Month: September 2017

Are you a Jonah moaning under a tree when others do perhaps unduly well? Especially those you thought you ought to disapprove of because you think the bible or your tradition tells you so? You know, church people are usually very proper and just, fair-minded and orderly, so God help the wretch who finds outrageous grace. Our very moral rectitude can make us cruel. It is one thing to be ‘scriptural’ in following the commandments of Moses and the ethical teachings of Paul, but let us understand the fact, patent on every page of the gospels, that Jesus was an outrageous character who took church people – who he called Pharisees – seriously only as examples of who God was not, how not to act, and of those who would not enter God’s kingdom. Clearly for Jesus God deals with us outrageously.

– from my talk today, Don’t be a moaner – heed the Sign of Jonah. With help from the late respected Robert Hamerton-Kelly.

Jonah 3.10-4.11, Matthew 20.1-16 

The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity – 24 September 2017

Queen Camel Together at Ten, West Camel Methodist Church

 

Fr Ian was a priest I truly admired, though we differed on many things. He was as high church as it is possible to go, his small chapel a glistening shrine to Mary, his liturgy full of smells, bells and all manner of ecclesial embellishments, plenty of them worn about his person during worship. He was in there every day, morning, noon and night, often alone, interceding for his parishioners, a model of the old-style cleric who poured himself out uncomplainingly for over 35 years in that one place. [1] 

I admired all that about him: and also this – that although he was utterly convinced that scripture and tradition firmly said ‘no’ to women priests, and although he campaigned tirelessly at local and national level in the cause of keeping the priesthood a male-only preserve, eventually Fr Ian  admitted that God was doing a new thing; and he chose not to leave the Church, but to stay. Not only stay, but in time Fr Ian became one of the most faithful encouragers of women priests in our locality, quietly and gently involved in their training and pastoral support. Fr Ian never ever changed his mind about what scripture and tradition said about that issue, but he grasped a deeper truth about God. Fr Ian had perceived what Jesus meant by heeding ‘The Sign of Jonah’.

On a few occasions I asked him why he had stayed in the C of E after the vote on women priests, when so many of his fellow-traditionalists, many of his closest friends, had either left the church or – worse still – stayed and sulked, moaned, stopped cooperating, made life difficult for everyone else around them. He would tell me, “I don’t want to be a Jonah. Even though I really don’t understand it, even though I really can’t believe it, nevertheless if this is the direction God is taking us, then I will learn to live with it, because I want to stay faithful to the God I love and the church I love, and the people he has sent me to serve.”

We entered the story of Jonah in today’s reading some time after his attempted escape from the mission to the Ninevites which God had called him to; after his three days inside the whale, after he had reluctantly gone to Ninevah and done what God asked him in the first place, and the Ninevites had accepted his message and turned to God in great numbers, much to Jonah’s despair. 

Jonah would have preferred that God had judged these people mercilessly, that God had stayed true to the image that Jonah had of God from scripture and tradition; but Jonah had perceived that, despite what he had so far preferred to think, the truth about God’s nature was that He is gracious and merciful, full of love, slow to anger, always ready to withhold punishment, and that whether Jonah liked it or not, this was what God wanted to show to the Ninevites. Jonah didn’t much like this God – far too forgiving – and so he got angry with God and so full of self-pity about his own misdirected vocation that he asked God to take his life from him, “for it is better for me to die than to live,” he said. And in reply God simply asked, ‘Is it right for you to be angry with me?’

When Jesus’ religious critics asked him to prove himself by giving them a sign, he told them that the only sign they needed to heed was ‘The Sign of Jonah’. [2] It is the only sign which we need to heed. It asks us to acknowledge that God will always keep moving beyond the rules we have set for Him, he will always transcend our expectations, always challenge our traditions. The Sign of Jonah  asks us to pay heed to this question above all: when God does this, how will we respond?

Christians not wanting to be Jonahs, have engaged in this struggle through the centuries. In the face of the growth of Nazism many Christians began to acknowledge painfully that their reading of scripture and their cultural traditions had cultivated an antisemitism which had deadly consequences for the Jewish people; and sensing that God was asking them to move in a new direction, they had to face the question of whether to turn and resist, at the probable cost of their livelihoods and even their lives, or whether to continue to be carried on the tide of conventional opinion. In an earlier time and for some centuries, church leaders, Christian politicians and business people had been convinced that scripture and tradition justified slavery – that, in one minister’s words, slavery ‘stood as an institution of God.’ [3] And when the tide of the Spirit began to shift towards abolition, these believers had to face the question of whether to move with it, or to sustain their present position and resist change.

This may be a difficult insight for some of us, but if we are to be truly ‘biblical’ then we must accept that there will be times when God wants to move us beyond what we think scripture has been telling us all these years, to open our eyes to new insights in His Word. It may be hard for us to take, but the Sign of Jonah demonstrates that our traditions are not set in stone, but movable objects which we may or may not move along with, as God reshapes them by his Spirit.

For God does not play by our rules – God does not follow our moral logic – and ‘Jesus tells us his  parables not to give us moral guidance but to reveal the nature of God.’ [4]

If we were to take today’s parable, of the labourers in the vineyard, as a guide to our behaviour in the workplace, then it would be a scandal to people on all points of the economic spectrum. It would be a scandal to trades unionists for the unfair rates of pay between those who had worked all day and those who worked just one hour: heretical behaviour to those convicted that workers’ wellbeing depends on their gaining a fair wage. And it would be scandalous to business capitalists for the money wasted on the extravagant gesture towards the latecomers: heretical behaviour to those convicted that business must thrive by constantly driving wages down. But all that would be to miss the point.

By our parable Jesus is not teaching us that it is morally acceptable to take advantage of workers who bear the heat and burden of a twelve hour shift by paying workers who work only one hour the same wage, and when the all-day workers complain, to insist on the letter of the contract rather than acting in its spirit. 

Rather, Jesus uses this parable to describe the radical graciousness of God’s grace, the outrageousness of the divine love, a love that surpasses human understanding at every level, logical, aesthetic and moral. By this parable Jesus communicates the outrageousness of our Father’s love for us. He reveals the nature of God rather than endorses our human sense of justice. This is the lesson Jesus gives us in this parable, asking us to hear it, understand it, believe it and act on it. [5]

This is a Sign of Jonah moment, for it causes us to view God once again moving beyond our ethical expectations of him into totally new territory, it challenges us in our traditions and ‘biblical’ understanding to acknowledge that ‘God’s morality is not the same as ours, or more precisely, that we understand the divine morality only very imperfectly.’ [6] 

The parable reminds us that our morality is based on a strict law of exchange, a system of quid pro quo, of equal actions and reactions, deeply attached to the idea of equality or fairness. The parable  invites us to acknowledge the destructive features of this morality, where we resent those who rise above or go ahead of the rest of the group, and do all we can to ensure that the nail that sticks up is pounded down. Jesus corrects this view of God’s morality. He teaches that God does not deal with us by the morality of exchange, but rather by the generosity of grace. If God were to deal with us according to human justice we would long ago have perished.

‘Are you envious because I am generous?’, God asks you. Does the good fortune of the other make you unhappy, are you resentful of the beautiful, and the strong and the successful, and in particular, do you resent the fortunate ones, those who are most blessed and graced by God? 

‘Are you envious because I am generous?’, God wants to know. Does the the happiness of these others make you deeply unhappy? Does it matter so much to you that you should have a relative advantage over others, that you should be better off than they? Can you not appreciate that in God’s economy there is absolute gain for all, because you only really want the relative gain of some, that is, yourselves? Do you only feel that you are  succeeding in life when your friend begins to fail? [7]

Are you a Jonah moaning under a tree when others do perhaps unduly well? Especially those you thought you ought to disapprove of because you think the bible or your tradition tells you so?

You know, church people are usually very proper and just, fair-minded and orderly, so God help the wretch who finds outrageous grace. Our very moral rectitude can make us cruel. It is one thing to be ‘scriptural’ in following the commandments of Moses and the ethical teachings of Paul, but let us understand the fact, patent on every page of the gospels, that Jesus was an outrageous character who took church people – who he called Pharisees – seriously only as examples of who God was not, how not to act, and of those who would not enter God’s kingdom. Clearly for Jesus God deals with us outrageously. [8]

I recall another minister, steeped in the scriptures, a great preacher and expositor of The Word. He began his ministry by applying his convictions in the area of baptism. He refused to baptise children, and also adults who were unable to make a profession of faith. As he saw it, this would be against the teachings of scripture; he insisted that the only way for people to value those teachings was this hard way of exclusion which he applied to them. And then one day he was asked to take his turn on the deanery hospital chaplaincy rota, on-call to a major hospital 24 hours each week. And the very first situation which God presented him with was an emergency baptism, the baptism of a premature baby born with only hours to live. It was his Sign of Jonah moment. You can guess the effect that it had on his own church baptism policy from that day on.

I once spent weeks preparing to make a keynote speech at a Christian anti-poverty rally. I went about my preparation by researching my subject assiduously, by studying and studying to draw on related themes in the scriptures, by writing and rewriting the talk until the words were just the right length, and just the right balance of fact and eloquence. I felt this would have a great impact on the audience, which was to include many opinion-formers and gatekeepers in the community: politicians, business leaders, civil servants and so on. My speech was well-received; but another one stole the limelight. It was given by a young mother who briefly shared her struggle to make ends meet on invalidity benefits. It was the first time she had ever stood ona stage to address an audience. She was barely audible, shook with nerves, lost her way a couple of times. But the room was deeply moved by her honesty in sharing, and the policy discussions which followed afterwards had her and her situation at their heart. My precious talk forgotten, I felt vexed at first, then jealous, and then rather foolish, at my anger and enviousness in how that event had played out. 

In the weeks following, it was good to see that young woman go on to advise local councillors and government ministers, and to play a part in making some positive – if relatively short-lived – changes to welfare policy at the time. It was outrageous that God should use a contribution so modest and imperfect to make such a difference; especially compared to my tremendous effort which was instantly forgotten. But that’s how God deals with us – outrageously; and we should ‘be doubly careful to include a little outrageousness in our lives’. [9]

So, as God keeps on loving the world in ways we find hard to imagine, Jesus teaches that love does not live in the world of quid pro quo, love is not a contract; it is a wonder and a miracle. He teaches that the only sign we need to guide us is the Sign of Jonah. So come on, dearly beloved, let us never stop asking ourselves: why be envious because he is generous? 

 

 

Notes

[1] Fr Ian is a composite of two or three Anglican priests in the Catholic tradition who have lived the struggle and demonstrated the character I discuss here, although I pay particular respect to the late Fr Ian Brooks, 36 years priest of St Paul’s, Croxteth.

[2] Matthew 12.38-41.

[3] Why Did So Many Christians Support Slavery? Key reasons advanced by southern church leaders, Christian History Issue 33, 1992.

[4] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace, preached on 18 September, 2005. I’m grateful to Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary Reflections Year A, Proper 20A for the link to the late Robert Hamerton-Kelly’s words.

[5] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace.

[6] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace.

[7] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace, altered.

[8] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace, altered.

[9] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace.

Rami Elhanan's 14-year-old daughter was killed by suicide bombers in a Jerusalem street at Yom Kippur 1983. It took him a long, long time of working through his anger to reach a point where he was able to agree to attend a meeting of The Parents Circle Families Forum, where Israeli and Palestinian bereaved parents meet together in search of understanding and reconciliation.

“I am not religious – quite the opposite, and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on in 1998, I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day on I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to go from ear to ear and from person to person and to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! It is not a decree of fate that cannot be changed!!! Nowhere is it written that we must continue dying and sacrificing our children forever and forever in this difficult horrible holy land. We can – and once and for all must – stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment. This never-ending cycle, with no purpose. With no winners and only with losers.”

– from my talk today, approaching Yom Kippur and the Balfour Declaration centenary: Even now in Palestine, imagine a debt-free world.

Romans 14.1-12, Matthew 18.21-35

The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 17 September 2017

West Camel, Queen Camel, Weston Bampfylde

 

Imagine a world where there is no debt. Imagine a world of absolute forgiveness.

You don’t need to imagine it. It already exists.

Let me tell you the story of Rami Elhanan. He is sixty-seven years old, a professional man, the seventh generation of a Jerusalem family. He is a Jew, an Israeli, “and before everything else”, he says of himself, “I am a human being”. [1]

When Rami Elhanan tells his personal story he begins and also ends it on one particular day of the Jewish calendar – Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, observed by even the most secular Jews: 25 hours of fasting, prayer, and synagogue services focussed on atonement and repentance. This year Yom Kippur begins on the evening of September 29th, next week, so it seems timely to be telling Rami’s story today. [2]

On Yom Kippur in October 1973, Rami was a young reserve soldier finding himself all of a sudden in the midst of a terrible war. He set out in a company with 11 tanks which returned with only 3 tanks. “There, in the Sinai sands, I lost some of my very best friends,” he says.

“I came out of this war a beaten and battered young man – an angry and embittered, cynical and furious young man. I was determined to cut myself off from any sort of involvement – political, social, or anything else. I was released from the army and built me a life: studies, family, career.”

A decade later, on Yom Kippur evening 1983, a sweet new baby girl was born in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to Rami and his wife Nurit. They named their daughter Smadar, from the Bible, the Song of Solomon, meaning ‘The Grape of the Vine’. He said of her, “She was a very vivid, smiling, happy, full of life and active young girl who joined our calm, happy family, and so we lived complacently, my wife Nurit, my three sons and this princess, in a bubble that we built around ourselves.”

That was until, on the 4th September 1997, this bubble of theirs was smashed to smithereens.

On the first day of the school year, a few days before Yom Kippur, Smadar and her friends went to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem to buy books for the new school year. There, they met their death, killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers who murdered five people that day, among them three little girls aged 14. Rami remembers it vividly: “It was a Thursday at three in the afternoon – and the beginning of a long night, cold and dark,” he said, and this is how he describes what followed:

“At first in the depths of your heart you hope that the terrible finger won’t point at you this time. You find yourself running crazily through the streets, going from one police station to the next, one hospital to the next, until eventually, much later in that long accursed night, you find yourself in the morgue and this terrible finger is right between your eyes and you see a sight that you will never, ever, be able to blot out.”

On the following Sunday the funeral was held in Kibbutz Nachshon, on the green hill on the way to Jerusalem. Smadar was buried next to her late grandfather ‘Matti’ Peled, a well-known Israeli public figure who was, at various periods of his life, a Major General in the Israel Defense Forces, head of Arabic Language and Literature at Tel Aviv University, a respected member of the Knesset and a radical peace activist, a leading proponent of Israeli dialogue with the PLO and of complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in whose conquest he had personally played a major role. [3]

“The fact that the enemies of peace murdered his granddaughter drew huge attention in Israel and abroad,” says Rami Elhanan. “And as at his funeral, so at hers the mourners represented all the nuances that make up the wonderful mosaic of this unbelievable country – Jews and Arabs, left-wingers and right-wingers, religious and secular people, from the representatives of the settlers in the Occupied Territories to the personal representatives of chairman Yasser Arafat.”

After the funeral, at the end of the seven day traditional mourning period called the Shiva, on the eighth day after everyone disappeared and the family were alone, came the time of challenge for Rami. “Now,” he says, “you must marshal your strength, get up, face yourself in the mirror and decide: what’s next? Where do you go from here? Where do you direct this new and terrible pain, this unknown and intolerable ache? What do you do with the rest of your life when suddenly you have become a completely different person, and all your previous priorities have dissipated in a trance and it’s as though they never existed?

“And really there are only two options to choose from, only one of two paths to tread: the first is the obvious one, the automatic, and the immediate. When someone murders your 14 year old little daughter, the one and only thing you have in your head is unlimited anger and an urge for revenge that is stronger than death. This is a natural feeling, it’s only human. Most people feel that way, it’s understandable, it’s clear and predictable. However, we are human beings and not animals. We have a head on our shoulders and inside that head we have a brain and when the first madness of anger passes, you begin to ask yourself penetrating questions: if I kill someone in revenge, will that bring my baby back to me? And if I cause someone pain, will that ease my own pain? And the answer is absolutely “No”. Then, during a long and slow, difficult and painful process you gradually reach the other road, and you try to understand: what occurred here? What can drive someone to such anger and despair as to be willing to blow himself up together with little girls? And most important: what can you, personally, do to prevent this intolerable suffering from others…”

To reach that point of understanding took Rami almost a year. And then one day he met a man called  Yitzchak Frankenthal. He told Rami about his son Arik, kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 1994, and that he had established an organisation of people who lost children in the conflict but nevertheless want peace. Rami then remembered that this man was one of the thousands who had been to his home during Shiva and Rami was really cross with him. He asked: “How could you?! How dare you enter the home of people who have just lost a child and talk to them about peace?” Frankenthal was not offended, but “with great calm and patience” he invited Rami to attend one of these meetings to see for himself. Rami agreed, partly so as not to insult the man and partly from curiosity.

When he arrived at that first meeting he saw holocaust survivors, bereaved Jewish parents, and also what he calls “an amazing spectacle”, something that was completely new to him. He saw Arabs, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women and children, coming towards him, greeting him for peace, hugging him and crying with him. He says, “I distinctly remember a respectable elderly woman dressed in black from tip to toe and on her breast a locket with a picture of a kid, about six years old…”

“I am not religious – quite the opposite,” Rami says, “and so I am at a loss to explain the change I underwent at that moment. But one thing became as clear to me as the sun at noon: from that day on in 1998, I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Since that day on I have dedicated my life to one thing only: to go from ear to ear and from person to person and to shout in a loud voice, to all who are prepared to listen, and also to those whose ears are blocked: This is not our destiny! It is not a decree of fate that cannot be changed!!! Nowhere is it written that we must continue dying and sacrificing our children forever and forever in this difficult horrible holy land. We can – and once and for all must – stop this crazy vicious circle of violence, murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment. This never-ending cycle, with no purpose. With no winners and only with losers.”

The group he joined is called The Parents Circle Families Forum, a grassroots organisation of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis which promotes reconciliation as an alternative to hatred and revenge. Through that organisation Rami Elhanan, together with his Israeli and Palestinian brothers and sisters, put across this message of peace. They have created a world where these two peoples are  committed to releasing the other from the debts they owe them. They have imagined a world of absolute forgiveness – and are working hard to bring it into being. [4]

Jesus told a story about a man who had been forgiven a great debt, but who then went on to act mercilessly towards someone who owed him a far smaller debt. This is a story about a man who had been shown the door into a world of absolute forgiveness, but having received its benefits, immediately turned his back on it and returned to the old world of unforgiving repayment and retribution. This is a story fit for contemplation at Yom Kippur, a story fit for our consideration today and every day.

Imagine a world where there is no debt. Imagine a world of absolute forgiveness. We don’t need to imagine it. It exists. And the door to it is open to each one of us. It is for us to step inside; it is for us to decide whether to stay there or return to the old world of unforgiveness. And… it is for us to face the consequences of our choices.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” [5] 

Notice how that prayer is phrased. It seems to be saying that The Father will forgive us in the same way and to the same extent as we forgive others. This is why the parable of the unforgiving servant ends as it does, with him being punished just as cruelly as he punished the servant who was indebted to him. How does God judge us? By our own standards. So that if we choose to reject  the way of forgiveness and release from debt then God sadly leaves us there in that world of condemnation and punishment of our own making. But if we step through the doorway – which God always leaves open to us – then that debt-free world of absolute forgiveness can be ours. 

An interesting detail in the story Jesus told, is the size of the debt which the first servant was released from. It was enormous. Ten thousand talents, in the time of Jesus, was the ‘largest debt imaginable’; entire provinces such as Galilee or Perea usually made annual payments to King Herod Antipas of just two thousand talents; so forgiving ten thousand talents is at the level of releasing an entire nation from financial obligation. [6] This suggests that the characters in Jesus’ story were at the level of senior politicians or top civil servants, and invites us to read the story not just as a moral tale about how individuals should act towards others – but as a parable addressing the behaviour of nations towards other nations. It reminds us that nations also have the choice whether or not to release other nations from their indebtedness to them.

In 1917 the British government, through the Balfour Declaration, approved the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people without prejudicing the rights and freedoms of the resident Palestinians. [7] The hard truth of history to date is that only half that bargain has been kept. This year’s centenary is a necessary time to review that declaration, it is time to ask just how can the world community help Palestinians and Israelis now build a peaceful future based on equal rights for all; and the parable of the unforgiving servant may just help us in that task. 

The Reform rabbi Jonathan Romain recently wrote, “To be a good Jew you do not have to believe in God, just do what God says.” [8]

This is sound wisdom for people of all faiths; it reminds us that when Peter asked jesus, “How many times should I forgive one who has sinned against me?” Jesus told him, “Not seven times, but  seventy times seven.” In other words, forgive without limit, forgive every time, make it your practice to always set free those who are in debt to you.

 

 

Notes

[1] The story of Rami Elhanan which follows is an edited version of Rami Elhanan, Replacing Pain with Hope, The Parents Circle Families Forum – Personal Stories, 1/1/2006. Rami Elhanan is, at the time of this sermon (Yom Kippur 2017), Israeli General Manager in the Israeli Office of The Parents Circle Families Forum.

[2] Wikipedia: Yom Kippur.

[3] Wikipedia: Mattityahu Peled.

[4] The Parents Circle Families Forum. 

[5] Matthew 6.12.

[6] See my 2014 sermon on this passage, The Parable of the King Who Failed to Keep Forgiving, or ‘What if the Messiah Came and Nothing Changed?’ and William R. Herzog, Parables As Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed, p.147.

[7] Wikipedia: Balfour Declaration. See also The Balfour Project: Contributing to justice, peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.

[8] Quoted in William Whyte, Power of a good story, a review of Jonathan Romain’s Confessions of a Rabbi, Church Times, 8 September 2017.

Luke 5.1-11

Queen Camel, Bruton and Cary Deanery Clergy Chapter Communion, Thursday 7 September 2017

 

I wonder if you’ve ever considered that if Peter and his colleagues had not been fishermen, but doctors, then Jesus would have called them to be healers of men; that if Peter and his colleagues had been bakers, then Jesus would have told them their calling now was to bring people the bread of life; or if Peter and his cohorts had been plumbers, Jesus would have said that from now on they would serve people by supplying them with living waters.

For the metaphor which Jesus used to describe the disciples’ new vocation related directly and deeply to their existing vocation. 

And this must have surely come about through Jesus observing the fishermen at work, contemplating the ways they went about their days, training his eyes to see the nuances in the skilled tasks they performed, appreciating their teamwork – and then, as their teacher, affirming their everyday skills and encouraging them of their value, in the work he was now inviting them to share: the gentle, generous task of furthering the kingdom of God.

What does it take to be a fisherman? Intelligence in understanding the ways of fish and their whereabouts. A strong stomach and the ability to keep going in all weathers. Patience above all, I imagine. The willingness to be alone, adrift, a long long time, living in hope of a catch. 

“All goes back to the earth”, writes Wendell Berry, 

“and so I do not desire

pride of excess or power,

but the contentments made

by men who have had little:

the fisherman’s silence

receiving the river’s grace” [1] 

And so in contemplating the qualities of the fisherman, Jesus discerned there also the latent qualities of the disciple, the apostle.

And so the phrase “fishing for men” is how Jesus encourages his friends the fishermen to the exercise of a soft power in their world, utilising the gifts they had been given in the service of the kingdom. 

For Jesus’ phrase “fishing for men” – or women – is not a way of forcing the idea that the chief goal of a Christian life is to “catch” human beings by proselytising. That would be to rather oversimplify how human interaction and exchange really works; somewhat diminishing the humanity of both the one caught and the catcher whilst reducing Christian activity to something like a Ponzi scheme; a sales pitch which can only build a pyramid of hope and disappointment. [2]

Rather Jesus’ fishermen metaphor invites us to consider vocation as something which evolves over time, in which the gifts and character we develop continue to be reshaped and reused by God in the ongoing work of service.

For those of us whose own vocation now involves identifying, affirming and developing the vocations of others, this scripture story invites us to discern signs of the kingdom of God in the lives of those around us, to honour them, and to nurture them to maturity.  This is about empathy and the celebration of God at work in the everyday. This is an encouragement to walk alongside others out in their world, and together “to find out what God is doing and join in”. [3]

Part of my Christian formation was as an apprentice welder, creating in metal and fire; and at that time I was especially impressed that part of Jesus’ own formation was as a craftsman. Some years  later I was drawn to the Iona Community, whose ethos is rooted in a keen affirmation of the deep connection between work and worship; and this prayer of their daily liturgy, with which I close:

O Christ, the Master Carpenter, who at the last, through wood and nails, purchased our whole salvation, wield well your tools in the workshop of your world, so that we who come rough-hewn to your bench may here be fashioned to a truer beauty of your hand. [4]

 

 

Notes

[1] Wendell Berry, The Want of Peace, New Collected Poems.

[2] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Fishers of Men, February 4, 2007.

[3] A phrase widely attributed to Archbishop Rowan Williams.

[4] Iona Community, Iona Abbey Worship Book (2001 edition), p.19, and various other titles of Wild Goose Publications.