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January 22, 2012, Third Sunday in Epiphany, All Souls' Episcopal Church

The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand.
(In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.)

 The Gospel reading appointed for this service tells us of our Lord Jesus Christ calling his disciples. In calling his disciples his authority is being brought to light; that is what is being ‘made manifest’ and ‘shown forth’ on this Third Sunday of Epiphany.

We are told that following the imprisonment of John the Baptist, our Lord Jesus went to the region of Galilee where he began to publically proclaim the Good News of God’s Kingdom. “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand,” he says. When Jesus says “the time is fulfilled,” the word for time used in the Greek is ‘kairos.’ The Greek word ‘chronos’ is used when what is being referred to is ‘clock time,’ measured chronologically. Kairos time referred to the perfect occasion when the moment was just right. Kairos time was when an opening appeared and you seized the day. You wait for her in chronos time; you ask her to marry you when it’s kairos time. Kairos time transcends chronos time. Jesus proclaims that the right time has come and has been fulfilled. In our Lord Jesus Christ we find the perfect, eternal union of God and man, the perfect marriage of the eternal and the temporal. This is what the poet, T. S. Eliot, meant by “the point of intersection of the timeless with time.” It is all a way of speaking of the mystery of the Incarnation.

We should not miss the fact that Jesus began preaching in Galilee. He was raised in Nazareth which is in the region of Galilee, and so was known as a Galilean. John the Baptist preached in Judea, a region closer to Jerusalem. Jesus went north into the hill country, to a mixed area of Jews and Gentiles. In fact, the place was referred to as “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Jews from Galilee were considered rough country cousins, ‘people of the land,’ hayseeds and yokels; the sort of rural folk snobs look down on even though they grow our food and fight our wars. This is where Jesus begins preaching; he goes to a region and to a people who would have felt far removed from the corridors of power, the halls of justice, or the Holy Temple itself. He didn’t begin in Jerusalem among the proud, religious elite who might have expected to be visited by the great Messiah. Instead, he went to those out on the margins of life; the very last people who would expect a Royal Visit. This all would have seemed foolish to Jerusalem’s upper crust. The Messiah preaching in Galilee would have sounded every bit as silly to them as the notion that the Official Proclamation of His Royal birth was announced first to shepherds in some field somewhere. And yet, we may be thankful for the fact that God does not do things our way.

We learn that Jesus began to call his disciples at this time. Their response to his call shows his authority. These hard working fishermen were right in the middle of earning their livelihood, and yet they stopped everything and followed him. This was the response of Simon Peter and his brother, Andrew. They were busy, after all. I am sure that most of us, had we been those disciples, would have appreciated a little advance notice; enough time at least to get our affairs in order. And yet the immediate response they make is meant to teach us an important lesson. You cannot prepare for the Kingdom by God by any amount of planning or by getting your affairs in order. God always calls us in the middle of things because God is always and forever with us in the middle of things, right now.  As I compose this sermon I am more than ever aware that God is with us in the middle of our lives where things get messy and painful, and it is there, not in some polished oasis of tranquil ease, but in the harsh places, including the rocky, rugged terrain of grief, that he comes to dwell with us. He is with us in those places, and because he is with us all will be well.

Our reading tells us that “a little further” along, Jesus also saw James and John. They were fishermen like Andrew and Peter, and yet their situation was different. James and John were from a respected and relatively prosperous family. They were about to walk away from their earthly father’s business in order to be fully invested in the work of their Heavenly Father. It says they left not only their father but the ‘hired servants’ as well.

It is always easy to ask rhetorical questions in a sermon, and during a stewardship campaign, it is tempting to inquire about what we are willing to part with in order to follow Christ. When I was a teenager I used to wonder if I would have the faith to remain loyal to Christ if I was being persecuted and even tortured. My young ego was working overtime on that scenario. Instead, I should have been asking if there was anything so important to me that I would not part with it under any circumstances. For example, imagine that all of your life you have been deeply, depressingly sad, sometimes even in a debilitating way, and then one day it all just goes away and is replaced by a joyful peace which surpasses your understanding. Would you really go back to the way you were if the price was right? For what would you trade your peace of mind? How much is your emotional sobriety worth to you?

Finally, the disciples are called to become fishers of men. In baptism, they went from bringing what lives under water to die on dry land to calling those on dry land to die under water. They left their nets. Leaving behind our nets is a scary proposal for most of us. We tend to get caught in our own nets; all wrapped up in notions about how we need certain circumstances and stuff to be joyful. We find comfort in patterns and rituals and we secretly crave the same routines we decry as boring because they offer the illusion of permanence, and the net tightens. Our Lord calls us to leave our nets behind. He calls us to newness of life. How new? It amounts to being born again; that new! And so, let us leave our nets behind. Let us turn around and embrace the Good News. Friends, the Kingdom of God is at hand.

(In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.)

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