Call of Christ as Spiritual Mobility

3 Epiphany A      January  22, 2017

Is. 9:1-4         Psalm 27:1, 5-13
1 Cor. 1:10-18    Matt. 4:12-23

Lectionary Link

Imagine Peter in Rome, not yet dead but hanging upside down upon a cross.  What do you think went through his mind?  "I've come a long way from being a fisherman in Galilee."  Peter's brother Andrew supposedly died on an x shaped cross.  What do you think went through his mind?  He too was a long way from the Galilean Sea where he used to fish for a living.  James, son of Zebedee, also was a martyr and only John, son of Zebedee, according to tradition lived and died of old age but he also may have gone through some years of suffering and imprisonment.  Four fishermen in the family business but they were all coaxed out of the business and followed the itinerant Rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, the one who succeeded John the Baptist.

The call of Christ can change people's lives and some in very significant ways.  Some people say the call of Christ must have been miraculous since it could change four simple fishermen into the brave and brilliant church leaders and evangelists who they became.

If I were to guess, I bet that each of these fishermen felt rescued by the call of Christ; rescued from having to remain under-developed and unchallenged in their families' fishing businesses.  I imagine sons of fishermen in Galilee at the time of Jesus had very few vocational choices in their lives; if dad was a fisherman then the sons would be obliged to fish as well, and it could be that there were too many brothers to share the family fishing business and so if some of the brothers found other jobs that would be okay.

We take the many vocational choices that we have today for granted.  We can be in our twenties and thirties and still looking for our vocations after trying many different majors at the university.  We can be swamped and paralyzed by having so many choices and we may end up making a vocational choice based mainly on financial reasons rather than genuine sense of personal development doing "people-related" work.  Lots of people are trapped in jobs for making a living and look for relief in hobbies and avocations in their playtime.

I think that the church has gotten locked into lots of clichés about the call of Christ which has made it lose its significance and relevance to lots of people.  For many the call of Christ means being called to the "official" ordained ministries of the church as bishop, priest, deacon, pastor, evangelist or apostle.  Evangelical Christianity has tried to correct this by emphasizing that evangelism is the duty of every Christian, but when you get to know most evangelicals, they mostly just want to convert you to their particular view of God, Jesus and the Bible.  They mostly have changed being a fisher of people into getting people to join their particular religious group.  I think this too is a misrepresentation of what the call of Christ means.  St. Paul rebuked the Corinthian church for dividing themselves into groups that were loyal to various teachers: "I'm Paul's disciple, I'm Cephas' disciple, I'm Apollos' disciple,  and some thought it was a competition by claiming to be the best  of Jesus' disciples."  If we reduce the call of Christ to being Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Baptist or Methodist, then we probably have reduced it to just a different kind of identity politics.

In my own life, the call of Christ has meant many things, and I have been raised in groups that were more concerned how I believed things rather than being concerned about whether I was really a loving and kind person.  Yes, I have heard it said that such a person was a really loving and kind person but they were not "saved."  Such language has lead me to believe that many people believe that being an evangelical is catching and trapping people into one's view about God, Christ and the Bible.

What the call of Christ has come to mean for me is what I would call "spiritual" mobility.  We supposedly pride ourselves in America when say the individual has social, economic and educational mobility.  It may be truer for America than other countries but it may be more of a myth than reality, because people born in disadvantage end up in disadvantage and people born in advantage end up having larger safety nets to help them succeed.

The spiritual mobility of the call of Christ is the "pinch yourself" reality check of what one is able to become because of answering the call of Christ.  The last thing that I ever thought that I would be involved in was the endless production of language through speaking and writing.  As a very average student with more interest in sports, I would have rather had a career in sports, or coaching with some teaching.  I never imagined that I would discover at the center of my being an endless and continuous fountain of words rising to consciousness in word products of speaking and writing, so much so that it does not stop.  I have to stop the inner oracle because I have a continuous compulsion to organize human experience into words in trying to make sense of why my world is and why it is the way it is.

I never imagined myself to be a man of words, and the call of Christ has been an event of spiritual mobility to completely reorder and remake and reconstitute my life.  This call has been a gradual call in how I have understood it and how I have developed it.  The call of Christ, who is the Word of God at the beginning of human life as we know it, is a call always to be reconstituting our lives.  I had the sense the call of Christ long before I became drawn to the ordain ministry of the Episcopal Church and as such I believe the call of Christ is always already being offered to everyone.  It is the call to completely surprise oneself with a "spiritual" mobility.  Spiritual mobility is the invitation to be animated in all directions, body, mind and spirit, vocationally, aesthetically, socially, intellectually and verbally.

As hard as life became and ended for the four fishermen from Galilee, I would bet that they would never want to go back.  As hard as life was for them, their call of Christ left them no regrets.  They totally surprised themselves in travelling far from home delivering a way of life which could help others also discover this life changing call which would initiate a profound spiritual mobility in life.

The call Christ may have milestone markers which can have anniversaries like baptisms, confirmations, ordinations, matrimony, graduation ceremonies, but the milestone markers are only moments within this wonderful invitation to spiritual "mobility" of Christ.  This spiritual mobility is continuous and always being offered to us in different ways with different challenges.  People who live in skilled nursing centers and in assisted living residences need this call of spiritual mobility of Christ.  Why?  The call of Christ as spiritual mobility helps to adjust each of us to the current life circumstances even while inspiring us to exercise significant creativity given the limitation of any situation.

Jesus Christ was a fisher of persons.  He caught Andrew, Peter, James and John.  He did not get out his ruler and measure them to determine whether he should throw them back into their fishing vocation.  They were caught by Christ; they were keepers; he did not throw them back ever.  This is the nature of being caught by the call of Christ; it is an invitation to such personal spiritual mobility that one never wants to go back.  It is a call that is always renewing itself if we are willing to keep listening and responding.

What is the nature of your call of Christ today?  Do you know the joy of this spiritual "mobility" to surprise yourself with the experience of becoming someone completely different that you thought you would ever be?  Are you willing to accept the fact that you've been caught by Christ and he is never going to throw you back, because you are a keeper?

When you and I discover this wonderful "spiritual" mobility of the call of Christ to become self-surpassing people in future states, we can become people who carry and bear the excitement of the call of Christ to others.  We can live infectious lives as we invite others to find this joy of "spiritual" mobility.

The call of Christ is "spiritual" mobility.  It is a lure with attractive energy to us to want to be different in the future improvement of our lives.  And it is always and already and it is current to us now because it is never finished.

Let us make the effort to become intentionally aware of how we have been called by Christ and let us be attentive to new deliberate opportunities for "spiritual" mobility to surprise ourselves with what we can yet become.  Amen.