Nearer Than Near

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday After Epiphany, Baptism of Our Lord, January 22, 2023 by the Rev. Holly Huff.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” We hear today in Matthew’s gospel the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. After his baptism, where he hears the Father calling him Beloved and sees the Holy Spirit alight on him like a dove, he heads into the wilderness, where he is tempted and purified, learning to rely on God alone, tuning himself to receive God’s will by grace rather than impose his own on the world by seeking for power, reputation, or security. Returning from the desert, his teaching ministry begins as he proclaims the good news with these words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is his slogan, Jesus’s refrain here at the beginning in Galilee. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” John the Baptist, John the Forerunner had proclaimed the same in the wilderness, and now after John’s arrest, Jesus takes it up in the towns, by the Sea of Galilee, in earshot of merchants and fishermen. 

The kingdom of heaven has come near: beware lest you hear this as heralding a pie-in-the-sky other worldly heavenly reward! That’s exactly the message, actually. Repent—which simply means to turn or change your mind—Repent, for the kingdom of heaven you think is so far off has come near. God’s dream of all creation living together as Beloved Community, knit together in one Body, has come near. On earth as it is in heaven, God’s will being done, not an escape from the sandy salt-crusted fish-gutted stuff of our lives as we know them but an invitation to enter fully into this world, this moment, and find God radiant and shining at the heart of it: within each of our hearts, calling our name, within every created thing and fully embodied in the person of Jesus, walking along the seashore in Galilee. God become human, divinity incarnate in a person, the Word in the beginning made flesh and dwelling among us: yes, the kingdom of heaven has come very near, indeed!

And here are Simon and Andrew, casting their nets into the sea. By this point in our Salt Lake City quasi-winter I’m dreaming of spending some time at the seashore myself, that sounds pretty nice right now! But Simon and Andrew are not enjoying my fantasy tropical beach sweepstakes vacation. They are laborers up to their arms in their daily work, hauling in the catch of the day. Bread and butter fisherfolk, not particularly extraordinary in any way we can discern. Jesus walks into their everyday ordinary activity and gently yet thoroughly disrupts the same-old same-old. Simon and Andrew drop their nets, compelled not by any great drama but by the person of Jesus himself. Love embodied, with salt in his hair. I feel keenly the pull of Jesus’s momentum here, as he walks through this shore scene and draws them along in his wake, trawling behind him. “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people,” he says, and they drop their nets, immediately, and wade out of the shallows to follow him. It’s the same momentum we saw in last week’s Gospel of John account of the call of the disciples, who shadow John the Baptist’s pointing to follow Jesus. Jesus walks past Peter and Andrew then looks back over his shoulder where they are trailing behind him, again almost magnetically. Jesus holds them in his loving gaze, draws out their deepest longing, and invites them to stay with him: “Come and see,” he says, and they drop their itineraries and spend the whole day with him.

“Come and see,” “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” There is in these invitations Jesus holds out the promise of a different life, a life that is still quite ordinary yet centered on the ceaseless current of receiving the profligate, overflowing love of the living God and then pouring it out again for others. What is it that keeps us from living in the nearer kingdom even now? Jesus says it’s already here. But the disciples are occupied, their hands are tied, they have to drop something to answer the call. They have to drop their nets. What are the nets that keep us busy, distracted and occupied with self, missing the love that is the bedrock reality? What constricting stories limit our perception, entangle us and hold us captive? We cast our nets anytime we impose what we want onto the world as a demand rather than receiving what it gives as a gift. Our steady stream of judgements about how we think we should be and how the world should be: that’s a net we cast over and over. How about our wish to be something other than ordinary: we go fishing for ourselves, trying to dredge up someone who’s finally good enough, trying to tie up our identity once and for all with the nets of affiliation, family, nation, religion, profession, all the endless tangles of “who I am!” We want something to show for ourselves. We throw the net again and again, hoping this time we’ll measure up. When the nets break, when they fail to hold the measure of reality, instead of relinquishing what clearly can’t capture the radiant uniquely beloved reality of who we are, we usually sit down and try to mend our nets, fix up the story, draw the knots tighter! Two problems with this: a) it is exhausting, and, b) it also doesn’t work. These tangled nets strangle us and they capture and clutch at other people, too. Habits of demanding, habits of imposing what we want are habits of violence, that at their most extreme yield the terrible fruit like last night’s shooting in Monterey Park, where a gunman shot and killed 10 people at a Lunar New Year celebration, with others wounded. Caught in a terrible net.

Jesus’s call to us is to follow him on the easy way. Instead of casting the net over and over, fishing for yourself (and tangling up everyone around you), you can drop it altogether, like Simon and Andrew, and let Jesus show you who you are. The kingdom of heaven, so very near, emerges when we release the constricting stories we impose on the world. When we’re anxiously mending our nets, trying to cinch up what life itself has torn through, the sons of Zebedee show us how to get out of the boat and leave the nets behind. The disciples learn who they are as they walk with Jesus, drawn along in his wake. Simon even gets a Jesus nickname, and from then on he’s called Peter. Peter, the Rock. He’s not just feeding the town on rainbow trout anymore but nourishing his neighbors with the word of belovedness, proclaiming good news, truly fishing for people and meeting their hunger. Peter gets to be Peter—Jesus’s loving, comprehending gaze sees in his earnest petulant wild character something rocklike, incongruously faithful and stable—but it could just as well be Simon. Why shouldn’t your new name be exactly the one you have now, spoken back to you in love, redeemed on God’s lips? God loves you, as you are, sees you as you are and loves you.

The disciples-to-be in their fishing boats are not particularly extraordinary people, and thank God, because neither are we. You don’t need to be a special kind of holy person to follow Jesus. Looking at the people he spent the most time with, he seems to be especially fond of the average and the outcast. The call to follow him is open to all of us, and he speaks it to us still, in the midst of what is daily, ordinary, even “boring”. At home, garlic sizzling in the pan says, “Drop the net.” Drop the story, and find me here. Tending to a sick spouse, “Follow me.” The kingdom of heaven has come near, and the same-old same-old becomes entirely fresh. Sorting through the mail, rinsing coffee cups, “Follow me.” Among spreadsheets and bus routes and after-school pick-up: “Follow me, follow me, follow me.” Walk just one city block with ears to hear and it will be spoken a thousand times, among leaves disintegrating into snow melting into muddy sod, spoken by potholes (there are some spectacular ones on 100 South right now), spoken in fresh graffiti, and by pigeons fluttering across the gray sifted January sky. “Follow me, and let me show you your life.” God calls us in the midst of the ordinary and meets us there.

We may despise our weakness as human beings, but God does not. The Incarnation is our guarantee of this. The kingdom of heaven has come near, Jesus has taken up our humanity and entered into it fully, vulnerable as we are, in order to show us divine love in human form, and divine love for the human form, in all of the fish-gut messiness that entails. German theologian and 20th-century martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about God’s embracing love for reality, all that is just as it is, including each of us, just as we are. Bonhoeffer writes: 

“Ecce homo—behold God become human, the unfathomable mystery of the love of God for the world. God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in [our] opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. God establishes a most intimate unity with this. God becomes human, a real human being. While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, [too,] real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves real people without distinction. God has no patience with our dividing the world and humanity according to our standards and imposing ourselves as judges over them. God leads us ad absurdum by becoming a real human being and a companion of sinners….God stands beside the real human being and the real world against all their accusers.” (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 84)

So often we are our own accusers. Tangled in the fishing nets of our sick stories of who we should be and all the ways we’ve fallen short, we’re stuck, casting the same too-small constricting limiting frame over the vibrant dancing kingdom-of-heaven reality that wants to live in us. 

Jesus comes to break the yoke of oppression, to free us from accusers, even or especially when we accuse ourselves. We are called to breathe easy. God loves the ordinary-extraordinary you you were made to be. Repent, drop your nets, for the kingdom has come near! In Jesus it’s nearer than near. Nearer than near means you don’t have to go anywhere to get there. Not even to Galilee. You don’t have to do anything to make it true. God loves the real you, not some ideal version of the self you think you need to cook up before you deserve to be loved. It's given freely. The kingdom of heaven has arrived on your doorstep in giftwrap. It’s walking across the sandy stage of your life, pulling you along in its wake if you’ll let it, and Jesus’s voice in stereo is a perpetual invitation to leave the nets behind, as simple as opening your hand, and follow him into the life that is really life. 

Still utterly ordinary workaday stuff, but shining fresh with the glory of God, which will be revealed for all flesh to see together. Receiving it is the work of prayer. We drop our nets and rest in God’s love for this world over and over. All the embodied habits of Christian discipleship work on our perception, to open us to abundant life. Slowly freed from the frenzy of finding ourselves, receiving our name from God’s lips, we can actually meet each other. Relying on Jesus to show us who we are, we can start to love and serve our neighbor. Forgiveness, miracle of miracles, becomes possible. The ordinary world is revealed as exactly the kingdom of heaven, and living in it here, we can give ourselves away to nourish others as fishers of people, following the One who shows us how to love in that most ordinary-extraordinary truly human call: this is my Body, given for you.