“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” Matt. 4:19
Many, many years ago, when I was 18, I went to make my confession at Christmas. After hearing my confession the priest said, “Go and visit the Fathers at St Augustine’s, Penhalonga. You will like them.” I had never heard of them. So a friend and I borrowed his mother’s car and we drove up to the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. It was a journey that changed my life. St Augustine’s is surrounded by mountains. It is a beautiful place. It was then an old established mission with two schools, a clinic, a teacher training college and a lot of mission work in the surrounding area. And there were ten CR fathers dressed in white cassocks and grey scapulars, praying 7 times a day, celebrating mass every day and doing all this work. There were two communities of sisters, one black and one white. Above all there was God. Everywhere I went on the mission I could feel God saying, “Come. Follow me. Come and pray. Come and join this community.” It took me 12 years but I got here in the end.
I suppose each one of us in this church can point to significant moments in our lives when everything changed. For some it was dramatic; something happened, a word was spoken and you knew you had a choice. Or maybe you knew you had no choice. You simply had to follow the new road. For others it might have been a gentle shift into a different direction which gradually unfolded as a definite call from God. God calls in different ways. Perhaps it is because we are different people. Some need to be seized by the scruff of the neck and pushed onto the new path. Others can be trusted to follow the gentle music the Lord makes for those who love him. But why does God call us and how does he do it? And where does it lead?
We look at Peter and Andrew, James and John. Why did they leave all and follow Jesus? Had they met him before, and heard him preach? Or was he such a charismatic person they just got up as soon as he spoke, and went after him? In a sense it doesn’t matter. We can make up possible stories about them and how they came to follow Jesus but the important thing is that they did leave all and follow him. They didn’t cling to their boats and their families. They just went after him. They had no idea where they were going. They didn’t know they were going to spend the next three years walking round Galilee and Jerusalem. They didn’t know about the Cross and the Resurrection. They didn’t know that for three of them life would end in martyrdom. But they followed Jesus and it worked. They became the foundations of this Christian Church, this living body of Christ on earth which brings salvation to the human race, or at least to those who want it.
So, the first thing to remember about any call from God is that God knows what he is doing. It may seem madness. It may seem to go in quite the wrong direction. The direction may seem really unpleasant. Think of me having to leave beautiful Zimbabwe and come to cold, wet Yorkshire. I won’t go into the details, but God was right. I’m glad he called me.
The second point is that God calls us in love. This is really important. He is not an army commander sending troops into battle, not caring too much whether they live or die. God loves us. He calls us to a life that we will enjoy. He calls us into a relationship of love with him. He is not solemn and boring. He is like the lover of the Song of Songs, peeping through the lattice window or leaping down the hills. His song is different. We may not always understand it but if we listen we will hear the call of love. Jesus walks just ahead of us, like a pied piper calling us to an adventure. He is inviting us into a wonderful life. Isaiah told us that at Mattins:
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…..they rejoice before thee, as with joy at the harvest.”
Do we see that light in our lives? God says it is there so it must be, but we are often distracted, over busy, looking down at the ground. It’s worth stopping from time to time to work out what that light is, where it has shone in our lives, and what is the nature of the joy. Life in a monastery or a college can get so full of things that must be done, assignments that must be finished, people that make a lot of noise so you can lose the plot. We fail to see that God is in it all and that God’s presence is joy.
And my third point culled from decades of following this call from God is that God can be trusted. That may sound like a cliché. That may seem an obvious thing to say, but when we are in the midst of our studies, or working in a hard parish, or watching community life change around us, it is easy to ask, “What on earth was God up to, calling me to this? Has he made a mistake? Have I made a mistake? Where is God in this chaos?” The answer is, he is there, right in the middle of it, in the densest part of the chaos. We can’t see him. We can’t sense him, but he called us to this and he must be there. So we get on with this call and follow where it goes. If we keep our eyes open we will find God in the middle of it and life working out well around us.
It is easy to wax lyrical about the call of God for it is a wonderful thing. But we remember how hard it has often been for people in the bible who received God’s call. Abraham wandered back and forth, never finding a true home. Moses led the people for 40 years in the desert. The first disciples spent 3 years walking round that hot dry country in Palestine. That was hard work, often sleeping in uncomfortable places, not sure of meals, wondering what Jesus was up to. Was he really the Messiah or was he somehow cheating them? When it all came to an end on the Cross it seemed like disaster. They had lost their wonderful friend and seen all their hopes die. Yet, a few days later they found that wasn’t so. He rose from the dead. That didn’t mean that life suddenly became easy. It probably became harder – travelling in the Middle East and then round the Mediterranean with actively hostile Jewish and Roman groups getting in the way. Life didn’t become easy but it was exciting. You only need to read Paul’s letters, or the Gospels to see they were full of joy.
It is the joy we must think about when we think about God’s Call. We are programmed to think of the problems, to complain about how hard it is. We judge things by human standards and forget that God is with us. How can we follow God’s call day after day unless we continually remind ourselves that God is here? Yes, God is here. That is the miracle of this Call.
As I began this sermon in Zimbabwe perhaps we could finish there. One of the heroes of my life, as my brethren at least will know, is John Bradburn. He followed the call of God from an Anglican vicarage into the Roman church then out to what was then Rhodesia. He lived in the presence of God, always joyful, full of praise. Loving the world around him and singing songs of praise. John had three ambitions in life: to care for lepers, to die in a Franciscan habit and to die a martyr. He achieved all three. I met him when he was caring for lepers pouring out his love on these old deformed people. He became a Franciscan tertiary and soon afterwards he was taken out and shot by guerrilla fighters. He was too dangerous for them. Following God is serious. We cannot know where it will go. But if we follow with all our heart we will find joy in strange places. Amen.