January 25 2015 "Ordinary, Epiphany or Repentance"

Jonah 3: 1-5 Mark 1: 14-20 Last week following worship, someone asked Why these Sundays are identified as Ordinary Time? The European Reformation stripped away all identification from what the church had become, trying to Re-form as close to the Early Church of the Apostles as possible. Therefore every worship service was celebration of the Resurrection, and there were no Liturgical seasons. However, in those days no one had iPhones or wristwatches, wall clocks in home or business, to tell the time. Churches tolled the Bells in the Towers to call believers to prayer, these several times each day were called Ordinals. Thus, every day was Holy, every day a celebration of the Resurrection and every day was Ordinary. In America, following WWII, we began a Liturgical Renewal, in conversation with the Catholic Church, we identified two cycles following six seasons of Liturgy throughout the year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost. Yet in recent years, scholars have identified that in the early Church, Epiphany and Pentecost were never seasons, but single day Festival Celebrations, so we have The Day of Epiphany following the 12th Night of Christmas, and The Day of Pentecost 50 Days after Easter, and the days following each are Ordinary Days. Recently, I moderated another church's Session, and at the end of the meeting the Clerk offered the prayer: “Lord, we have been around for 214 years, let us be around another.” This morning we celebrate having been the church in this place and time for 214 years, but the focus of the church is and has been upon what is our mission, where are the challenges. Not only in the Church, but in every person's life there are Epiphanies, moments out of time, where we realize God's presence in our lives, challenging, blessing, conferring new identities and relationships. You have known a person, when suddenly you realize you do not want to live your life without them. You plan for the wedding, inviting witnesses, when suddenly you kiss and are pronounced as married. I recall imagining it would be okay if now we were to have a baby, and suddenly we were pregnant, but while the months went by and we adapted to all the changes, we were not Mother and Father until that moment of birth, when suddenly nothing was ever the same. I recall smiling for four days straight. In his coming of age novel “Uh-Oh” Robert Fulghum describes a young man in the 1950s who found a job at a Dude Ranch in Northern California. During the day, he shoveled stalls and groomed horses, at night he was employed to watch the Front desk, for which he was paid $1 per hour, and all the food he could eat. However, at the end of his third week, he realized that every day Lunch and Dinner were Hot Dogs and Sauerkraut, and the cost of these meals was deducted from his pay. He was outraged, coming back from dinner he complained for 90 minutes straight. Finally the Night Watchman stopped him, saying “The problem is not the Owner, or the Ranch, or the Cook, the problem is you do not know a problem from an inconvenience. When your house burns down that is a problem. When you have a disease without a cure, that is a problem. Everything else in life is an inconvenience, life is full of inconveniences. The Night Watchman had been a survivor of three years at Auschwitz, where he prayed for just one meal like this, or Hot dogs and Sauerkraut, and now they had it twice a day. For me, while there were relationships and roles in the Church which always felt right, the Call to Ministry has come over and over again, every wedding, baptism, communion, confirmation and memorial have felt holy, as if a moment out of time. The Wedding where the Flowergirl was so inconsolable I took her in my arms for the remainder of the wedding. The Wedding where the relieved Bride saw my hand raised for the Blessing, and High-Fived. The Baptism, where we gave the baby to a Soldier going off to war. My Anniversary here, where after my carrying every infant, on that morning we gave every child to others in the Church, and not a single child cried. The weekend where we had planned a Wedding and a Baptism and both were cancelled because they were not going ahead As a Presbyterian there have been Meetings, where in the midst of debate and prayer, understandings changed, commitments and convictions became tangible. I remember one day, shortly after our first child was born, that it was my day off and my spouse was out, when a call came asking if I would come right over. There, in the home of this couple, they confessed that over night in postpartum depression their only daughter had taken her infant to her husband's golf course and drown the child. Having my own child in our arms as they discussed this, transformed the moment from simply loss and shame at what had happened in their family, to realizing the grandchild they would never again hold, and the daughter's pain at taking the life of her own child in this way. The point this morning is that often we take every day as being Ordinary, and witness these moments out of time as being holy, as being Epiphanies, and we return to living ordinary lives, rather than stopping to change direction, or even to laugh at ourselves. Routinely, when we come to worship, we put on our Sunday best, and we sit quietly in the pew, as Prayers and Scriptures are read over us, Anthems and Hymns are sung by others and we try to slip out as quietly as we entered. Every article on the Internet, every filmclip on U-Tube, every book in the library is different. Some are Cat Videos, some are not fit for public consumption, some are classics, some are jokes. The Book of Jonah is one of the World's Greatest Jokes. The book of Jonah begins “Now the Word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amattai.” In Hebrew, every name has meaning, and Amattai means “My Truth, My Security, Consistency.” The name Jonah is Noah written upside down. The point of the Joke, that would have been immediately apparent to anyone knowing the meaning of names, was that instead of the Prophet Jonah being equated with God, he is linked to His own Version of the Truth, his Consistency, which is what will be called into question. And when the water comes, instead of the man of God being spared and everyone drowning, he alone gets wet. The Word of the Lord comes to Jonah, Son of his own Truth, saying Get up and go up to Ninevah, which is the Capital City of the enemy Assyria, modern day Mosul in Iraq, located to the East. Jonah is offended that not only is this Israel's Enemy, this is an Unclean people. In order to understand the Joke, we have to pay attention to direction. Because instead of Going UP to the great city of Ninevah to the East, Jonah goes down from to the Shore at Joppa buying a ticket to go West to Tarshish. Going down to the Docks, he goes on-board and goes down into the hold of the Ship, where he lays down and goes deep into sleep. Jonah is a story of Escapism, a story of Depression, where he is constantly going deeper down, instead of going up, always trying to go in the opposite direction instead of going east to confront his enemy. When a great storm comes up, it is caused because God hurled a great wind over the waters. In Genesis, God's Creation out of Chaos began with the Spirit of God/The Wind brooding over the face of the waters of chaos. While self-serving, Jonah is Consistent and Truthful, so when asked the reason for the storm, he admits this is his problem. The Sailors throw him down into the sea, where he is swallowed by a ship and carried to the lowest place in all Creation. But there is the belly of the fish, Jonah has an Epiphany, where he prays to God asking to be saved. And yet, the problem of the whole story is: Was this only an Epiphany in the depths of his Ordinary Life of Consistency based on His Truth, or will Jonah take this as Opportunity to Repent, to Turn Around to God. Jonah goes ashore, and while among an unclean people, he is dripping of fish-puke, his hair bleached white from the stomach acids of the fish. He is in a foreign land where they only spoke Farsi, he preaches in Hebrew, and the whole of his sermon is 5 Words: “40 Days And Ninevah Destroyed.” This is not exactly the Word of the Lord, Not Repent in 40 Days or else, but 40 Days & Ninevah Destroyed. After which, Jonah sits down and begins counting down, 40 days, 39 days, 38. However, the power of God, everyone in this foreign place repents, even the animals are depicted putting on sackcloth clothes, from the King to the lowest peasant repents. And God forgives. The power of Repentance and Forgiveness, in Mark's Gospel is about three things. First, knowing John the Baptist was arrested for having Preached Repentance, Jesus comes preaching Repentance. Life is not about the consequences, whether we succeed or fail, or are proven right, only about whether our lives effected other people so they could see God. Second, throughout Mark's Gospel, everything happens “Immediately.” People do not stop to evaluate, Simon and Andrew do not call a meeting. James and John do not even talk with their father, but immediately leave what they had been doing, how they had been living, to Follow Jesus. Finally, that God does not Call us to Repent to do something unrelated to our lives, going from being a plumber to doing brain surgery. But Fishermen to become Fishers of Men and Women. To have earned a degree in the tensile strength of concrete 60 years ago, and volunteering to go to S. Sudan. From having managed projects for the Oil Companies, to managing creation of health care in Africa. From having been a teacher, to teaching Sunday School. From having taught Nutrition and Home Economics, to teaching people in our own community about using food instead of feeding our garbage disposals.