The Rev. Carl M. Saxton, II

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Mark 1.14-20

In today’s gospel reading we hear the very first words spoken by Jesus in the gospel accounts.  Scholars believe that Mark’s gospel was the first to be written down, the very first record of the life and ministry of Jesus that would be passed down to us, His followers who have never seen and yet believe.  So, in a strange and mysterious way this morning we hear the first words to pass the lips of our Lord and Savior: Follow me; and two thousand years later we are still answering that call.

But, long before us, Simon and his brother Andrew are the first pair of disciples to be called. Jesus sees them doing their job: throwing their nets, fishing.  Mark doesn't tell us any of the details--what Jesus and the brothers saw in each other, why Jesus picked them, what kind of conversation they might have had, what questions they might have asked, how these fishermen felt. Mark skips right to the heart of the story. Jesus says, "Follow me," and without a word they get up and they go.

James and John are next. A little farther down the beach these brothers are sitting in a boat with their father mending their nets. Again, Mark gives us the story in fast forward--Mark doesn't show us anything but the important points. Jesus comes to them, he sees them, he calls them, they go.

It can be difficult to have an emotional connection to these stories as Mark tells them. He doesn't give us any sense of the visceral inner struggle that's involved in making these kinds of  life changing decisions - in discerning a life's purpose. Mark completely leaves out the process of deciding, discerning, choosing--all the stuff that would be really helpful to us some two millennia later.

Perhaps Mark leaves out the process because, in the end, the process isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus finds us, calls us, and the call is to go with him. This is about entering into a relationship with the person of Jesus Christ. It's not about committing to a doctrinal statement or a program, it's about coming face to face with Christ. Jesus didn’t say, "Come, be a Christian" or "Come, embrace this philosophy" or "Come, do this ministry." He said, "Come with me, belong to me, follow me."

When most of us think about the issue of "our calling"--we automatically think of something we're supposed to do or some career God may be asking us to embrace. Some of us can get really worked up about this, right?  We might even get a little frustrated that we don't have a better sense of what we're supposed to be doing. "God, why don't you show me what you want me to do? What's my calling? How can I find it?  If you’d just talk to me!!"

But here's the thing: The Scriptures are amazingly silent and calm about these things. For followers of Jesus, the most important calling comes first. Give yourself to the person of Jesus Christ. Know him, follow him, love him, listen for him; in doing that we will find that life opens up and we have freedom to do what we do best, to do what we love best, but we have to remember that that's not the main thing! Our first calling is to belong to God in Christ.

Isn’t that good news? If our essential calling is to belong to Jesus, then we are given enormous freedom to change the nonessentials along the way--to grow and to become! Jesus has no investment in putting anybody in any kind of vocational straight jacket. Who doesn't assume that the details of our lives are going to change over the next 10, 20, 40 years? We can’t begin to predict how our lives are going to unfold.

I recently read a story about a man in his late 60's. He studied at a prestigious university in the East some years ago, and then he moved to Texas to work on his doctorate. But somewhere along the way he became addicted to cocaine. He lost his family, lost his place in graduate school, lost big pieces of himself. Somehow he ended up wandering into a good church. When he did, he was so fragile--he looked like he'd been "rode hard and put up wet"--as they say in Texas, but the people in that church welcomed him into their community and slowly he started to heal. Eventually, maybe even miraculously, he was even reunited with his wife and children.

Talking with some of those wonderful people who welcomed him into their lives he said, "I want to believe that my best days aren't behind me, and that my life can still count, can still make a difference." He sat there with his head in his hands. "I just can't help but feel like I've blown all of my best chances," he said. That's when his wife reached over and took his hand and said, "Baby, you've got to take your sticky fingers off that steering wheel. If God could yank Jesus out of a grave, I figure he can make something beautiful out of busted parts."

Remembering our first calling - to belong to Jesus, to follow Him - gives us freedom to change, to grow, and even to mess it all up and find our way back again.

That our essential calling is to be in relationship with Christ is good news for another reason: In those long seasons when our calling doesn't change; and in fact sometimes seems unbearably demanding or dull, remembering our first call, to belong to Christ, will help us become better servants to His people. Ministry is hard. Sometimes it's hard being a Christian because even though you’re trying hard to follow Jesus people can make you nuts!  You can feel like Moses in the desert when he said

Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? ...If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once. [Numbers 11. 11-12, 15]

On those days you might want to crawl into a deep, dark hole and hide from the world, but God won’t let you hide away for long.  Whenever those times come, think of the story of Jesus recorded just a couple of chapters after this one.  After traveling all over Galilee, healing people and preaching the good news, Jesus returns home the Bible tells us.  But such a great crowd came together outside the doors of the house that Jesus and His disciples couldn’t even eat.  Weary, hungry, they sit down to eat but the lost and the forgotten of God’s children cry out to them.  Instead of sending a disciple to the door to tell the people to come back tomorrow, Jesus gets up and goes out to them.  Belonging to Jesus means that His light is there to shine into our darkness, and He’s there to hold us up when we think we’re too tired and hungry to move forward.

There is, however, one constant in the stories from Mark today and it's this: everyone who answers the call of Christ leaves something behind.  Andrew and Simon leave their nets; James and John leave their father. Following Jesus means being willing to change both what's in our hands and what's in our hearts, to leave more and more of the past behind to move forward in the light of Christ.

So I wonder, if Christ is calling you and me today--and He is, because His calling comes new with every day--what may we need to leave behind to be able to get up and go? To follow Jesus means to be changed, to grow, to leave some things behind. When Jesus says, Follow me, and we say, yes Lord, we can’t predict where that's going to lead us. It's all right not to be sure of what it all means and how it'll all turn out. All that matters is that Jesus sees you as you are, loves you and calls you to follow Him.

04 January 2015

The Rev. Carl Saxton

Epiphany 2015

Ephesians 3.1-12; Matthew 2.1-12 

If there is any image that captures this time of year perfectly, it’s the sad sight of a Christmas tree dumped on the curb. You see them everywhere.  Just driving around town you can see them in just about every neighborhood: piles of them, some with limp strands of tinsel still clinging to a few needles.  And these days as you go along, you see people pulling down wreaths from the front door, or throwing poinsettias in the dumpster or unplugging lights wrapped around hedges or strung around door frames.

The traffic on I-10, 95 and 295 let you know that the holiday visitors are headed home, clogging up the roadways in their race back to their “regular lives.”

There’s no mistaking it.  Christmas is coming to a close.

It’s tempting to wrap up our Christmas mindset with the decorations – to put away the good feelings of the season along with the “elf on a shelf” or the holiday ornaments.

Just when we thought it was over, along comes Epiphany.  Just when we thought it was time to get on with our lives…along come the Magi, strangers from the East, with the question that hangs over this last Christmas moment:

“Where is the newborn king of the Jews?”

If our answer is “Wrapped in tissue paper in a box, stuffed back up in the attic until next year”…well, wrong answer.

Where is the newborn king of the Jews?

Where have we put Jesus Christ since Christmas?

In the mind of the western world, the Christmas season is a time for sentiment, and family, and sudden bursts of generosity. We feel the urge to slip on an apron and bake – or maybe even give gifts to strangers, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or send an extra check to a favorite charity. We give gifts to the postman and wish “Merry Christmas” to strangers; we offer warm greetings to people we might normally go out of our way to avoid.  We cry at the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life” and feel a lump in our throat when Ebenezer Scrooge embraces Tiny Tim in “A Christmas Carol,” and remember for a little while what this season is all about.

So often, though, when the decorations come down, so does our good will.  Christmas is over.  The holiday is done.  Vacation is finished.  It’s back to the daily grind.

Maybe this is why the Magi appear on the scene here and now.

We need to be asked, now more than ever: where is the newborn king of the Jews?

Where is Jesus Christ in our world?  In our hearts?  In our lives?

Have we forgotten the deeper meaning of this season?  Have we lost track of Jesus?

The magi, the gospel tells us, had to search for Him, they had to seek Him.  The newborn king wasn’t where they expected Him to be.  They didn’t find Him in the palace, with the puppet king Herod.  They had to go outside the city, and travel further, to an out-of-the-way place, guided by the light of a star.   And there they found Him, in a humble setting, with only his mother. 

My wife spotted a sign just a few days ago, it might have been the sign in front of a church, it said:  Wise men still seek Jesus.  It got me thinking about those Wise Men of the Gospel story.  These Wise Men were definitely not Jews...they are described in one commentary as “Gentiles in the extreme!”  They were probably astrologers, star-readers, from Persia or Babylonia.  They were not people steeped in the Torah, though they may certainly have had a passing knowledge of the religion and scriptures of their neighbors to the West - and an interest in the possibility of a new ruler for Israel that they read in the rising of that star.  They followed the light of that star, knowing it would lead them to “the newborn king of the Jews” so that they could pay homage to Him.

Seeking Jesus is at the very center of who we are as Christians.  We can often get comfortable, thinking that we’re baptized and confirmed, attend church regularly, and even volunteer now and again; but even those of us who would declare that we are Christians should remember to seek Jesus.  We should seek Jesus, just like those strangers from the East, always striving toward the light, every day.

We might ask, what were they seeking when they followed that star?  What drew them to seek the “newborn king of the Jews?”  I think the answer can be found in the gifts they brought to the Christ child when they paid him homage.  Matthew’s gospel tells us that the three gifts were gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Traditionally these gifts have been seen as symbolic of the roles Jesus took on when he came into the world on Christmas, in that lowly stable.

The first gift was gold, a gift worthy of royalty.  Christian tradition tells us that this gift of gold represented Christ’s Kingship over the world.  These Wise Men were seeking a king, a ruler, and the same instinct lives in us today.  We are all seeking the one thing that gives our lives meaning - something to live for.  In our materialistic world the ruler of our lives has often become the amassing of more wealth, more stuff, maybe more prestige.  All of these are false rulers - they draw us away from one another, away from our families and communities.  Seeking material wealth will never bring peace to the heart, mind, and soul.  I believe no one will ever find themselves lying on their deathbed thinking: I should’ve spent a few more days at work or, I wish I had gotten that 60 inch TV.

Seeking Christ brings peace.  If Jesus is the king of our lives, if He is the thing that gives meaning to our lives, then He will draw us closer to one another.  Remember the second greatest commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love is the only thing that can really bring peace into our lives - love of God and love of every other child of God.

The second gift brought by the Magi was frankincense, which is a hardened resin or sap from a particular plant.  Frankincense has been traded on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa for more than 5000 years. In fact, a mural depicting sacks of frankincense traded from the Land of Punt can be found on the walls of the temple of the ancient Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, who died nearly 1500 years before Christ.  This hardened resin is used a incense, and in particular, it was one of the consecrated incenses used in the Jerusalem Temple and was used as an accompaniment of the meal-offering [Leviticus 2:1, 2:16, 6:15, 24:7]. It was seen as a symbol of the Divine name [Malachi 1:11; Song of Solomon 1:3] and as a representation of prayer [Psalm 141:2].  Christian tradition holds that it was given to the Christ child as a sign of His divinity.  Those Wise Men two thousand years ago were seeking the Divine.

We still seek the Divine, we want to find the source of all things and to know that there is a Creator who loves us and cares about what happens to us.  We believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He came to reunite us with the Creator of the universe when we had fallen away and “become subject to evil and death.”  C.S. Lewis made a very good argument for Christ’s divinity.  He said:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.  [C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity]

We seek the Holy, the Divine...we need God.  Christ Jesus is the answer to that need.

Finally, the Wise Men brought Jesus the gift of myrrh.  This is another plant resin that can be used as incense, but because it was used in the mummification process in ancient Egypt Christian tradition tells us that it was brought to symbolize eventual death, that His crucifixion was inevitable from the moment of His birth.  As hard as it is, at this time of the year when we associate the name of Jesus with the infant first laid in a manger, and then visited and worshipped by the Wise Men of the East, Christ’s death is a very important part of the story of God’s reaching out to us in His Incarnation.  I have often been asked, in the months that I have been here at St. John’s, why I wear a crucifix rather than an empty cross.  Some, like my own mother, say that Jesus is alive, He’s no longer on the cross, and I can agree with that.  I believe, though, that it’s too easy for us to look at an empty cross and forget the suffering, the pain, that He was willing to experience.  I wear the crucifix because it reminds me, and I hope every one of you who sees it hanging here around my neck, that you, in the mind and heart of God, are someone worth dying for.

Where is Jesus in our lives?

This is a time to put away the ornaments and the lights; it’s not a time to put away Christ.

This is a time to remember what His coming meant to our world, to remember that He is the answer to those things we, as human beings, seek – and to hold on to the sense of charity, and generosity, wonder, and joy that are all the hallmarks of the Christmas season. I’m sure we’ve all read or heard the phrase, “Keep Christ in Christmas” over the last few months.  Well, that’s just the beginning.  We need to keep him in every day, in every season - and remember that if we are wise men and women, we still seek Him.