The Invitation and the Imperative

Easter 3C

“Follow me.” Those are some rather stunning words to hear from Jesus. They’re also pretty familiar to us who go to church, so I want to invite you to listen to them anew, with the ears of your heart. And with the backstory in mind. “Follow me,” the resurrected one said.

Remember that, if you were Simon Peter, your world had just fallen apart. You gave up everything to follow Jesus—chances are your wife and friends and fellow fishermen thought you were a little crazy—and then the hopeful movement you thought you were part of just came to a tragic end. The messiah that you yourself had bravely confessed was murdered, and your last act as his friend was to deny him. Now you’re back to where you were before, fishing—and evidently not doing well at it—trying to hold back the despair over death and denial. And you don’t even recognize Jesus when he shows up on the beach. Follow him again? Really?

All that may account for why Simon Peter was confused enough to put his clothes back on before jumping in the water, A curious Gospel detail if ever there were.

Of course there’s a bit more complexity to this story. There’s actually a Gospel within a Gospel in these few short verses. Notice that we have glorious abundance—fish enough to drown the nets—which is always a sign of the presence of God in John’s Gospel. We also have fire and bread and a meal, favorite Biblical themes. And for poor Peter, who had denied the Lord three times, there were no less than three opportunities to reaffirm him. Not just as sovereign and Lord, but as the one whom Peter loved. And isn’t that what we all want? To know that God wants and welcomes our love, no matter how often we have fallen short. So yes. “Follow me” was the invitation Peter was ready to hear anew. Are we ready to hear it again, despite whatever confusion and sadness we may have experienced?

I wish I could tell you that Peter finally got it all together and followed without hesitation after that. Spoiler alert: he didn’t. In fact, he misunderstood God’s call time and again before he eventually figured it out. At least the guy was true to character. One of his more awkward stumbles on the post-Easter journey with Jesus and the Holy Spirit was Peter’s argument with Paul over the inclusion of Gentiles in the nascent community of Jesus followers. We’ll get to that story soon. It’s a really important one for contemporary Christians to learn from as we seek to practice unconditional welcome.

But our first lesson today—the story of Saul, breathing threats and murder against the disciples before the Spirit of the Lord interrupted his Damascus journey—comes earlier. It’s the story of the conversion of the man who would become Paul, the great evangelist and apostle to the Gentiles. And what a story it is! There are flashing lights and disembodied voices and blindness and sight and a justifiably reluctant Ananias praying for a man he knew to be a violent persecutor of the faithful. And in the midst of this, the Lord speaks several times. But notice that he never says “follow me.” Instead he says things like “get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do,” or to Ananias, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles.” And both Saul and Ananias do exactly as they were told.

How does God call you? With a gentle but persistent invitation to follow? With an insistent “Go”? The result in both cases is the same: the disciple moves. Goes somewhere new or does something new. And through their obedience, more of God’s kingdom is manifested on earth. And maybe that’s all we really need to know. God’s call—heard as invitation or imperative—makes all things new because it makes us new. And maybe we hear the call differently because God knows us and knows what we need. Myself, I’ve generally needed a good firm imperative from God to get off my dime. Hopefully you have the ears to hear a more nuanced invitation.

In the first half of the 14^th century, a daughter—the 23^rd  child of her mother—was born to a merchant family in the Republic of Siena. At the age of five or six she is said to have received visions of Christ that caused her to commit her whole life to God. Hers was a mystical experience not unlike Saul’s. And it certainly generated equivalent anxiety among her family, who naturally wanted her to mature and make a good marriage. Which she did not, but neither did she become a nun, which was the other acceptable path for pious woman of her day. Rather she followed her Lord into a vocation as a vowed laywoman living in her father’s house and serving the poor and the sick. She was renowned for her diaconal—that is, service oriented—ministry in her hometown, and many other local women joined her in service and devotion.

But that alone was not enough for Catherine of Siena, or for her God. Whether she heard an invitational “follow” or an imperative “go,” Catherine eventually began to travel outside of her hometown to found women’s orders, to advocate for clerical reform, and—perhaps most famously—to run diplomatic errands on behalf of Pope Urban VI during the schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon. She was also a copious theological writer, because of which the Roman Catholic Church named her a Doctor of the Church in 1970. We celebrated Catherine’s witness through our Episcopal Calendar of Holy People last Friday.

Catherine of Siena had relatively little formal education, but she knew—by instinct or by mystical insight—that the Church was called to unity rather than division. As of course Peter and Saul-who-became-Paul knew that as well, both being architects of a unified church after they recovered from their squabble over Jewish dietary laws and Gentile converts. Which is really no small argument: notice in both our first lesson and Gospel that feeding the called one seems important. God knows our hungers! And longs to feed us. So if you are hungry now—you, who are all called to be church—know that we’ll have a special cake at coffee hour to celebrate and bid farewell to our beloved Deacon Lee Barford and his wife Kirsten, who are moving to London.

I don’t know exactly why God has called Lee and Kirsten to London—they may not yet know themselves—but here’s what I do know about Lee. He has the heart of a deacon, from which he has served Trinity faithfully for decades. And like Catherine of Siena, Lee is committed to the unity of the church. When the future of our Spanish-speaking Guadalupe congregation was in jeopardy, he taught himself Spanish in order to ensure that our faithful Latino/Hispanic members would still find a home at the Cathedral. In so many ways, we owe our current multicultural witness to Lee’s courage and hard work. “Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring,” wrote Catherine of Siena. Was she thinking of Lee and Kirsten? Maybe; I wouldn’t put much past that visionary saint! And likewise she wrote: “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the whole world on fire.” That’s a truism for all of us, everywhere and at all times. Whether God gets us there with a gentle invitation or a vision or a fierce command.

Lee, here is my invitation—and perhaps even my command as your dean—for today, anyway. As you move to the mothership, so to speak, of the Episcopal Church, stay in touch with us. Lead us to become  a more connected church. “Be who God meant you to be, and set London on fire with your loving service.”