3rd Sun after Epiphany Year A

3rd Sunday after the Epiphany- Year A January 26, 2020 Our gospel reading for today begins: “When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea…” At this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been baptized by John in the Jordan River; he has been driven into the wilderness to face temptations, and he has just come out of the wilderness to begin his ministry when our reading for today picks up and he hears the news about John’s arrest. So what does Jesus do? He moves. He had been raised in Nazareth, a different region in Galilee, and Matthew tells us that he makes his home in Capernaum by the sea. Last year when we made our trip to the Holy Land, our tour group visited Capernaum. It was the end of the day, and we had spent the whole first day on a bus driving around Galilee, following the edge of the Sea of Galilee. We had seen the ruins of a huge Roman complex right in the heart of Galilee; we had visited the purported sights of some of Jesus’s miracles and teachings, and with less than an hour left of daylight, we pulled up in Capernaum. As we followed the crowds, I stopped at the entrance to take a picture of the sign: “Caphernaum the town of Jesus.” I wandered around an excavated synagogue and peered underneath a modern church which had been built over the ruins that were thought to be the home of Simon Peter’s mother in law. I walked past the large bronze statue of Peter to look out over the Sea of Galilee, all close together within the space of one of our squares in downtown Savannah. As I wandered around this place where Jesus had chosen to make his home, I thought about what it means to make a place home. Matthew suggests that Jesus chooses to make his home in Capernaum in fulfillment of the prophecy. But we all know that there is much more that goes into making a place home. Home is our comfortable place, where we are known and safe. It’s a place whose landscape and surroundings are familiar. Home is a place where we have friends and family and pets others who care about us, and home is a place that is layered with memories and experiences. It is the place where we can be most fully ourselves. (I know certain people who say that the first thing they do when they get home is take off certain articles of clothing!) This is why when we face disruptions in the places that we consider to be home, then these disruptions can be the most unsettling. However, in life as in this gospel reading, we see God calling, God working in and through the disruptions. Jesus heeds God’s call to make his home elsewhere as a result of the disruption of his cousin’s imprisonment. The disciples heed Jesus’s call to follow him, in the midst of their orderly, homely lives—doing the work of their families, called from what they have always known to lives of disruption in following Jesus. Those of us who have ever been in churches that are suffering from conflicts can relate to Paul’s appeal to the conflicted church in Corinth. When church feels like home and disruptions happen there, it is hard to hear God’s call in the midst of the clamoring factions. So Paul reminds them of their common call to preach the good news of the cross of Jesus Christ. He reminds them how God works through the ultimate disruption to bring about salvation for all and how we are invited to be a part of that. Our collect for today reminds us that each and every one of us is called by God, and we ask God for the grace to “answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works.” For this week, I invite you to think about your call and to think about the call of this church in terms of home and disruption. Where do you feel most at home right now physically, mentally, and spiritually? Then look at the ways that God is disrupting you in your life? It can be in those places or it can be elsewhere? Another way of asking this question is “what’s keeping you up at night?” Then pray about the ways that God might be calling you to a new way of being in and through the disruptions. In January of 2001, I met with the Bishop and he told me he saw in me a call to the priesthood that had also been seen by my community. He told me he was sending me to seminary that fall, and we talked about some practicalities. Before we finished our time together, his canon to the ordinary, who had been sitting there with a hymnal open on his lap the whole time, told me he wanted to share with me the words to his favorite hymn. It’s hymn 661—“they cast their nets in Galilee” and it was written by William Alexander Percy, a fellow Mississippian who had known his own share of disruptions and call in his life. In my 19 years of trying to faithfully follow God’s call in my life, these words have affirmed and upheld and haunted me: They cast their nets in Galilee Just off the hills of brown Such happy simple fisherfolk Before the Lord came down Contented peaceful fishermen Before they ever knew The peace of God That fill’d their hearts Brimful and broke them too. Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, Homeless, in Patmos died. Peter, who hauled the teeming net, Head-down was crucified. The peace of God, it is no peace, But strife closed in the sod, Yet, let us pray for but one thing– The marvelous peace of God.