The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

When Jesus began his ministry, he decided not to do it all by himself but to call other people to help him with it. And right there he set the stage for trouble! "Follow me," Jesus says to some folks who are fishing one day, "and I will make you fishers of men." Or, as they put it in some of the more recent, politically correct translations, "fishers of people."

Maybe, when he was a boy, Jesus was like lots of other young people who "just want to work with people" when they grow up. I don't know. In any event, when we find him by the Sea of Galilee this morning, we hear him inviting some ordinary people, fishermen, to come with him to share his life and work and destiny.

If I were the Son of God, I wouldn't have done it that way. If I were the Son of God, I would think it would be easier to whip the world into shape all by myself. After all, as Son of God, I'd have the right credentials, the right pedigree. And, as God's Son, I'd have the power. No fooling around with committees or vestries or fishermen, all of whom have wills of their own and who would just gum up the works with all their conflicting ideas...which seems to be exactly what happened later in the church in Corinth, where there were some people in the parish who said they were following Apollos, and others who said they were following Cephas, and still others who said they were on Paul's side, and others who said they were for Christ, and probably not any two of them in the whole bunch could even agree on what kind of donuts they should have at the next meeting.

I imagine the folks in Corinth were pretty much like us. They all had their ideas about what church was all about. Some thought that Christians were free to eat meat sacrificed to idols. Others argued that they were not. Some believed that real worship just had to include speaking in tongues. Others, like Paul, insisted that speaking in tongues should be kept on a short leash. Some thought that women could attend church without a veil; others thought women should be both covered and quiet. Some believed Christian liberty included sexual license; others taught that sexual activity was to be kept within strict bounds.

So they were divided. "I am for Paul," some claimed. And "I'm for Apollos," and "I'm for Cephas," and "I'm for Christ," replied the others, as if Christ is divided into parties. Which must have made Paul pull his hair in frustration and recall with sorrow the words we heard Isaiah speak just last week when he lamented that although God had called him from his mother's womb to be the Lord's prophet, he had utterly failed and had toiled in vain.

I can just hear Paul's distress: "Is Christ divided? Was it Paul who was crucified for you? Was it in Paul's or Cephas' name that you were baptized? If that is what you think, then I, like Isaiah, have spent my strength for no purpose."

Well, today we've moved beyond some of the things that divided the Church in Paul's day. We've pretty much settled the issue about eating meat sacrificed to idols. But sex, and speaking in tongues, and women speaking at all are still hot topics in some quarters. And everywhere it continues to be "I want a church that will meet my needs," and "I want a church that teaches the Ten Commandments," and "I want a church with good music," and "I'm for a church with a strong outreach program," and "I'm for a church that takes evangelism seriously," and "I think the parish budget should focus more on this" and "I think it should focus more on that," all of which is Jesus' fault in the first place, because he didn't just pull on his Superman leotards and whip the world into shape. Instead, he chose to work with people.

Many pastors are not as tough and resilient as Paul. Many call it quits because of the feeling of failure experienced by Isaiah and the frustration expressed by Paul. So do many teachers and many parents and not a few in other areas of life.

William Willimon offers an illustration of why this is true. He tells of a woman in one of his former congregations who was an alcoholic, and how he and others had worked with her for years to try to help her with her addiction, and how at last she got up the courage to take the first step. The church mobilized. The Sunday School classes pulled together and arranged meals for the family while she was away for a month for treatment. Three generous people in the church donated nearly every cent for the cost of her treatment. And for two or three months after she returned home, her recovery seemed miraculous.

But then she stopped going to AA, and in another month she was drinking again. If anything, she seemed worse off than before. Frustration and futility was felt by all, a sense of having spent their time and energy for no purpose. No "Miller Time," as they used to say in the beer commercials. No time to stop and step back and say, "There, that job is done; that house is painted. Let's watch the paint dry and have a beer."

Diplomats must often feel similar disappointment and frustration and futility when months or years of negotiations to gain an agreement between hostile nations go up in the smoke of renewed fighting. Teachers, too, when years of patient work seem to yield little passion for books or thought beyond final exam time.

Such frustration is why one pastor I read about spends a full day a week repairing lawn mowers. It's not because he needs the extra money, and not because he's got so much free time on his hands, but because, as he says, "it's good to see something work right. Even if I can't fix anyone or anything at church," he says, "I can at least fix a lawn mower."

Part of the problem, of course, are our expectations. Isaiah understood that his vocation was nothing less than to be the agent through whom Almighty God himself would win his glory. For Paul, the Church, in Corinth and everywhere, were not a collection of interest groups, but the Body of Christ, a community united in love, a body inspired by one Spirit, with one mind and purpose.

Teachers expect to be more that grade givers; they are called to lead students toward a passion for learning. The vocation of doctors and nurses and therapists is not just to pass out pills, but to restore health. The goal of Habitat for Humanity is not just to build four or five houses this year, but to eliminate poverty housing throughout the world. The vocation of parents is not just to "have" children until the age of majority releases them from your responsibility, but to create families who love and care for each other and the world. Diplomats seek to bring peace in lands where there hasn't been peace for centuries, if ever. The mission of the Church is nothing less than the reconciliation of Cephas's group with Apollos' group and all the other groups, and the reconciliation of all of them with God.

These are big expectations, divine expectations. So, when we fall so short of them day after day and year after year, it's no wonder it's so easy to become discouraged and frustrated, even to fall into despair and say with the prophet, "I have failed. It's all futile. I have toiled in vain, spent my strength for no purpose."

Fortunately, for us as for Isaiah and Paul, there is grace. There is a grace that is salvation: It's not about us; it's about God. "I have failed," the prophet goes on to say, "yet my cause is with the Lord, and my reward is with my God."

It is God who called Isaiah to the work. It is God who called Paul, and you and me. The work is God's, not Isaiah's, not Paul's, not mine, not yours. For all of us who understand that our work or ministry is a vocation, it is God who has called us to it.

In every case where the expectations are big, even divine, like all those I just mentioned, and more, the work is God's, not ours. Wherever healing or reconciliation or justice or peace or love or personal growth is the objective, then the work is God's, not ours. In all matters like these, we, like Isaiah and Paul, are called to be God's agents, called to plant, to sow the seed, to water. We may never see the harvest.

But then, again, we may. Willimon tells of a family in a parish church he served who told him shortly after he arrived that they didn't like him. (Now I can relate to that.) And for all the time he was at that parish, the family attended church only sporadically, and they were forever talking down and frustrating all the church's plans. As far as he could tell, Willimon says, all his efforts to establish a relationship with them were in vain, all for nothing.

But years later, when he was speaking somewhere, Willimon was astonished to see that family sitting in the first row. And at the end of the evening he was even more astonished when they came up and embraced him and asked if he would have a cup of coffee with them. "We don't know how to thank you enough," she said. "Thank me? For what?" asked Willimon. "We owe the life of our son to you. You stuck with him through the tough time. We didn't like it when you confronted us about him. It made us angry at the time. But later we came to see the truth of it, and things are going well now. Thank you."

"Of course it wasn't me," adds Willimon. "I did some sowing and some cultivation, but God did the growing. My cause was God's cause, and any reward was with God."

I'll bet some of you have had similar experiences, maybe with former students or patients or clients, maybe with a friend, or maybe even with one of your own children when, years later perhaps, you would see one of them and she would tell you about how important something you said or did was to her, something you didn't even remember.

That's often the way it is with vocation, with work to which one is called by God. As Paul says, we plant the seed and water it, but the harvest happens long after we've left the scene.

We are not the best measure of our own meaning or faithfulness or success, God is. Isaiah knew this. That's why his frustration and sense of personal failure could be overcome by hope, and why, just a short while after expressing his despair, he could write these famous lines:

And so it was that Isaiah was enabled to see that the purpose and work for which he was called and sent by God would, without fail, be accomplished. But in God's time, not his own. The just act, the word of love or faith or hope, once planted, being of God, always bears fruit.

And just so, Paul continues to preach the Gospel throughout his wonderful letter to the Corinthians, and beyond: "It's not about us," he reminds us. "It's about God. Christ is not divided. You are one body, one body who lives by one Spirit, one people bound to one another by love, one people with one mind and conviction. Christ died on the Cross for you so that this might be true, true in fact as well as in vocation. Now what are you going to do about it?"

Martin Luther King, Jr., God's prophet to our own land whom we honored this week, shared Isaiah's and Paul's confidence. Even in the midst of perhaps the bloodiest century in history, in the midst of the struggles and frustration of his prophetic ministry of the 1950s and 1960s, King was able to express the prophet's hope: "I am convinced," he said, "that we shall overcome. I am convinced that we shall overcome because the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right when he says, 'No lie can live forever.' We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right when he says, 'Truth crushed to earth will rise again.' We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right when he says, 'Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future.'"

In All Rivers Run to the Sea, Elie Wiesel tells about his early life in Romania. He tells about his devotion to his mother as an eight-, nine-, and ten-year-old. And he tells about his fear and admiration and love for his father: "Shabbat," he writes, "was the only day I spent with him. In Sighet, Shabbat began on Friday afternoon. Shops closed well before sundown.... After the ritual bath, we would walk to services, dressed for the occasion. Sometimes my father would take my hand, as though to protect me, as we passed the nearby police station or the central prison on the main square [where Jews were often beaten on Christmas Eve]. I liked it when he did that, and I like to remember it now. I felt reassured, content. Bound to me, [my father] belonged to me."

And Wiesel goes on to tell about all that his father and mother and his teachers and rabbis taught him about Torah when he was a young boy, and about how Messiah would surely come to save his people.

How understandable it was, then, five or six years later in 1945, when Elie was 16 years old, how understandable it was for both Elie and his father to feel only despair when his father, dying in Buchenwald, was crying out for Elie to come to him, and Elie, hearing his father's cries, but prevented by his captors from going to his father's deathbed -- how understandable it was at that time for them to feel, "It's all in vain, all meaningless."

But it was not in vain. Elie's father was not the best measure of his own meaning that day in Buchenwald. Nor was Elie. Out of the unspeakable horror and apparent hopelessness of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel survived, called by God and sent -- grieving for his father, he says, to this very day -- but sent to speak the word of God, to speak words of memory and hope to the world, words of memory and hope matched by few, if any, in our lifetime.

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Isaiah planted seeds of justice and hope. St. Paul planted seeds of hope and grace. And because, like Isaiah and Paul and Elie Wiesel and Martin Luther King, we are also called to that ministry, we will do the same.

But in this vocation, we are not the best measure of our own meaning or effectiveness or faithfulness, God is. And the harvest, unlike the planting and the watering, comes in God's time, not in ours.

Truth is on the scaffold. Wrong may be on the throne. It has certainly occupied it a lot since the days of Isaiah, and the days of Pontius Pilate, and the days of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and the days of Martin Luther King, Jr.

But the scaffold sways the future.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.