Transformation & Good News (Jan 21 Sermon)
TRANSFORMATION AND GOOD NEWS
1/21/24 ~ St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Encinitas, CA
By: Ms. Rachel Ambasing
Good morning! My name is Rachel Ambasing, I serve on Diocesan Staff as Missioner for Community Vitality and Diversity. I also get to serve as Lay Pastor for an emerging faith community that we’re growing in Ocean Beach called Church of the Resurrection, which is one of two new church plants in our diocese alongside St. Brigid’s, Oceanside.
This is my first time being here at St. Andrew’s, and I’m so excited to finally visit because I’ve heard a lot of good things from different people about all the work that St. Andrew’s has been doing as a community, and for your surrounding neighborhood. So I’m glad to be able to be here in person to see you and get to know you a bit better.
I’m coming to you today off the heels of our diocesan Leadership Academy, which we held at the Episcopal Church Center in Ocean Beach just yesterday. It was an entire day full of story sharing, meeting new people, learning from each other, and talking about God with each other. I also had the opportunity to facilitate a panel that featured Mtr. Brenda, and Simeon Bruce, which was a panel called Listening for God’s Call: Ministry of All the Baptized, where we discussed discernment, particularly in connection with the ministry of the laity. As I heard our panelists talk about their paths to discernment, or the journeys in listening for God’s voice and living lives faithful to God’s call, one of the key learnings I took away with me is that: following the call of ministry, whether it’s as a lay person or an ordained person, is an ongoing journey of transformation. And it’s a journey of transformation that is oftentimes messy and roundabout and nuanced. It’s a path that can be full of tension and moments of confusion and challenge, which we often have to journey through in order to reach the gentle warmth of quiet clarity on the other side of it all. Following a call is often a process of trial and error, or play and experimentation: the chaos of the world before God whispers it into order. It’s the undoing of all things false about ourselves so we can make space for all those things that are true.
But as messy as the call to transformation is in real life, we might not think that by looking at some of our scripture readings today: particularly in our Old Testament and Gospel readings — two passages that hold a message of some sort of transformation — and two passages that tell these stories in a deceptively brief amount of words, where unless we stop to consider all that lies below the surface, we might actually believe that transformation is easy.
In our Old Testament reading from the book of Jonah, we hear in 6 verses the story of God’s call to Jonah to deliver his message to Nineveh, that they would be destroyed in 40 days unless they repented. Somehow, this entire great city of Nineveh came together, decided they believed God, and collectively acted to demonstrate their turning away from their evil ways, and realigned themselves with God, thus saving their city. The way this story is told sounds paint-by-numbers simple — Jonah delivers his message, somehow the entire city of Nineveh hears it, and seemingly everyone in Nineveh agrees on what they’re going to do. But, for those of us who have lived in community and have ever experienced trying to come to an agreement as an entire community, perhaps we know that coming to a collective agreement is not as step-by-step, or as linear as this story makes it sound on the surface.
Our Gospel passage today is also only 6 verses long, yet in those 6 verses, so much seems to happen. So for context, we are still in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. In the Gospel story leading up to today’s passage – if you can perhaps remember all the way to the second Sunday of Advent, when we last heard this story – was the story of John the Baptist. John proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and declared, “the one who is more powerful than I is coming after me.” And this story took us to a reading from just a few weeks ago, in the story of Jesus' baptism, where Jesus is baptized by John in the river Jordan. After his baptism, Jesus is driven by the Spirit to the wilderness, where Mark tells us Jesus was tempted by Satan for 40 days, and where the angels and wild animals were with him…. Which brings us to today’s Gospel.
In the very first sentence alone, we hear of the arrest of John the Baptist, who we know Jesus is close to. In the same sentence, we hear that Jesus has come to Galilee, proclaiming the Good News, and, as Mark tells us – calling all those to repent – as John had previously called those to a baptism of repentance – and to believe in the good news. It seems, then, that as Jesus has returned from the wilderness, and hears of John’s arrest, this news serves as a catalyst for Jesus to continue the ministry left behind by John – in other words, in one sentence, we see in Mark’s Gospel for the first time, the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry to the world. We hear nothing about how Jesus might have felt about John being arrested — was he stressed? Angry at the system? Anxious for his friend?
In the rest of today’s Gospel, we hear similar ultra-simplified accounts of the calls to ministry for four of Jesus' disciples: Simon, Andrew, James, and John — they hear the call from Jesus, and, we’re told that Simon and Andrew immediately drop their nets and follow, while James and John leave their own father behind. We are not told by Mark why these four men were so keen to leave behind all that they knew in order to fulfill God’s call. Did they know Jesus beforehand? What kind of relationship building did Jesus put in before he gave the invitation? Did Jesus hold community listening sessions or do community engagement work while in Galilee in order for these men to say yes? What were the hopes or the longings of Simon, Andrew, James and John, what were their own lives or personalities like that made them ready to transform into fishers of men?
I invite you now to think of a moment in your own life, whether in your own individual life, or in the life of your community, where you reached a moment of transformation. Was it simple, or complex? Where was it easy; where was there tension? What was that journey like?
There are many in the world, now, who believe that our own world is in a moment of deep, profound transformation, particularly as we have all survived the wildness that happened with the pandemic in 2020 essentially turned the world upside down. In fact, the deeper we may be drawn into our individual or communal callings of ministry, the closer we may be drawn into the chaos and the confusion….and amidst all of this messiness and tension so necessary to bring us into transformation, the harder it can be to remember what might lie on the otherside of transformation, and the easier it can be to think that God is nowhere to be found. But what’s interesting in todays readings, is that, amongst these stories of chaos and change, centered in the middle of it all, is this portion of Psalm 62 which begins: For God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, my hope is in him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, so that I shall not be shaken.
This psalm that reminds us so wonderfully that no matter how chaos might seem to swirl around us or through us, God is always with us, waiting to be found – waiting to ground us, center us, to keep us and hold us, giving us that anchor to weather whatever roughness or challenge we may find on our respective journeys of transformation. And I can think of no better Good News.
