Stories and Nets

(The sermon series we're doing right now is following the lectionary through the Gospel of Mark and this is inspired in part by the passage from this morning: Mark 1: 16-20. The sermon may have made this exact point, but I wasn't listening as much as I should have because I was too busy being distracted by my overly dramatic, slightly tortured inner monologue. Sorry about that.) 

There are stories that we tell over and over because we love them. A hero fights a monster and saves the day. A lost soul in search of love finds it through mishap and adventure. Against all odds, the most unexpected person triumphs. These are our fairy tales, our fables, our novels, our movies, our bedtime stories. We come back to them time and again. 

There’s a story that we love to tell in the church. It’s a call story. It’s when the hero of your tale hears God’s plan for their life clear and true and willingly follows. It’s the story of Abraham, Moses, Samuel, of the fishermen who became disciples and the Christians who followed after. Sure, everyone has bumps along the way, but everyone picks up and follows the Lord when he calls. That’s what we’re meant to emulate; we’re meant to be faithful and obedient on a life-altering scale for the good of the people around us and those who will come after.

But we all know that the stories we tell don’t always reflect the realities we live. Some souls don’t find love and spend their whole lives wondering what was so wrong with them, when the fault really lies with the people who assume love is water and not wine. Some heroes fail to slay the dragon and the townspeople have to find a way to rebuild away from the charred remains of the only home they ever knew. Some giants win. And sometimes, when Jesus calls, we stay behind to tend the boat.

I have a lifetime of practicality behind me, the kind of practicality that worries about that worship leader’s microphone cord wrapping around her ankles as she spins in the Spirit on stage, the kind of practicality that thinks about how much it must cost to build those houses we’re sending our mission team to build. I look at the numbers, I think about the logistics, and I ponder what would happen if we all dropped our nets to follow Jesus because in all practicality, we can’t do that. Someone’s got to pay for the upkeep of this building. Someone’s got to bankroll your ministry. And if we had success beyond our wildest dreams and gathered every human together on this earth in a faithful crowd, someone would still need to leave the communion table to bake the bread and crush the grapes. We need people to do the jobs that need doing. Mary could take that break to listen at the feet of Jesus because Martha was working. 

That’s why so many of the stories I’ve been told during my life worm into my heart and rankle me. How did Papa Zebedee’s fishing business fair when James and John left the boat? If we let the dead bury the dead, how many carrion birds will burst from overeating? And in these hero’s quests, when someone goes out to find themselves or whatever their goal is, who takes care of the tasks they had been entrusted with before they decided to leave their town? When you go off on a journey, you make more work for other people who can’t go because you just left. It’s a simple task to spin these tales as stories of selfishness, perpetrated by dreamers who never really understood the value of the work they did in the first place. 

I know it’s an easily solved complaint. We all have different gifts and some are meant to follow while others stay behind. Everyone can’t change the world- we’d cancel each other out. The best faith, I think, balances the practical with the knowledge that some moments pull us out of the necessary into a glorious impracticality. It’s good to have a faith that looks out for that. And I guess I’m not really mad at those who leave the boat for putting the rest of us in a difficult position; I’m mad because I want to be one of them. 

Every time I hear or see or sing one of those call stories, my heart pounds. I want to leave everything and go somewhere new, to follow a leader, a cause, a dream, anything that takes me away with a purpose. I want to throw my life at something and hope that it sticks. Theoretically, I know there’s another person who can do everything I do and that this life I’ve been leading, it’ll be fine when I go. I’m not leaving my net abandoned in the water. The practicality is satisfied and I can go off on my well-earned adventure. I know that, I know that, I know that and yet I still chase my fears around in circles until we’re both exhausted, collapsing in a pile, looking up at that shiny thing that is a call and a purpose and wondering why there isn’t one there for me. 

But not everyone’s story is a call story and not every call story is the same. We play with our narratives, bend them into an arc that follows our lives just a little more accurately. I know that I’m still a work in progress, that this is not the time to sit back and reflect on the journey thus far because there’s not much journey to see yet. But there will be.

And one day, I’ll tell that story.