Feast of St Andrew
Deuteronomy 30.11-14
Psalm 19.1-6
Romans 10.8-18
Matthew 4.18-22
@Suzanne Grimmett
What does it mean to be called?
Judging by the St Andrew’s Day Gospel reading we share, to be called is to have your life utterly disrupted. Andrew was just doing what he always did to make a living and help feed his family and community, casting his fishing nets into the Sea of Galilee with his brother Simon’s help. We can only speculate about how much these brothers knew Jesus before this moment when they apparently walk away from everything they have known at a word.
There is a theme of word, language and communication in all the readings we have today. We are reminded from different ancient contexts in our New and Old Testament readings, far apart in space and time, that “the word is very near you”, on our lips and in our heart.
What is this “word” and how do we recognise its presence within and amongst us? And how are we to respond to its call?
All too often this concept of the Word of God, imbued with great cosmic meaning, has been reduced to mean just ‘the Bible’. To make this reduction, as if everything we need can be found in scripture alone, is to leave ourselves prey to whatever interpretation our own cultural worldviews create, limited by the blinkered vision which is simply part of being human and cannot be fully overcome. We see this cultural lens at work in previous centuries, for example, when so many Christians argued that slavery was justified in scripture and therefore must be God-ordained. We might point to other beliefs, particularly around gender and sexuality, which are justified by scripture but in practice we know are unloving and unjust. We are finite, limited and mortal beings who do not have God’s eye view of everything. The call is not to certainty and nor is it to persist in the kind of doublethink required to embrace a literal reading of scripture when these sacred writings demand a different, deeper reading.
Neither is the idea of the call this word places on our lives about working really hard to believe impossible things and try to convince others to do likewise. Too often in recent centuries, particularly in the Protestant churches, we have made this call and our response about the words we speak of assent to propositions, and the words of assent we should try to get others to speak. But both call and response belong in a space not of coercion, but freedom.
The poetic and beautiful prologue to John’s Gospel of course gives us one of the biggest clues to how we are to understand this “Word of God”; a word which day and night communicates knowledge, and which has crept into our mouths and hearts. “In the beginning there was the Word”, we read, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
The scale of this understanding of “the Word” is cosmic, as the nature of Christ is cosmic. The Word of God is not a “what” but a “who”; the one who was in the beginning, before all things and yet took up mortal flesh within space and time in the man, Jesus of Nazareth.
This changes our understanding of “the Word” from something which we possess as objective knowledge to a relational knowledge which we embody and live; one which we know and are known by. Indeed, all creation declares this relational knowledge, as we hear in the beautiful Psalm 19;
1 The heavens declare the glory of God:
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork;
2 One day tells it to another:
and night to night communicates knowledge.
The Word of God is constantly being spoken, through creation, scripture and the unfolding incarnation of Christ in the world. Being relational, this movement is not one way. The Word does not go out without evoking a response in return. Jesus calls, “Follow me”, and Andrew and Simon left not only their nets, but all the life they had known. We can see this same call and response throughout Christian history, where the result is the creation of something entirely new.
Two clear examples of this may be found in the calling of St Francis and St Ignatius of Loyola. Francis in the 12th century heard the gospel and his response to the word of God was: ‘This is what I want, this is what I long for with all my heart.’ Francis’ life was one of continued calls where his life became ever more deeply a new incarnation of Christ as he responded relationally to the Word of God in his heart, in community and in nature.
Ignatius in the 16th century was, like Francis, a passionate individual who had sought glory and honour, but Ignatius’ journey was literally stopped by a cannon ball that left him with a long convalescence from a terrible injury. Pope Francis writes that there are;
…moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had their own “stoppage”, or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal.[1]
As so many of us have experienced with major life events, these moments generate a crisis that reveals what is in our hearts and what is most real and true. Both Francis and Ignatius described a transformation into something new through their response and surrendering to the grace of the call. We might say their becoming in Christ was a realisation of who they always were created to be.
I know I am always grateful for the ‘dailyness’ of Christianity. This call and response is not a once off encounter but an ongoing dance throughout our lives, and one that takes seriously the darkness in the world and indeed in our own hearts. We are always beckoned to begin again and lured with grace. Advent is a season where we invite light into dark places, recognising that ‘the light of God’s love is discernible everywhere’. It is a season where we are gathering our courage, our perseverance, and our best hopes for humanity and the world.
But the faith that is required to respond to the Word spoken within us and amongst all creation is not the same as certainty. Doubts are integral to any faith that is alive and speaking its word into a changing world. Religion can seem like it is imposing static worlds upon the real one at times when our fears lead us to shy away from the changing winds of Spirit and instead ossify our traditions and doctrines into idols. The Advent spirit invites us to release our false securities and constructed certainties, letting die all that is not real. The call and response that is the pattern of Christ’s engagement in our lives invites us to hope for that which we have not yet seen, even within ourselves, beckoning us to transformation and new beginnings. This portion of the poem Mutations by Louis MacNeice points to these new beginnings from the static worlds we have created, moments when the living water has gushed forth unexpectedly from carefully contained pools.
If there has been no spiritual change of kind
Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man
And none is looked for now while the millennial cool,
Yet each of us has known mutations in the mind
When the world jumped and what had been a plan
Dissolved and rivers gushed from what had seemed a pool.
For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;
The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation.
Our carefully enacted life scripts find themselves disrupted by the stranger waiting in the wings…or wandering past two fishermen casting their nets or unravelling the life plans of a wealthy young man or wounded soldier…or annunciating with the voice of an angel to a young woman from Nazareth. The call presses insistently and patiently for a response of faith. Yet to have faith is not to assent to propositions or believe impossible things, but rather to fall into relationship, open to encountering what is real and becoming real ourselves- the kind of real only possible in the presence of love.
So as we ponder the call of St Andrew and the challenge and grace of this Advent season, may we respond to the call to enflesh the Word anew through our lives and by our prayers. And may we hear the gentle voice of the one who is both stranger and friend, inviting us to follow.
+Amen
[1] Pope Francis, Let Us Dream