1-26-2020 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah.

There will be no gloom for those who were in anguish.

In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.

Those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined.

You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy.

They rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as people exult when dividing plunder.

For the yoke of their burden and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian, the word of the Lord.

Reading from Corinthians.

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in an agreement and there should be no divisions among you.

But that shouldn't be, that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose.

For it has been reported to me by Chloe that people that are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters, but I what I mean is that each of you say, I belong to Paul, or I belong to Apollo, or I belong to Cephas, or I belong to Christ.

Has Christ been divided?

Was Paul crucified for you?

Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Cephas and Gaius, and no one can say that you were baptized in my name.

I did baptize also the household of Stephenus.

Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any of you.

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, and not with elegant wisdom, so that the cross of Christ may be emptied of its power.

For this message about the cross is foolishness of those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is a power of God.

The word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to Matthew.

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.

He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken to the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled.

Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.

The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region in the shadow of death light has gone.

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.

And Jesus said to them, Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.

Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James, son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets.

And he called them.

Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

The gospel of the Lord.

Well, in the season of Epiphany, we're here to consider to be formed by big ideas, and I'd like to suggest that there's at least two opportunities for Epiphany today.

The first is what happens in moments of what we call cognitive dissonance.

And so I would tell you that almost every biblical scholar, regardless of whether they're labeled liberal or conservative, believes that Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist for some time.

That is to say, John the Baptist not only baptized Jesus, but served as his rabbi, as his teacher.

And notice in Matthew, and this is true in Mark and Luke as well, Jesus doesn't start his public ministry until John the Baptist is imprisoned.

Now you've got to consider this.

Jesus' rabbi has just gone to jail, and Jesus says, the kingdom of God is at hand.

This is like losing your mentor, and instead of retreating, he actually advances and says, even though it appears the world has gone even further along the path to hell in a handbasket, the kingdom of God is at hand.

So what should you do?

The word is repent.

Reminder to you, there are four words that are translated repent from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin into English.

And it's worth hearing these because normally we hear repent and we think, oh, that just means saying I'm sorry.

Oh God, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have done it.

And that is not actually the root of any of those words.

So first, in Hebrew, there's the word nicham, which is a verb and it means to turn, to change direction.

So fairly spoken, you repented when you turned into the parking lot because you changed your direction.

It doesn't mean you're sorry.

It doesn't mean you did something awful.

It just means you changed your direction.

Repent.

That's part one.

Part two.

In Greek, the word is called metanoia.

Metanoia, the word noose is a mind in meta, you know, like in metaphysics, something beyond physics.

It's having a mind that is beyond the mind you had before.

And I would suggest to you, really, an epiphany is about metanoia.

It's about enlarging the way you see the world.

Notice you don't have to be sorry to have metanoia.

The third is the Latin word from which we get the word repentance in English.

It's the word poena, and poena means making right what you did wrong.

Now, you can be sorry, and that's fine, but if you don't help fix what you did wrong, then your sorrow didn't do anything.

So when you go see the priest in the Middle Ages, the priest gives you penance when you confess, right?

And normally we think, oh, penance is about saying Hail Mary's and drinking holy water and saying the Our Father.

No, it's supposed to say, oh, you defrauded your neighbor, you'll pay that person back with interest.

That's penance.

Of course, we realize if you know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous, that there are certain apologies we can't make without causing more harm.

So we don't make those.

I hope that makes sense to you, right?

Sometimes we apologize for our sake instead of for the injured people, and we ought not to do that.

So we make right what we can do, what we've made wrong when we can.

And then the last one is this Hebrew word.

It's funny, Hebrew actually has the fewest words in the language, 10,000 words compared to Greek, 100,000 plus.

But it has two words for repentance.

And this is really actually pretty deep.

This is the word in Hebrew.

Um, oh, I said it wrong the first time.

To turn is to shoot.

This is the word nicham, and nicham is when you are overcome with grief because you're involved in a system that is bigger than your own ability to correct.

So to hear this in two ways, right?

Um sorry, you've heard me say this before, but uh I cannot personally correct ageism, racism, heterosexism in the world.

I can't.

I can try to abstain from those benefits and privileges, but the truth is the world is so wrapped up in those things that it is impossible for me to auto-correct the world.

It doesn't mean I do nothing, but it does mean that there's recognition that there were powers beyond me that both benefit me and hurt others.

Another way to put this, and I remember this happened once upon a time, um, one of my neighbors was really upset with my elder child, and they came to me, and I really weren't quite sure what they were trying to do here.

They said to me, Um, boy, you know, it'd be too bad if people found out about what your boy did, because I know it would really embarrass people, it would really embarrass you.

And I said, I'll never be embarrassed of my son, even though I'm disappointed in the decisions that he makes.

That is part of Neha.

Right?

Because he's my son, because she's my wife, because he's my father, we're bound to one another, and what they do is really part of me.

It doesn't reflect poorly on me.

It's not like that.

It's not an embarrassment, it's that my heart breaks when I see people I love make mistakes they don't have to make.

Does that maybe make sense?

Now you put all four of those together, and that's repentance.

So Jesus says, change your direction, change your mind, grieve and make things right that are wrong, because the kingdom of God is at hand.

Now, I don't know why I spent most of my childhood hearing the kingdom of God happens when you die, because Jesus doesn't say that.

He says the kingdom of God is at hand, like grabbable, reachable, accessible, and you should be trying to hold on to it now, not later.

And what's remarkable is he says this at a moment of great personal loss.

He didn't just go to some youth retreat at Camp Allen and he's pumped up for the Lord.

He did not just receive lottery winnings.

He just lost his teacher.

And he says, in a moment of cognitive dissonance, the kingdom of God is reachable.

So change your direction and change your mind.

And maybe that's our invitation at Epiphany this year, once again, is to think instead of heaven being some far-off place that we go when we die, to think about God's family on earth.

If we could just open our eyes to see it and change the way we treat one another and frankly, ourselves to live into it.

Of course, we'll have to make right some of what we did wrong for that to work.

And there is that inevitable grief from family members who don't live in the family.

That's what Paul writes about today.

He says, Listen, I urge you to stop being divided, as if there were multiple families of God.

There's one family of God.

So repent.

Make right what you've done wrong, see God in one another, change the way you treat each other.

And it's with that vision I suggest to you that Jesus invites these people to be fishers of men.

Now, this is a great song.

I learned it when I was like five.

Does anybody know this?

I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.

I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men, I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.

I just blew that song up.

Anybody heard that before?

At least three of you went to a Baptist thing.

Okay.

You know, it's really interesting because I've heard this uh, you know, analogy pushed really hard where people say, you know how to clean them, you just gotta catch them.

You catch them, gotta clean them.

And you know, it's a tough metaphor because normally when you think about um fishing, it's sort of like, well, who sets the hook?

And what's the bait?

You know, I mean, this is could easily become the bait and switch for the Lord, which is a kind of cognitive dissonance, don't you think, right?

Like, hey, let's have a pizza party, but in order to have the pizza, you need to make a profession of faith.

Or, hey, harmless guys, I'll give you some soup as long as you say whatever I want you to say about Jesus.

Uh, I would suggest to you that is not what Jesus has in mind.

Again, that's what Sears did with tires like 30 years ago, and we know better than to behave that way.

It's not good for business or longevity or reputation.

So, what does Jesus have in mind?

Well, I would suggest to you that instead of hooking people for the Lord, which is grabbing them against their will, there's a different way in which we could consider being fishers of people.

Which is by the way we swim.

So I think sometimes we push these analogies to think, oh, look, all the all these people in the world that are wicked, because they don't think like I think, that makes them wicked, by the way.

If you didn't know that, if you don't think like me, you must be wicked.

Um, those people are like fish, and I'm like a human with full understanding.

So what I'm going to do is make just fish into humans by catching them with my hook.

No, instead, I would suggest to you that, listen, everybody's a fish in the analogy.

So, how is it that you get people to follow you?

Well, you swim a life that's worth following.

What advantage is there in swimming in schools of fish?

Of course, you know this, you've seen these videos on Discovery where these schools of fish they swim as one fish, like a thousand fish, and they turn instantly.

You've seen this before?

And you know why they do that?

Not only is there strength in number when there's predators, there's also this ability for the ones in front to bear the load of the current so that all the fish behind them are drifting.

Or drafting.

I don't know which one is it.

Drifting or drafting?

Drafting.

Well, you know, they don't stay on the front all the time.

They swim in the front, and when they get tired, they hop back in the middle.

And so they swim cohesively as this unit, and they're synchronized because they're paying attention to one another all the time.

And if one fish is off, it damages the whole school.

And what the school does not do is leave that one behind.

If one's off, they actually all move together anyway.

This is a really interesting thought, and I would suggest to you this is possibly what Paul is suggesting that if we divide the school, we end up not only weaker and without protection and without cohesion, but we are swimming by ourselves in an ocean, and there's just no wisdom in that.

You know, God has designed it for us to swim as a school.

But there's just God's family swimming together in unison, and it's really important for us to draft it.

That's why we say in the creed we believe instead of I believe.

Because I can guarantee you, not everybody out there believes every word of that creed every week, but someone does, and so we do.

And on that day where you can't say it, somebody in the school is carrying you.

Don't worry, you'll get your turn to carry somebody else.

That's how schools work, and that's how we fish for people.

If we go out and we swim mindlessly in the water, why would you follow that to your death?

The thing is, if we're not swimming toward life, we need to repent.

We need to change our orientation and the way we're seeing this whole business.

Now, there's one other crazy thought I want to tell you.

Jesus was talking to fisher people.

How many of you are fishers?

None.

That's what I thought.

Nobody here is a vocational fisher person.

So I wonder what Jesus would have said if he'd run into, well, I don't know, a bunch of engineers.

Follow me and I'll make you engineers of people.

Well, how do you be an engineer of people?

You solve their problems.

Right?

Without making new ones.

That's what engineers do, right?

You solve the problem in front of you without making a bunch of other problems.

Well, that might be a life worth living, don't you think?

That might be a compelling life that people would follow you because it points to something bigger than yourself.

Well, what about accountants?

Well, you know what accountants do, right?

They balance accounts.

They try to turn deficits into credits when they can, right?

So what if you were an accountant for people?

I don't mean you analyzed everybody's flaws.

I mean, after your analysis, you tried to turn deficits into credits.

You tried to turn a deficit into an abundance.

Would that be a compelling way to live your life?

I think so.

I think so.

Jesus talks to fishers because he meets fishers, but what would Jesus say to you in your career?

What would he say to you as a student?

What would he say to you as a realtor?

What would he say to you as a priest?

This invitation is not for you to be some kind of fisherman that you're not.

It's for you to live into your vocation so deeply that it appoints other people to God.

And of course, the school of fish doesn't need one kind of fish.

The school needs the variety to hold life.

Now, I don't think I need to tell you that we often have this problem in the church where we say there's one vocation better than another, and it is being a clergy person.

And a bishop is better than the priest who's better than a deacon.

Sometimes we think this stuff.

And of course, the prayer book says that the church is the ministry.

Do you know?

The order is important.

The church is a ministry of you don't know this, this is good.

The laity, the deacons, the priests, and whatever's left over to the bishops.

It's an in-verse order because the church is a ministry of you.

And I get to do something too, but the reminder is there's no holier than thou.

There's just the uniforms we wear.

And whether or not, quite frankly, we wear our uniforms well, is what points to people or not to God's kingdom being at hand.

Now, these are difficult times, I want to let you know, because partly a week goes by where I'm grateful I don't spend all that much time watching the news.

There's not a lot of uplifting stuff, you know.

Um, but I am aware of the down casting things, which is why I'm very aware that what the world and the church need are engineers of people.

I hope you don't mind saying this.

This is one of the most diverse parishes in Houston.

You just don't know it.

I had a dinner for eight at my house, and there were six different kinds of engineers there.

How diverse is that?

Out of eight, there were six engineers, and they all had a different degree.

Now, I know not everybody is one of these things, but don't you see in this cognitive dissonance time, whether it's partisan politics, Middle Eastern realities, whatever it is, we could throw up our hands and say the kingdom's far away, but today Jesus is saying it's at hand.

And the way it becomes at hand is that we repent and we live into our vague vocation, not just to fulfill our tasks, but to connect us to people and to God.

Maybe those aren't big ideas for you.

Or maybe they were a big idea a couple of years ago, but I think they're worth returning to and considering whether and how we might better swim in unison and ask the question is the way we swim in our job, in our piety as a parish life-giving compelling.

Is there something more to it?

And if not, we need to repent.

Because surely the kingdom of God is at hand.

And if so, we just need to keep pointing the way and inviting the people to draft behind us until they're ready to take their turn.