A Call to Be More
You can listen to this sermon here
Gate Pa –5th Sunday of Ordinary Time and Waitangi Day 2022
What I want to say:
Use the call of Isaiah and Peter to talk about “call” being about re-imagining who we are and how we are and what we are called to do
What I want to happen:
How does that help us engage with the ongoing work of honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi?
The Sermon
1. Introduction:
You can imagine the scene. Peter and his partners sitting in their boats after a hard and fruitless night fishing. As they clean their nets, they are wondering how they might feed their families this day? How they might pay all those other demands on their catches. This is a hard life, and this last night has made it harder. Dejectedly they clean their nets and order their boats ready for the next night of fishing and hopefully a catch. And then home to sleep.
But along the beach comes Jesus. He has been in town for a while now. They have listened to him. He has healed Peter’s wife’s mother. He is stirring things up; in town, in them. And here he comes with a growing crowd trailing along. They are eager for more. So eager they are crowding Jesus and he can’t move, let along teach. So, he gets into Peter’s boat and asks him to push out a bit. It’s been a long night. Things still aren’t entirely sorted. They have nothing to show for it. Peter is tired and wants to go home, have something to eat, and sleep. But here is this man who healed his mother-in-law and others, and who teaches with such authority. He is amazing. And he is in his boat. Wow!
So, he pushes out, and sits and listens and Jesus teaches. He waits. Soon he can go home.
Then Jesus turns to him and asks him to go out further and again throw the nets they have so carefully cleaned. What? Seriously? He is so tired. What does this teacher know about fishing? He comes from Nazareth which is nowhere near water. “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and caught nothing.” He despairs. But he has seen Jesus do some crazy things. He is beginning to trust him. “But because you say so, I’ll drop the nets.”
And he does. And soon he and the others in his boat are struggling with the catch. They have never seen a catch like this. It is huge. The wealth in this catch is staggering. There are too many fish, and they call their friends on the beach. And soon both their boats are near sinking with the weight of the fish. They are in awe. They are filled with wonder and dread. This man is holy. And they are not! They are rough unholy fishermen. They have no place being in the presence of this man who heals, who has power over the spirits of the sea, and who teaches words of life. This is too much, and they wish him gone. But Jesus has other ideas. “Don’t be afraid. From now on, you will be fishing for people.” What does even mean?
But here is the surprising thing. They leave everything and follow. They do not deal with that amazing catch of fish and all the wealth tied up in it. They do not talk to family about what this will mean for them. They just go.
They leave behind everything that defined who they were
- - their family and their place in that family
- - the village they were from
- - their identity as fishermen.
They start again and re-imagine themselves
- - as disciples to the rabbi Jesus – with all the growing uncertainty and dangers that held
- - no longer from one place, but roaming the countryside - with all the growing uncertainty and dangers that held
- - fisher of people – learning what that meant.
I wonder why Luke tells the story like this?
And I wonder what happened to all the fish?
And I wonder what Peter’s wife had to say about all this?
2. Isaiah
We have just heard the story his call to be a prophet. It is a dramatic story, much like Luke’s telling of the call of Peter, James, and John.
He is not just called to be a prophet. He is called to be a prophet to the kingdom Judah. The southern kingdom. His kingdom. They saw themselves as the holy and righteous kingdom. Their kings stood in line with David, like Isaiah himself. They worshipped in true temple in Jerusalem. What need is there for a prophet to this kingdom?
Unlike those backsliding and more powerful cousins up north who had abandoned Davidic kings and established their own temple with their own priests. Who had on more than one occasion humiliated Judah. For their many and great sins, they were now under serious threat from Assyria. They were in great need of a prophet. But Isaiah is called to be a prophet to his own people, to his own family.
He had to re-imagine himself as the one who calls out his family’s desires for wealth and security at expense of the poor
o immigrant
o orphans and widows
o and their northern neighbours
Even as he says yes, you can hear the despair in his question “How long, Lord?”, and his grief as he hears the response. He, like those fishermen, will have to leave everything behind that defined who we was. He will no longer be welcome in his home. How he saw them and how they saw him was about to radically change. In the end the rabbinic tradition says he is sawn in two by them. But he will continue to love Jerusalem and to speak in its defence to his family, and to God.
3. Call
Here we are. We have spent the last nearly two years negotiating our way through a pandemic. It has changed so much about how we live life. Mask wearing, social distancing, contact tracing, vaccine passes. Things we had never heard of two years ago are now part of our daily life. And it has changed how we do things like church, and shop, and all sorts of other everyday things.
And it has changed how we see other people and relate to other people.
And it is changing how we see ourselves as people of God. Our old understandings of what it means to be church were already under pressure. Covid has just made that more obvious.
We are like Peter, James, and John. We are having to re-imagine who we are. What does it mean for us to follow in this changing world?
4. Communal call
When we talk about our call there are three things we normally associate about that.
The first is only special people like priests are called. The problem about that is baptism is all about call. We are all called to follow Christ. We are all called to live our lives shaped by that call. We all have moments when we have an opportunity to say as Isaiah did, “I’m here; send me.”
The second is we see call to be about doing something. To act in a certain way. But in both our stories today, and in the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, the call was “to be”. To see themselves in new and entirely different ways; letting go of everything that had given them their identity up to that point. The same is true of us today. Call is about how we see ourselves. My call to be a Franciscan is to see myself as a follower of Christ in the footsteps of Francis and Clare. that is who I am rather than what I do.
Thirdly we see call being about the individual. And it is. But it is also about community. The call of the prophet was always to live out God’s justice and peace to create the kind of community God longs for us. A community built on God’s love. The prophet Isaiah spoke hard words to his own family about how their greed was destroying community. And he offered a promise that God would one day bring that community to life. In the gospels, especially Luke’s gospel, Jesus understood himself as being the one who was fulfilling that promise and was and is creating that community. And as Paul would reaffirm, that community would be the means God would transform creation and renew human community. If there was ever a time when we need that promise again it is now.
So as we live through these times, how is God inviting us to re-imagine who we are?
5. The Treaty
It was argued for in London by Anglican humanitarians who sought to protect Māori from worst effects of encounters with British settlers. It was drawn up and translated by Anglicans. It was signed by those who trusted (among others) Anglican Missionaries, and who understood the Māori text in light of what those missionaries had taught on other occasions about bible. And it was taken around the country by (among others) Anglican Missionaries for more Māori to sign.
Our fingerprints are all over this thing. Which is why it is at heart of our church’s constitution.
Sadly, Anglicans have been at the forefront denying of the treaty over the last 170 years. And we have been at the forefront of having it lived out.
Today we are reminded that we are called to be more. We are called to join Isaiah, Peter, John and James to be a reflection of God’s love, generosity, mercy,
The Treaty of Waitangi is ours. We are called to stand with Isaiah and to invite our nation to be more than we have been. We are invited to reimagine how we might, as a nation, see ourselves so that all might thrive.
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