Preached by the Right Reverend Grant Lynn Ford at the Sunshine Cathedral on Sunday, February 9, 2003, and again on Sunday, February 5, 2006.
The grace of our Master Teacher — the love of God in the unity of Spirit — be with you all.
God of All, your love surpasses all our understanding but it is there for each of us; no exceptions. You call us to your service just as you called the prophets of old. Your Beloved Jesus, proclaimed the Good News of your love. He called his disciples, and they dropped everything to follow him.
Yet, we find it difficult to do the same, to let go of our old ways of thinking and living. Lord have mercy.
We know the things you have called us to do, but still we fail to do them. Christ have mercy.
Like your prophet Jonah, we, too, can be stubborn and rebellious. Lord have mercy.
You are always compassionate and forgiving. Use us for your service, in spite of our self-absorbed reluctance. Let us hear again the call of Jesus. Help us to change our attitude and turn our lives in a new direction. All this we ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
3:1A second time God spoke to Jonah: 2“Go to Nineveh — that great and powerful city — and give them the message I give you.”
3Jonah did as God told him, and took off for Nineveh. It was so large that it took three days to visit the main sites of the city. 4On the very first day, as Jonah stepped into the city, he shouted: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.”
5The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on the humble clothes of repentance.
10God saw what they did — how they turned around and moved away from the negative — and had compassion on them. The destruction that was predicted was avoided by their change in attitude.
Creative Visualisation
The most powerful thing you can do to change the world, is to change your own beliefs about the nature of life, people, reality, to something more positive… and begin to act accordingly.
Mark 1:14-20
14After John the Baptist was arrested by Herod, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the Good News of God. 15“Time’s up! The reign of God is here! Turn your life around! Believe the Good News!”
16Jesus was walking on the shore of the Sea of Galilee when he saw Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, fishing.
17“Come with me!” Jesus cried out. “I’ll teach you to fish for people.”
18They dropped their nets at once and went with him.
19He went a little further down the shore when he spotted James and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. 20Without a moment’s delay he called them, and without a moment’s hesitation they followed him, leaving their father Zebedaios in the boat with the hired hands.
A fisherman was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess.” He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket.
The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful Princess, I will stay with you for one week.”
The fisherman took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a Princess, I’ll stay with you and do anything you want.”
Again the fisherman took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket.
Finally the frog asked, “What is it? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful Princess, that I’ll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?”
The guy said, “Look, I’m an avid fisherman, so I don’t have time for girlfriends, but a talking frog? Now that’s really cool!”
Speaking of fishing and the great outdoors, comedian George Carlin asks: “Where do forest rangers go to ‘get away from it all?’”
Back in Jesus’ time there were a lot of fisherman near his hometown, especially down at the Sea of Galilee. That’s where our Gospel lesson takes place, and it’s a beautiful place. A number of us have taken boats across Galilee while visiting the Holy Land.
But let’s take a second look at this story. Can you imagine how Zebedaios felt? His two sons are running off to join a cult, while he’s left to run the family business with the hired help? That’s exactly how he must have felt when Jesus came by and said to James and John, “Let’s go fishin’.”
He had just done the same thing with Peter and his brother Andrew. The difference is that Peter was married, had his own business, and had a good mother-in-law to keep the fishermen working on those boats. Zebedaios was working to turn the business over to his sons, and now they were gone.
Sometimes our parents — even our friends — can think the same of us when we really start to follow Jesus, committing ourselves to the Gospel way of life. The truth is, attending the Sunshine Cathedral is no shock to anyone. It’s the place to be on Sunday morning in Fort Lauderdale, especially in the glbt community. We’re also becoming home to many people in our own neighborhood and the larger community, and we’ve worked hard to come to this place of respectability and attractability. (There’s a new word for you!) We’ve become the progressive alternative to the many conservative, judgmental churches in Broward County, and I believe we’re doing the right thing. We’re not just the gay church anymore; we’re the happy church … for gay, straight, bi, transgender … the wonder-filled, the wandering and the wondering!
But respectability is not what Peter and Andrew, James and John were being called to. They were being invited to be revolutionaries. Listen again to Jesus’ message, as Mark encapsulates it: “Time’s up! The reign of God is here! Turn your life around! Believe the Good News!”
You run around town shouting like that and they’ll have you in Broward General so fast....’psych floor’ at that!
We don’t like radical approaches to change. At least, I don’t. How about you? We like it nice and easy. Nothing too extreme. As CJ says, “Emily Post would just die...” (She did, you know. 1960.)
However, that’s exactly what Jesus is calling us to do: to die to our old way of living, to turn around, and to live a new life, to believe that life is good, that God is good...all the time!
This means really, honestly, openly loving our neighbor. This means caring for those who need our care. This means feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, ministering to the sick and dying. This is Mother Theresa stuff, far more than sitting in a pew!
It sounds like Jesus is calling us to be extremists. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was often accused of being an extremist. Sitting in Birmingham Jail, he wrote these words: “Was not Jesus an extremist for love — ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice — ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ — ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist — ‘Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.’ Was not John Bunyan an extremist — ‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.’ Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist — ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist — ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love?”
The question is still before us this day: will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Moses put it another way: choose life or death, blessing or destruction. Jesus added ‘hate or love’ to the choice.
It’s easy to choose hate; we have only to do nothing. Another word for hate would be ‘indifference’; not really caring at all. We need not carry a placard, mark in a parade, wear a hood and burn a cross, revile someone or openly despise another. We can choose death, destruction, hate, by simply doing nothing.
On the other hand, life, blessing, love — those powerful choices put before us by the prophets, by Jesus, by Gandhi, by King — are radical choices: we have to do something! We must put our faith into action. James (not the brother of John but the brother of Jesus) said it so plainly, when he wrote: “Someone will say, ‘You have faith, and I have works.’ Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” Then he emphatically declared, “As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” James 2:18, 26
Faith that demonstrates itself in practical acts of love will draw people into the net of the Good News. People are hungry for authentic faith, real spirituality that is not just a bunch of pious platitudes or warm affirmations. They want to see the real stuff, and they are drawn to it like hungry fish. That’s why Jesus said, “I’ll teach you to fish for people.”
Peter and Andrew dropped their nets at once and went with him. James and John did the same. What about you? Are you ready to drop the old nets of your old way of living, centered only on your needs and your wants? Those nets will only entangle us, irritate us, and ultimately make us dissatisfied with our lives. Our of frustration we blame others for our problems, not wanting to own up to the fact that it was our choice that got us here.
It’s also the power of choice that will untangle us from the nets of life. Today we can choose life and love and all the blessings that come with it. And then we can share it with others, in wonderful, radical ways. We can make a difference in our world, and ‘fish for people’, sharing the same Good News we embrace when we chose to live in love.
And that’s the Truth!
It was Henry David Thoreau who asked that important question, “Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing?” My answer would be: “Isn’t fishing like Jesus described it heaven all along?”
So let us fish in a way that changes us and our world, and enjoy heaven here and now.
