In the name of the God who is holy, holy,
holy ✠ Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you let your imagination run wild, what would your greatest success look like? Building a business that becomes a Fortune 500 company? Getting into your dream school on a full scholarship, graduating summa cum laude, and then landing your dream job after graduation? Discovering or inventing something that would make you rich and famous? Perhaps becoming our nation’s most beloved President and becoming the fifth face on Mount Rushmore? Having your kids being happy, financially independent, and winning the Nobel Prize or Olympic gold? Being the Rector of the largest church in Salisbury?
Whatever
that wildest dream is, now imagine reaching it only to hear Jesus say to you,
as he said to Peter, James, and John – “leave it all behind and follow me.” Peter
had just pulled in a catch so large that
he had to call for other boats to help them pull it in; so many fish that the
boats began to sink. He was about to become the top fisherman on the Sea of
Galilee and he’d be a shoe-in for the next cover of Field & Stream
magazine. But Jesus doesn’t say to him, “Great, now see how I’ve blessed you –
I want you to take 10% of the income from this haul and start a church right
here and set up a feeding ministry with all the extra fish.” No. Jesus said, “Leave
it all and follow me.”
As
we’re continuing to consider the sacrament of Baptism on these Sundays after
the Epiphany, the aspect of Baptism for our consideration today is that Baptism
plunges us into the crazy call of discipleship. In a sermon that inspired a
book, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said, “Those who would follow Jesus, those
who would be his disciples are called and summoned and challenged to be just as
crazy as Jesus.” Because when we stop and think about it, according to the
order of the world, it is crazy to give our money to those in need, it is crazy
to love our enemies, it is crazy to forgive those who have wronged us, it is
crazy to give God the credit for our accomplishments, it is crazy to proclaim
that an itinerant 1st-century Jew who was executed by the State was
actually the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, rose from the dead on the third
day, ascended into heaven and now sits enthroned on high, it is crazy to claim
that when we then gather in his name that we receive his body and blood and we
willingly consume it. This is crazy stuff.
Baptism,
at its most basic level, can be described as being united to Christ in his
death so that we are joined to him in his Resurrection. The Resurrection part
makes sense – after all, who doesn’t want abundant and eternal life? But the
death part – that’s crazy. God doesn’t eliminate death and say, “You won’t have
to deal with that,” but rather God gives us a way through death. This is what
is at the center of that well-known passage in John where Jesus tells Nicodemus
that we have to be born anew. Death is something we are taught to fear and
avoid, but as one of the great prayers from the Prayer Book puts it, “the way
of the Cross is the way of life.” The Christian life is one in which we have
died to ourselves so that we can be alive in Christ.
This
is what the 20th-century pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant when he wrote,
“When Christ calls us, he bids us come and die.” For Bonhoeffer, that was a
very literal death at the hands of the Nazis. For others of us though it will
be the death of our egos, the death of our bank accounts, the death of obsessing
over our faults or mistakes, the death of what we had planned for our lives, the
death of our insistence on doing things my way or the highway, the death of our
perfectionism, the death of our need to be right.
For
a lot of us, these are the very things that culture teaches us that are most
important. This call to leave it behind and follow Jesus is taking our diplomas
and résumés and running them through the shredder. It is as that lovely hymn
puts it, “Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee… Take myself,
and I will be ever, only, all for thee.” Or, as St. Paul put it once in a
letter, “For Christ’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard
them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ.” The word “rubbish” is a very
polite translation. Other translations have it as “sewer trash,” which is still
a bit polite. The word means “dung.” And, without God, ultimately, that’s all
we have. Goodness, beauty, love, joy – all the things that make life worth
living are gracious gifts from God, not the products of our own making.
One
way or another, life has a way of bringing us to this realization. Sometimes it’s
through a crisis, a diagnosis, a tragedy, or a great gift, but unless we live
our entire life as Ebeneezer Scrooge, even if we don’t admit it, we all figure
out that the best life is one that is received as a gift. For Peter, it happened
after a long night on the ship and catching nothing. Have you ever felt that
way? Fruitless? Like you just can’t catch a break? Like you keep coming up
empty? And, usually, when we’re in that place, the last piece of advice we want
to hear is “Give it one more try.” But there Peter is, already cleaning up his
nets and putting them away – the last thing he wants to do is head back out on
the lake and have to repeat the whole miserable experience. But he does it
anyway, and God often meets us exactly in that place of despair. Maybe you are
in a place where faith doesn’t make sense, where hope seems pointless – but you
feel the tug of grace or have a crazy invitation come your way, that very well
may be God preparing you for the catch of your life.
To
say that I was in a bad place wouldn’t be right – I was just on a normal path
of life. Though I had first sensed a call to the priesthood when I was a 12-year-old
acolyte, that sense of call faded as we moved from a church that valued the
ministry of acolytes to one that didn’t. So when I went to college, I wasn’t
sure what I wanted to do. One day, a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go to a
Christian concert with him. I didn’t particularly want to, that wasn’t my sort
of thing, but nothing else was going on, so I went with him. You might correctly
guess that guitars and drums aren’t a part of my spirituality or preferred musical
style, but I tell you – the Holy Spirit used that night to remind me of God’s
abundant love and reignited that sense of call in me. Don’t ever underestimate
the power of an invitation, especially the ones that seem a bit crazy.
And
I want to be very clear about this – each and every single one of you is called
by God. A call isn’t just for the clergy. I am so inspired by those of you who have
clearly been called by God to do the work that you do – some as teachers, some
as physicians, some as accountants, some in sales, some as parents, some as
volunteers at church and in the community. The call to follow Christ is as diverse
as we all are.
The
result of Peter’s one last attempt at fishing is the sort of abundance that
comes only from God – and Peter immediately knows that’s who he’s encountered.
There is such abundance in Jesus that there is only one possible explanation –
this is God. These first disciples embody a parable that Jesus will later tell,
that “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone
found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that
field.” They give up everything they had worked for to follow Jesus whom they
recognize as God in the flesh.
And
this is quite crazy. To believe that and live as if the values that our culture
gives us are rubbish and to see that most of what we have been taught is wrong.
But this is precisely the call that Jesus issues to us – leave it all behind
and follow him, for he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Yes, Baptism is
always about grace, about God’s loving, saving, and redeeming action towards
us. And in addition to those things, Baptism is also about transformation and
new birth as we die to self and rise in Christ.
Whether
we want to call it craziness, or transformation, or sanctification, or holiness
– there is the sense that in Baptism, because Holy Spirit is implanted with us,
there will be growth and change. In the reading from Isaiah, we heard of Isaiah’s
encounter with God in which the seraphim around the throne of God sing that God
is “holy, holy, holy.” We tend to think that “holy” is a word about ethics or
morality – that being holy is about being good and following the rules. But
this is not how “holy” is being used here. Rather, “holy” means distinct or
different. The claim here is that God is utterly different from us as God is
perfect in love, perfect in mercy, perfect in being.
This
holiness, this sense of being different, is what we are Baptized into. God does
not call us into being a better version of ourselves. God does not say “follow
me into living in such a way that lands you on the ‘Who’s Who’ list.” No, we
are Baptized into God’s holy holiness. As Jesus says in John, we are “in the
world, not of the world.” In other words, Christianity should be weird.
Does
this make Christianity difficult? Yes, if we are measuring by the standards
given to us by the world, following Jesus is quite difficult. This is why St.
Augustine famously prayed, “O Lord, make me a Christian, but not yet.” But following
Jesus is the most natural thing in the world, we’ve just been distracted from
seeing that. Our values in the Church should be unintelligible to the world. Sadly,
this, as you know, is not the case.
The
Church has become a part of the establishment and in doing so, we have largely stopped
following Jesus and instead chase power, wealth, prestige, comfort, and influence.
We’ve neutered the Gospel and domesticated the call to discipleship. Gone is
the radicality and the craziness of our faith. The early Church grew
exponentially and it was also the time when martyrdom was at its highest – when
people were willing to die for their faith. Today, well, I can’t help but
notice that coffee shops, sports and concert venues, and restaurants are full,
but there’s plenty of room in the pews. This is because either the call to discipleship
is laid out in its truly crazy terms and is rejected for being too much; or faith
is laid out in a watered-down way and is rejected as being worthless.
The
call though is into holiness, into the difference that Christ makes – which is
at the very top of our parish identity statement. Christ makes all the
difference – he turns our sins into forgiveness – both Peter and Isaiah confess
their sins when they come and see the holiness of God. Christ turns our
despairs into hope, our sorrow into joy, our estrangement into beloved
community, our gifts into calls, our lack into abundance, our deaths into life.
Following
Christ takes us on an amazing, wonderful, and wild adventure. Following Christ is
the gift of living a life that is resonant with the deepest truths of reality,
a life that goes with the grain of love, a life in which we can be assured that,
in the end, all shall be well. Baptism is when we are plunged into this holy
difference of God, into the kingdom of God that stands as the alternative to
the idols that we have made for ourselves. It is the invitation of discipleship,
the call of faith, and the meaning of Baptism: come and see the difference
Christ makes.
