At once they left their nets and followed him...

Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time – A
Isaiah 8:23-9:3
1 Corinthians 1:10-13, 17
Matthew 4:12-23

At once they left their nets and followed him…
It didn’t work that way with me!

When people ask me when I decided to become a priestthe most honest answer I can give is,
“About six years after I was ordained.”
I was ordained in 1973. I truly decided to become a priest around 1979.
Those six years were very interesting years!
(That's a story I may share at another time...)

I’ve heard married people say the same kind of thing,
that the real decision to be married
came some years after they stood at the altar.

And the last six years have been interesting years, too.
These have been six years in which I have had to rethink
many things about the church –and you have, too-
but one thing I haven’t really needed to rethink
was my call to be a priest.

Well, “call” is really too strong a word to use here.
I had no visions, heard no voices, experienced nothing mystical.
Less than a call, what I experienced was a nudge, a prompting,
an intuition, a suggestion that becoming a priest
might be what I was meant to do with my life.

Actually, it was more like a hunch,
a “holy hunch,” if you like,
but a hunch nonetheless…

That’s just the way it was.

So, I followed the hunch, hoping that God was behind it and,
to the best of my ability,
I believe that indeed, I’m doing with my life what God asked of me.
But what God originally nudged me into
has turned out to be very different than what I expected.

Reminds me of an ad for new books last week,
offering this interesting title:
This Isn’t The Life I Ordered!

Well, whose is?

Even though I believe that God and I are still on the same page,
I’ve found that my work is often frustrating, disappointing,
difficult, painful, lonely, confining, confusing, depressing,
unsupported and suspect.

But at the same time, I find my work is also exciting, challenging,
fulfilling, uplifting, liberating, validating, appreciated, needed,
joyful, blessed and deeply rewarding.

And I have these two sets of experiences of my ministry
precisely because my work invites me
and allows me inside the tender, fragile heart of your lives:
your joys and sorrows, your dreams and disappointments,
your successes and failures, your sin and grace – and mine, too.

If you think a priest’s work is mostly doing "holy things"
or saying "holy words" – or even "being holy" himself –
you’ve got it inside out.

We live in a culture of junk.
My work is to sort through, with you and for you,
all the junk in our lives
and to dig deep enough to discover the holy
in our hearts, our lives and in the world around us.

And when we find the holy within and among us,
we celebrate it and share it with us who are searching for it, too.

In sorting through the junk in pursuit of what is of real value,
we Christians use the gospel as our treasure map
and the Church’s wisdom as light for our path.

Like the ancients of Zebulun and Naphtali,
something deep within us longs
for anguish to take wing,for darkness to be dispelled,
and for the holy to be discovered and revealed.

And like the Corinthians,
we screw things up a good deal of the time:
we make our own maps and cast the Lord's aside;
we forgo wisdom's light and stumble in the dark;
we prefer rivalry to unity and loose sight of our goal.

We need to heed Paul’s warning that unless Christ be our light
and his Cross the standard of our lives,
we will be lost, buried in the junk
failing to find the holiness our restless hearts are always seeking.

So once a week we gather here, God's people,
as modern members of the tribes of Zebulun and Naphtali,
and contemporary Corinthians.

We study again the scriptures’ map
and pray to find the Church’s path to what is holy
with wisdom’s light to lead way.

Here Christ nudges us and invites us to believe
that leaving our nets to follow him
might, indeed, be a very good hunch.

One in Christ and in the shadow of his Cross,
we celebrate and share what is already ours,
the Eucharist:
the Holy One, broken and poured out for us
in this table’s bread and cup.

- Rev. Austin Fleming