Grace to Answer Readily Your Call

 

Call: Invitation, Possibility, Permission

“Your image of God creates you,” writes Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest, monk and teacher in the meditations we have been reading at Noon every weekday with people who join us for Noonday Prayer & More from across the country and around the world. [Richard Rohr, Yes, And…Franciscan Media, 2013, p 9] He has also helped us to understand our collect and lessons for this Third Sunday after Epiphany as we pray for “Grace…to answer readily the call” Jesus issues, first to a group of fishermen, but ultimately to each and every one of us, to anyone and everyone who reads and listens and ponders these accounts we call Gospels – God-spell, an Anglo-Saxon word for “good news or good message.”

 

The message has not changed for some time. From the time of Jonah and the city of Ninevah, “that great city,” some five or seven centuries before the time of Jesus, and for the people of Galilee and Jerusalem as Jesus emerges from a long sojourn in the wilderness to ponder the message and call he received at his baptism in the River Jordan: You are my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased. [Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20] Jesus, like Jonah, was called to issue an invitation, to those who would listen, to repent, to turn back from the way things are and back to the way of God, which Jesus says is near, or more specifically, “is at hand.” So near, so close, you can almost touch it. This is the Good News, the God-spell, both Jesus and Jonah proclaim.

 

Had we read just a few verses further in Jonah, we would learn that Jonah’s understanding of the image of God is that God is “gracious…and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing,” a refrain that runs throughout the Old Testament. This is similar to how Jesus understands the call he receives at his Baptism by John: You are my Beloved; I am well pleased with you. Immediately, Jesus calls upon people like Andrew and Peter and James and John to repent, to turn back to the way of the Lord God of the Wilderness because they too are God’s Beloved, God is well pleased with them. They can be transformed into those who fish for people – to bring others closer to God, closer to others, and closer to themselves. They are never the same after Jesus issues the call to “Follow me.”

 

Rohr writes that at that moment, like the one down by the sea in Galilee, when the call, God’s invitation breaks in on us, we open to a new sense of possibility and permission. We begin to receive and to trust God’s “steadfast love,” and our belovedness - even with all our perceived limitations, feelings of unworthiness, limited intellect, or whatever we sense holds us back – when one begins to really hear, and feel and know that you are God’s Beloved and that God is well pleased with you, you begin to experience a new sense of possibility. And it is this possibility, Rohr says, that grants you permission – permission to be the image and likeness of God that you already are. [Ibid p 19] This is the essence of the call; the essence of the Good News; the essence of the God-spell. Your image of God creates you.

 

It was at a high school youth group performance of the musical Godspell that I first experienced this inner sense of God’s love that Rohr speaks about. I was about 28 years-old and could not have told anyone at the time what was going on inside of me, but it was in trusting that experience that opened me to both the possibility and the permission to turn back to and follow Jesus and begin to accept the possibility that I am made in the image and likeness of God. “Follow” is the operant word as I was to learn from an unlikely mentor, The Reverend Bill Caradine, someone I met when he was a Staff Officer for Stewardship at the Episcopal Church Center. The most popular song from Godspell was Day By Day, making it to number 13 on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, based on a prayer of the 13^th century bishop, Saint Richard of Chichester:

 

May I know Thee more clearly, (or, “See thee more clearly”)

Love Thee more dearly,

Follow Thee more nearly.

 

Bill Caradine said that as powerful as Chichster’s prayer and the hymn and the song are, they  have things completely backwards and upside down. For instance, Jesus does not approach the four fishermen in Galilee and say, “Hi, lads! Here is a copy of the texts of our people for you to read, mark and inwardly digest. Tomorrow I will come down and give a quiz, and if you score well on the quiz, you can follow me.” And it is not until the very end of the fourth Gospel of John that Jesus asks anyone, in that case Peter, “Do you love me?” No. The call, the invitation to possibility and permission is the quite simple and direct, “Follow me.” And somewhat inexplicably, they lay aside the family business and depart from their families and follow him. It must begin with following Jesus if we are ever to love him and know him at all. If we wait to know him or see him more clearly, we will never have time to love or to follow him.

 

Bill would go on to say, that it is only in following Jesus that it is even possible to begin to love him. And that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is so deep and so wide that to this day knowing him or seeing him more clearly is a lifetime adventure as he responds to each situation and the needs of each person differently in every time and place. It is as the fourth gospel says at the very end: there are so many things Jesus did and does, if it were all to be written down, the world could not hold the number of books it would take to tell them all! Yet, as his conversation with Peter reveals, it is love, love of neighbor, love of others, all others without qualification, that is at the heart of the image of God’s own steadfast love. For he asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter says, “Yes, Lord, I love you.” And Jesus answers, “Feed my lambs…Tend my sheep…Feed my sheep.” Your image of God creates you.

 

These lessons from my experience of Godspell and the teaching of Bill Caradine was going through my heart and mind this week as I read Richard Rohr out loud at Noonday Prayer and More: “If you keep listening to the love, if you keep receiving the love, trusting the love – even with all your limitations, with all your unworthiness, with all your limited intellect or whatever holds you back -you start to experience within yourself a sense of possibility…not just possibility, but permission…It is permission to be the image and likeness of God that you already are! We each are unlike any other image or likeness.” [Ibid p19]

 

Your image of God creates you. If our image of God is that which Jonah, Jesus, Peter and his friends all knew, graciousness, mercy, steadfast love, love of others, being God’s Beloved, then one day you become the love – the love we come from, the love to which we return, the love that is all around. We have been created to be the image and likeness of God that we already are. We are promised that when we follow Christ we will be opened to new possibilities and permission to be the very likeness and image of God. This is our calling. Today our prayer is for Grace: Grace to answer readily the call to be what we already are! Amazing grace! Alleluia!

Amen. It is so. It is truth.