Sunday, January 25, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

Call Waiting

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 62:5–12
Jonah 3:1–5, 10
Mark 1:14–20

I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.

Etty Hillesum
An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork

A friend of mine, a professor of communications, once said something about human behavior and attitude and how both are affected by technology: “Technology changes behavior and behavior changes attitudes.”

Technology changes behavior and behavior changes attitudes.

For example, Edison invented the light bulb, people started staying up longer into the night, and now we expect to be able to work or play even when it is pitch dark outside. The darkness no longer limits us. Or consider the cell phone. The fact that we can know who is calling because of caller ID and the fact that we know a message can be left because of voice mail gives us control over whom we talk with and when we choose to take a call, based on our convenience and based on the knowledge that we can listen to a voice-mail message at some later time, a time of our choosing. It’s a far cry from the days when we picked up a phone without any idea who might be on the other end of the call.

One of my friends and I used to compare notes on our then twenty-something children. That was before the prevalence of iPhones, when most phones were the flip version. She said, “I have the strong suspicion that whenever I call any of my kids, the phone rings, they look to see who is calling, and when they see that it’s mom, they just close the phone and go right on with what they are doing.”

Technology changes behavior and behavior changes attitudes. And so I wonder. I wonder how our spirituality has been affected by technology. With so much control afforded to us, are we still able to be open to God’s timing, to God’s surprise in-breakings into our lives, to God’s calls? The tension between control of our own lives and turning ourselves over to God’s will for us has been a long-standing human problem, but has it become even more of a problem now, given our technological advances and the control we have? Is it even harder than it once was to conceive of ourselves dropping everything and responding to Jesus immediately? Are we even more likely to put off taking the call, to wait until we have enough time, to suspect that the caller has nothing important to say so why bother, to dismiss the call altogether because we don’t believe we’ll be able to do what the caller is asking of us?

Whenever I’ve read this story of Jesus calling the disciples and imagine their instantaneous dropping of everything—their nets, their livelihood, everything—and their taking off after Jesus, I imagine it as sort of a Pied Piper scene. Something that could only happen long ago. There’s an unreality to it for me. I think of the people with whom I would have to talk over what Jesus had asked me to do before I could just leave. I think of the plans and preparations I have to make just to take a few days off from work. To see these men just get up and leave their work seems ludicrous to me. And so I distance myself from the text, which is what I think most of us do. We know we can’t walk away from our homes and our jobs as instantly as we see these men do it.

Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that we’re missing the point if we linger on our questions about how these men could have so instantly dropped everything and followed Jesus—or if we linger on our questions about whether we could do the same. She says, “This is a story about God, not the disciples or us” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Miracle on the Beach,” Home by Another Way). To focus on what the disciples gave up and whether we could do the same is “to put the accent on the wrong syllable.” This “miracle story,” as she calls it, is really about “the power of God—to walk right up to a quartet of fishermen and work a miracle, creating faith where there was no faith, creating disciples where there were none just a moment before.”

We’ve become so independent, seemingly so much more in control of our lives and our time, we may have lost something. “We may have lost a sense of the fullness of the power of God—the power of God to recruit people who have made terrible choices; the power of God to invade the most hapless lives and fill them with light; the power of God to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not God, and smack them upside the head with glory” (Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way, as quoted by Kathryn Huey, www.textweek.com).

This story is not so much about us but more about God and God’s power and God’s way of working. So notice some things about the story. Notice who the men were that Jesus called. These fishermen did not come from East Coast schools; they were not learned seminarians; they were not wealthy. They were ordinary people. They were ordinary people with ordinary lives and with ordinary responsibilities. William Barclay says, “It was as if Jesus said, ‘Give me twelve ordinary people and with them, if they will give themselves to me, I will change the world’” (William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark). God was building a team and still is. That is nothing short of a miracle. Barclay says, “No one ever believed in the ordinary person as Jesus did.” This piece of scripture is about the power of God to change this world with ordinary people like you and like me.

But then, we don’t think that anything we can do has the power to have much impact in the world, do we? Change the world? Us? With such problems that exist? With wars raging and terrorists acting and injustices everywhere and long-held animosities between groups of people, what can we do? Those doubts nag at us, and again we get hung up with ourselves rather than trusting the power of God.

Our deacons, ordained officers of the church, are called to provide a time of prayer—in Stone Chapel, right next door to me—after the 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. services. On some Sundays, no one comes for prayer, but the deacons show up. On other Sundays, two or three come at the same time. It’s not a big thing, but it is. The deacon who prays has no idea how God will work with the prayer he or she says. Nine times out of ten the deacon never hears what happened or if anything happened. One time, about three years ago, a woman came for prayer after one of those services, and she was from out of town. Her son was at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, having suffered severe brain trauma in a motorcycle accident in China. He had just graduated from college months before. After the time of prayer, one of our other members brought the mother to me. During the several weeks this family was staying in Chicago, our Angels on Call meals ministry provided meals for the family so they wouldn’t always have to eat at loud and noisy restaurants, where everyone was joyful and they were in the midst of such grief. I visited the young man at the Rehab Institute. And then, some months later, they all returned home. He would never get better, would forever be confined to a wheelchair, would never be able to speak normally again. Did all of our efforts change the world? Probably not. But I like to think that those efforts made another family in crisis know that God was holding them, even in the midst of their suffering. In those particular moments when the deacons show up in Stone Chapel to pray with those who might come, they are aligning their lives with God’s vision for the world. And those people who come for prayer—a step that takes courage and vulnerability—they too are aligning their lives with God’s vision for the world. There’s a turning toward God that is taking place.

Last night, I saw the movie Selma. If you haven’t seen it, you must. During one part of the movie, when things had really gotten tough for Martin Luther King Jr. and for the rest of those who were following him, he said something like, “I’m just like everyone else. I want to live a long life and to enjoy my family. But right now, I’m not thinking about what I want. I’m thinking about what God wants.” The movie showed King’s need to turn to God over and over again for guidance and strength. Kneeling in prayer, asking for encouragement from a friend to keep going, seeking God’s guidance—not just once, but often.

When Jesus asked those fishermen to follow him, he did not say to them, “I have a theological system that I would like you to investigate.” He did not say, “I have certain theories that I would like you to think over.” He did not say, “I have an ethical system I would like to discuss with you.” He said simply, “Follow me.” William Barclay says, “It all began with a personal reaction to Jesus, It all began in a tug on the heart.” Jesus doesn’t ask the fishermen to “add one more task to their busy lives. He calls them into new ways of being.” He doesn’t give them a new list of things to do but a “new identity—a whole new life” (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 1). That’s what they turn to in a moment. A whole new life lived as best as is possible in alignment with the will of God.

Jesus called those ordinary fishermen into a movement, to join a revolution that is still going on, a revolution that involves standing for love rather than for hate, standing for involvement rather than lack of engagement, standing for purpose rather than for humdrum days.

So might you believe that every single day when you awaken, you will have an opportunity to turn again to follow—to be used by God in some way each and every day? What a way to wake up. With the anticipation that somehow, sometime, in some way during the day, God might use you, and you may know it or maybe you won’t.

Following Jesus is the ongoing process of turning our lives in the same direction as God’s life, and sometimes that means doing the same things we always do but doing them in a new way or for new reasons (Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way). Following Jesus is to claim our identities as children of God and to live lives faithful to such a calling. Following Jesus is rededicating ourselves, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world” (Martin Luther King Jr., A Time to Break Silence).

Are you ready? The time has come. The future is now. Turn, turn for the first time; or turn again, and follow.