you merely getting wet or are you being transformed?