Some of you have probably had the experience I had this week of having something at work come up that completely disrupted and reorganized everything I had planned. I had to make a trip out of town with some other people from work, they set the time and the agenda, it came up on no notice, and I had to drop everything and go. It messed me up but good, and a lot of plans went by the boards. Doctors’ appointments, pleasant lunches, meetings, other trips, things at home, I spent as much time on the phone changing it all as I would have at the actual events themselves. I was mad about it, but it just had to be done. (Well, actually, the truth is, corporations being what they are, it didn’t really have to be done, it all could have been done next week, but you know how it is.)
More seriously, some of you have probably had the experience of there being a sudden illness, maybe out of town, where all of a sudden all your daily obligations just didn’t matter, things you thought tied you down, and that would have normally — well, they just have to get canceled, changed, put off till later. You go somewhere and do what you have to do, spend time in another town, stay with someone until things get worked out, reorganize things. Plans change. The priority takes over.
In an emergency, whatever we decide an emergency is, we do these things. We can all pull ourselves together and do something very unusual, drop everything, and just go. It’s stressful, but it’s actually pretty easy to understand how and why we do these things when there’s an emergency. It’s not quite as easy when this “dropping everything” is held up, as it is today, as a mark of Christian life, Christian discipleship — a model, not just for a few, but for anyone, for us.
It’s no exaggeration. Today’s readings all imply this kind of a dramatic moment. They are all about people responding, and reorganizing their lives from top to bottom, not in response to some professional obligation or an emergency, but to a message from God: Go here, do this, preach the gospel, convert a city, leave your profession and follow me, as only Paul the apostle could put it, live as if there were no time left. It’s not easy to hear these stories, because they raise a lot of questions: What does dropping everything really mean? Not many of us here will feel as if we have lately done anything quite so dramatic, so once and for all, responded so well as the people we hear about today.
How do we handle that? Looking, we don’t see much of ourselves. So we assume these readings aren’t about us. Looking more closely, behind the heroism and the drama, there’s a lot of us here. That makes them harder to ignore.
Take the disciples, in that famous “call” story — I will make you fishers for people. In a moment, they put aside their past lives and set off on an adventure none of them had predicted. We’re intimidated. We think: Who here has ever done that, or could do that? Yet it’s easy for us to forget that these same disciples, after rushing through this gospel of Mark witnessing one incredible discovery after another, will just a few chapters later seem like failures and disappointments, you will all be deserters, Jesus says, and in fact they are. So we can romanticize how well they responded. But they were people who only succeeded part of the time. The importance of their story is that it did not lower their expectations, or keep them from responding, beginning again, repenting and starting over.
Then there’s Jonah, in the first reading, the patron of all those who were not certain how to respond to the thought that God called them. If you look on the front of our altar, of course, you’ll see Jonah with his fish. Today we only hear a little bit of the story of Jonah and it is a misleading part of the story that tells only of his message to Ninevah, the climax of his assignment. You’re really entitled to hear the whole story of Jonah — if you go home and read it in your Bible, you’ll find it’s two pages, you could probably get through it [tomorrow/today] at halftime without difficulty. He was not the prophet who dropped everything and did what he was told. He was the prophet who ran away, ran so far and so fast that he was lost at sea, swallowed up inside a fish, got spit out after three days and still waited, didn’t do it, until the call came again. He was the prophet who was not sure that his mission would succeed and stalled around about trying it out. He was the prophet who had every reason to be ashamed of his failure the first time, of chickening out, of compromising, and yet did it right the second time. (Best of all, even then, he wasn’t happy about it — but you’ll have to read the story.)
What do we really find out today about discipleship? It’s this: Responding once and for all and perfectly and with success isn’t the point. Doing it is the point. Doing it again and again, starting over, not being burdened by our past failures and compromises and laziness is the point. This is not about positive thinking about ourselves — most things we try will in fact seem like failures to us. But that doesn’t change the reality of today. We still have somewhere we’re being called to go that we’re not sure we want to, where we’re not sure we belong, doing something we don’t think will work out. That place for you might be a life that brings you into closer contact with people who are in need of someone to notice their situation, or a life that brings you to a different kind of a career, or that sends you with help or a message to people who have no desire at all to hear anything you have to say. Most people have such a mission, or a place to go, try as we might to pretend we have no idea, and in many cases we delude ourselves into thinking we’re no longer being called there.
If you haven’t tried to get there recently, you can stay inside the big fish, or you can get spit out unwillingly, drop everything, and follow where God is leading. We have the ability to marshal our resources, and get to the thing we’ve been asked to do.