January
25, 2009 Des Moines
Mark 1:14-20
Changing Course
A
handful of years ago a valuable painting was discovered in the Queen’s royal
storeroom. The painting, by the Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), had
been in the royal collection for 400 years and had been believed to be a
copy. Covered under a thick layer of
dust and withdrawn from its storage place at Hampton Court Palace, west of
London, the painting underwent six years of cleaning and restoration and study,
and was ultimately determined to be the long-thought lost original. The painting, depicting the very scene
recounted in this morning’s passage and titled “the Calling of Saints Peter and
Andrew,” was originally bought by King
Charles I in the 17th century, and is worth in excess of 50 million
pounds – or $96 million. It had been
right there at hand; close, but like the Suffering Servant described by Isaiah,
had through all those years been despised, rejected, and neglected.
And it doesn’t only happen with objects. There is a memorable scene in the book of
Genesis when Jacob, recently blessed through trickery by his father Isaac, is
traveling to the home of his Uncle Laban in search of a wife, when he stops
along the way for the night. During the
night he has that marvelous dream of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven,
and angels going up and coming down.
Waking the next morning, Jacob marveled, “Surely the Lord
is in this place—and I did not know it!
This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of
heaven.”
Close, in other words, but neglected
and discounted.
And it is that poignant proposition,
in narrative form, that gets my attention in this morning’s story from the
Gospel of Mark. The stirring truth, as
the lost painting and the calling of Peter and Andrew it depicts make plain, is
that nearness is not all there is.
Proximity is not finally enough.
No matter how close one gets to food, until you eat it, it will not
nourish. No matter how close to one
another we may individually stand, until we introduce ourselves and share the
essence of our stories, we will not become friends. God can get in our face, can crowd us from
behind, but until we change our course, the Kingdom of God will be close, but
not ours.
That, I want to suggest, is what it
means to “repent.” We typically
associate that word with feeling sorry for something we’ve done. Repentance, in other words, as essentially
asking for forgiveness and promising to “never do it again.” But the Greek word behind this passage is “metanoia,” which more literally means
turning around and going a different way; it is making a fundamental change in
course.
That is precisely what Mark depicts
in this call of Peter and Andrew. There
is no hint that they had done something grievously wrong. They weren’t saying they were sorry for
something they had done. In dropping
their nets, leaving their family and also the family business they were making
a decisive change in course. Don’t let
Jesus’ clever play on words distract you.
They weren’t merely baiting a different hook or dropping their net in a
different pond. They were choosing an
entirely different path.
Now, if Peter and Andrew’s change of
course sounds shocking and a little hard to imagine for yourself, let me join
you in that dismay. While Mark’s telling
of this story may well be intended to highlight the later teaching of Jesus
that discipleship requires your all, superseding all previous affections and
relations, and while the Christian story is certainly populated with the anecdotes
of many for whom faithfulness resulted in just this stark of a choice, we can
take some comfort in the awareness that such harsh breakages are more the
exception than the rule – more the extreme than the norm. Not every Christian abandons her family; not
every disciple quits his job.
But that should not inure us to the
dramatic changes nonetheless real and required.
People of faith need to keep in mind that the ways of the Kingdom of God
frankly bear little resemblance to the ways of the world. The Kingdom of God is animated by very
different values; aimed by very different priorities; and characterized by very
different practices. And repentance –
for us no less that for Peter and Andrew – will mean changing the course we,
even now, are typically on.
You may have come across the story
this past November of a very unusual football game that was played in
Grapevine, Texas – a suburb of Dallas.
The game pitted the home team Faith Christian School Lions of Grapevine
against the visiting Gainesville State School Tornadoes. What made the game unusual was the home team
crowd rooting for their opponents – beginning from the moment that Gainesville
came out to take the field, when 300 Faith fans made a 40-yard spirit line for
them to run through. You followed that
correctly: it was a spirit line made up
of the other team's fans. They even made a banner for players to crash
through at the end that said, "Go Tornadoes!"
As one sports writer described it, “It
was rivers running uphill and cats petting dogs.” But let me just read the article and let the
reporter tell the story:
“More
than 200 Faith fans sat on the Gainesville side and kept cheering the
Gainesville players on—by name.
‘I never in my life thought I'd hear
people cheering for us to hit their kids,’ recalls Gainesville's QB and middle
linebacker, Isaiah. ‘I wouldn't expect another parent to tell somebody to hit
their kids. But they wanted us to!’
And even though Faith walloped them
33-14, the Gainesville kids were so happy that after the game they gave head
coach Mark Williams a sideline squirt-bottle shower like he'd just won state.
Gotta be the first Gatorade bath in history for an 0-9 coach.
But then you saw the 12 uniformed
officers escorting the 14 Gainesville players off the field and two and two
started to make four. They lined the players up in groups of five—handcuffs
ready in their back pockets—and marched them to the team bus. That's because
Gainesville is a maximum-security correctional facility 75 miles north of
Dallas. Every game it plays is on the road.
This all started when Faith's head
coach, Kris Hogan, wanted to do something kind for the Gainesville team. Faith
had never played Gainesville, but he already knew the score. After all, Faith
was 7-2 going into the game, Gainesville 0-8 with 2 TDs all year. Faith has 70
kids, 11 coaches, the latest equipment and involved parents. Gainesville has a
lot of kids with convictions for drugs, assault and robbery—many of whose
families had disowned them—wearing seven-year-old shoulder pads and ancient
helmets.
So Hogan had this idea. What if half
of our fans—for one night only—cheered for the other team? He sent out an email
asking the Faithful to do just that. ‘Here's the message I want you to send:’
Hogan wrote. ‘You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth.’
Some people were naturally confused.
One Faith player walked into Hogan's office and asked, ‘Coach, why are we doing
this?’
And Hogan said, ‘Imagine if you
didn't have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you.
Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in
you.’
Next thing you know, the Gainesville
Tornadoes were turning around on their bench to see something they never had
before. Hundreds of fans. And actual cheerleaders!
It was a strange experience for boys
who most people cross the street to avoid. ‘We can tell people are a little
afraid of us when we come to the games,’ says Gerald, a lineman who will wind up
doing more than three years. ‘You can see it in their eyes. They're lookin' at
us like we're criminals. But these people, they were yellin' for us! By our
names!’
After the game, both teams gathered
in the middle of the field to pray and that's when Isaiah surprised everybody
by asking to lead. ‘We had no idea what the kid was going to say,’ remembers
Coach Hogan. But Isaiah said this: ‘Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I
don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many
people in the world that cared about us.’
As the Tornadoes walked back to
their bus under guard, they each were handed a bag for the ride home—a burger,
some fries, a soda, some candy, a Bible and an encouraging letter from a Faith
player.
The Gainesville coach saw Hogan,
grabbed him hard by the shoulders and said, ‘You'll never know what your people
did for these kids tonight. You'll never, ever know.’” [1]
Now that is setting a different course – one animated by those different values; aimed by those different priorities; characterized by those very different practices. That is going a new direction. For Andrew and Peter it meant dropping their nets and taking up a new way of life. For one set of football fans, it meant cheering for the other team. Who knows what it will mean for you and me – except this: that to the rest of the world it will look bizarre and utterly new. But then
Epiphany
is the season in which we proclaim not only that God’s kingdom is near, but
that it is also fulfilled.
In
the different course we choose to follow, may it be so in us.