Guest Post - You Have Been Called

I feel that I need to explain that I have 3 baptisms this Sunday and so my reflections on this week’s readings are filtered through that lens.

I am first struck by the reading from Matthew – it is almost 2 separate passages and reflects 3 of the themes from Matthew – Jesus as the fulfillment of the promises made in the OT, the communal nature of his ministry, and his mission focus. I seem to be caught up in the idea of community and how that affects our mission to the world. As we baptize these three children into the Body of Christ, I’m wondering what that means for them, what that means for the Church, and what that means for the world. For Christians, Church ought to be our community in which we learn how to be disciples. When it works well it is a place where we learn (or remember) how to pray, to laugh, work and share. It ought to be where we learn our story and how to participate in the ongoing chapters of our story, and it ought to be where we share a world view different than that of our society or culture. Church is where we ought to receive our sustenance to travel down our road that is not necessarily culturally “correct,” a place where we find companions for our journey – where we hold up one another during times of doubt, pain, and joy. Somewhere this week I read a comparison of the church to Noah’s ark and I really like that image of being safely – albeit roughly at times – carried through chaos.

Jonathan Marlowe on Theolog, the blog site of the Christian Century, reminded me of Rowan Williams remark that when we get to heaven, God will not ask us why we weren’t more like one of the saints, but God will ask us why we weren’t more fully ourselves. Living into who we were meant to be is risky and scary business. But it is not a journey we ought to have to take alone, and it ought, also, to be one that is full of the same kind of excitement, thrill, and joy that any adventure is.

Jesus sought out the four who are called in this reading. The fishermen followed Jesus because they were looking for more – they wanted a larger story than daily fishing. We come to church – we follow Jesus – because we, too, are looking for more. And yet….we fight the urge to change – the call to do our lives differently, but it is what we truly desire – to be so awakened that we know we must live our lives differently. We are looking to be reborn. We want to be brave enough to leave our old lives and take up the new. We want to be energized, excited, sure, overwhelmed, secure, loved enough to dare to follow Jesus – to be our own truest selves. What if Jesus were to come to each of us and call us to follow him – call us by our names?

That is what the church, in the name of Jesus, does at our baptism. And yet I am reminded of a book entitled Mighty Stories, Powerful Rituals. Do we still think of our stories as mighty? Do we still find our rituals powerful?