Pastor's Desk, 25 January 2009

25 January 2009

From the Pastor's Desk . . .

In today’s Gospel Story (Mark 1:14-20) Jesus invites several fishermen to “Come, follow me”. They leave their father, abandon their nets and follow him. If we are remotely serious about trying to be open to Jesus we will hear him invite us to “Come, follow me”.  How, or if, we respond is our choice. This is how we work out God’s will for us --  by following Jesus in the ordinary events of our everyday life while doing our best to remain rooted in our life with him and going wherever this takes us.

As with the men in the Story, it is possible that Jesus might invite us to abandon some things that have become pretty important to us. From time to time we will face difficult choices. Our tradition is filled with people who have heard such an invitation from Jesus and have followed him. Nowhere does Jesus say, “Come follow me and I will make you comfortable and secure”. He says, “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men”. He calls us to follow him in bring his Father’s love to others around us. It is quite possible that if we try to follow him in this way we and what we do will be neither understood nor appreciated. We in the military know what this is like in a very real sense.

While our relationship with Jesus is personal, it is never private, never just “me and Jesus”. It always is with, through, and for others. We learn what Jesus is inviting us to both in our time with him and our interaction and involvement with the others in our life. Each provides depth and richness to the other as we live the time we spend with Jesus through our everyday dealings and relationships. Prayer is not an escape, but our response to Jesus inviting us to greater involvement in his mission of bringing his Father’s love to all creation.

Then there is the Cross – our own and others’. Life is painful and difficult in many ways. All of us have been hurt in any number of ways, and perhaps are hurting now. This is one of the mysteries of life. Healing is real, a facet of God loving us. Most of the time healing is not dramatic, but very quiet and simple, even unobtrusive. Our participation in the healing power of God loving us is inevitable if we are open to Jesus and are really trying to follow him. The odds are we will never even know that we are ministering his love. We don’t have to know, we just have to be willing and open.

In the Opening Prayer we express our belief that, “the love you offer always exceeds the furthest expressions of our human longing, for you are greater than the human heart”. In our efforts to follow Jesus we come to know this, perhaps in very practical ways. We ask him to “direct each thought, each effort of our life”. We have to ask ourselves if we really believe in this, if we really want him to do this in our life, if we are serious about facing our faults and weaknesses, accepting them, and presenting them to him to use as he chooses.

At some point we might ask ourselves if Jesus is really real to us, or is he just some nice idea we hold onto in case it might be true. In Jesus everything comes together, makes sense somehow, shows us the love and goodness that underpins everything. We might come to love life, discover a new richness that has always been there, begin to sense the good that is in every one of us, and maybe even begin to reflect in our own unique (and perhaps not always appreciated) way the love we have begun to know deep within ourselves, as the conditions we have placed on our life.