God calls us twice, with patient urgency, into the reign of God.
Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Third Sunday after Epiphany, Lect. 3 B
Texts: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20; John 21:1-19
God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There is an urgency in all of the texts for this week.
“The time is fulfilled!” Jesus says – his first words in Mark’s gospel.
“The appointed time has grown short,” Paul writes to the Corinthians.
“Get up and go,” God says to Jonah.
There is something pressing about the message of all these writers, and it reminded me of something my mom used to say: “If it’s urgent, call twice.”
That was the instruction she always left for us when we were kids, in the days before texting, on any occasion when we might need to talk to her while she was gone. “I might not answer the first time,” she’d say. “But if you call back right away, if you call twice, I’ll know it’s urgent and I’ll answer.” That was her promise to us and to this day I know that if I call twice, my mom will drop everything and answer. She’ll know it’s urgent.
In these texts, something urgent is happening. So God calls twice.
“God has spoken once, twice have I heard it,” the Psalmist sings. God calls twice.
“The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time.” God called Jonah twice. Because it was very urgent. The situation was dire. God describes Nineveh as a place with more than one hundred and twenty thousand people who don’t know their right hand from their left. Whose wickedness, especially their violence, had risen up before God.
Jonah’s work is urgent. There are people, thousands of them, who must be reached, who must be stopped, the violence must stop. For the sake of the people that the Ninevites were hurting, and for the sake of the Ninevites themselves. God calls Jonah twice, because the need was urgent. It was time for a better way.
This is the same urgency that drives Jesus. “The reign of God has come near,” he proclaims, and he pairs with an urgent call “Repent and believe the good news.” As if he were saying: All you people who don’t know your right hand from your left. It’s time for the reign of God! It’s time for a better way.
It’s the same urgency that still drives prophets who speak and spread the reign of God today.
This past Monday we celebrated perhaps our greatest modern prophet in the United States, Dr. King. Dr. King understood the urgency of the reign of God. He dreamed of a better way. And he knew the reign of God meant love and power.
The Psalmist knew it too: “God has spoken once, twice have I heard it, that power belongs to God. Steadfast love belongs to you, O Lord.”
Power and love belong to God. That is the recipe for meeting the urgent needs of the people, so urgent that God calls twice. But power doesn’t work on its own. Love doesn’t even work on its own. That’s the crucial insight that Dr. King understood.
“Power without love,” he said, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”1
This is the reign of God- power and love, at their best, implementing justice.
God called Jonah twice because it was time to implement justice. With both power and love, God saved them all. God saved the victims and God saved the oppressors. Justice and Mercy, Power and Love correcting everything that stood against love.
This is the reign of God. It’s what God calls each and every one of us into it. It’s incredibly urgent. And it’s why God calls twice.
But it’s not the only reason.
Because God could have called somebody else, when God called the second time, right? Jonah did not want to do this job, he made that very clear. If you don’t remember the story, the first time Jonah was called to Nineveh, he hopped in a boat and sailed the opposite direction as fast as he could. That’s how he ended up in the belly of that big fish. Which spewed him up right back on land so that the word of God could come to him a second time.
God calls twice because God is incredibly patient with us.
God was certainly patient with Jonah. Jonah ran away from the first call, because he knew God would be merciful. He knew that God would respond not only with power, but also with love, and he just couldn’t stand it. And in the end the only one who isn’t saved, the only one who isn’t part of the reign of God, is Jonah. He is left looking down at the city in resentment, telling God he is “angry enough to die!” And the book ends with God patiently loving him too, calling him, yet again, into the reign of God.
Because it is urgent, God is patient.
God was also patient with those fishers in the gospel for today. Andrew and Simon Peter and John and James. Now, it’s true in this story, they don’t seem to need to be called twice. “Immediately” they leave their nets and their boats. James and John up and leave their father in the boat and they don’t even seem to look back. All four of them are caught up right away in the promise of God’s power and love implementing justice, ushering in the reign of God.
But we know that they don’t really understand the reign of God yet. Most of the rest of the gospel of Mark will show how they really don’t get it. And even these men who seemed so eager to leave their nets, will end up back in their boats. On another lake shore. At the end of another gospel. Lost and despairing because they really didn’t think that God’s love and power in action would look like God dying on a cross.
But Jesus will call them again.
He will call these same followers again from their boats. He will tell them to cast their nets on the other side. He will tell Simon Peter to feed God’s lambs and tend God’s sheep. And he will say, for the second time, follow me.
Jesus called these fishers twice, in almost the same way. Because God was patient with them, even though they didn’t understand.
And with this patient urgency, God has called you too.
Even when you, like these fishers, just don’t get it, don’t understand the fullness of the reign of power and love and justice you are being called into. Even when you, like Jonah, don’t like it, when the love of God makes you angry enough to die. God is patient. God calls twice.
Or three times or four times, or too many times to count!
God has called you into the reign of God. Maybe you heard God’s voice, saying “Get up and go!” Or maybe you felt an urge, a stirring from the Holy Spirit that you couldn’t quite explain, maybe you feel it right now, calling you into urgent work. Maybe you heard the words of a prophet with a message as simple as “Repent and Believe.” Or another way you could translate it: “Turn and Trust.”
Turn away from standing against love. Turn away from the ways you hurt others and hurt yourself. Turn away from this present world and follow Christ into the new creation.
Turn and Trust.
Trust that power belongs to God. Trust that steadfast love belongs to God. Trust that God is calling you and will not abandon you. That God will call twice. Again and again and as many times as it takes.
The reign of God has come near. It’s urgent. Turn and Trust.
In the name of the Father, of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
1. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Where do we go from here?” Speech. 15 August 1967. Transcript available at https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here. Hear the quoted excerpt from the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsvSq5_vbL4&t=1s