Rooted and Called

Mary Elizabeth Moore: a sermon preached at STH on Jan 29, 2009

School of Theology, BU – 21 January 2009
Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Jeremiah 5:7-8; Mark 1:14-20

Roots—

Anchoring plants in rock and soil,
Bearing nutrition for a plant’s daily toil,
Spreading rhizomes through sand and clay,
Binding old plants with those of today.

BU Roots—

Anchoring peoples in prophetic soil,
Bearing nurture for intellectual toil,
Creating knowledge and spreading its sway,
Binding yesterday’s visions with dreams of today.

Inspiring Roots—

Celebrating the “firsts” of yesteryear
When Boston University was without a peer
In teaching diverse peoples of global renown –
People whose legacies have been profound,
People like Shaw and Harkness and King,
Who gave their lives so freedom could ring.

Challenging Roots—

Burrowing deeply in spiritual pools,
Spreading their reach toward inclusive goals,
Seeking the waters of justice streams,
Daring to stretch toward “impossible” dreams,
Bearing the courage from lives of old,
Who dare us now to be prophetic and bold.

We are a people rooted and called—rooted in the prophetic, intellectual, engaged traditions of Boston University and the School of Theology. We are a people rooted and called in the promises of God for a New Creation crafted by love, shaped by justice, and propelled by peace. We are a people rooted and called—called toward visions we can barely see, toward religious practices of the past that are barely remembered or those of the future that are still being formed. Yet, the roots nourish our call. We are called to draw from those roots to find the grounding, nourishing, challenging spirit to act boldly in a world that badly needs the best of our Christian faith—the best of all religious traditions—and the conversion that comes when we drink the good waters of the past and dare to walk boldly into the future.

The New Testament text illumines this connection between roots and calls. First we learn from Mark’s story that John the Baptist has been arrested. What follows is not a sweet call story for gentle times. In the contentious context of John’s arrest, Jesus comes to Galilee proclaiming the Good News, supposedly the same good news that had placed John in harm’s way. Indeed, Mark’s description of Jesus’ message is much like his earlier description of John’s words. Jesus says: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:15, NRSV). This is a trouble-making message, speaking of the nearness of God’s kingdom and the need for people to repent and believe. It troubles the powers that be (the kingdom that is), and it troubles the comfortable habits of thought and action that people have held so long that they no longer question them.

As the next scene opens, we see Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee, where he sees the brothers Simon and Andrew, who are fishermen. They are minding their fisherman business, casting nets into the sea, when Jesus calls and invites them to become fishers of people. I have always thought of this as a simple metaphor that would speak to fisher folk, but my reading this time has shown me something fresh. Jesus seems to be calling Simon and Andrew to draw upon their distinctive roots as fishermen as they move into the new vocation to which he is calling them. They are to be fishermen still, drawing upon their body wisdom to reach out to other people and to participate in Jesus’ work. On the one hand, my reading of the text may be too simple. In fact, the call of James and John that follows does not have a similar pattern. Jesus does not make a connection between their work of mending nets and the new vocations to which he is calling them. On the other hand, the call stories do reveal much about the ways of Jesus, who frequently asked people to rise to seemingly impossible calls, but who asked them to draw upon the roots that were already planted.

Such a reading is important to Boston University’s School of Theology, where we inherit our forebears’ passion for justice. Some of these forebears became leaders of the human race in the movements of freedom, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrated on Monday and whose legacy reached a new moment of realization on Tuesday in the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama. Now we face the challenges of Wednesday!

Some of the early STH leaders created new paths for women. Anna Howard Shaw graduated from the School of Theology in 1878 and from BU’s medical school in 1885. She was the first woman ordained by a Methodist body, the Protestant Methodist Church, was an orator for social justice, and was a leader in the movement for women’s suffrage. Another path-making BU woman was Georgia Harkness, who was one of the first professional women theologians in the world, who was the most persistent theological voice behind the ordination of women in the Methodist Church, who pioneered in ecumenical relationships, and who raised critical theological questions that were not even considered by others until after her death. She is known, for example, for having said that “the sooner [the doctrine of original sin] disappears, the better it will be for theology.” Some of the BU School of Theology leaders were less visible in the world than these three, but were committed prophets all the same. One STH grad of 60 years ago asked the organist in his Portland, Oregon, church to play the BU alma mater every Sunday morning as he rose to preach. Only he knew the words to the music that she played, but he needed the inspiration of BU’s prophetic tradition as he opened his mouth to preach the words that God had engraved on his soul. These are our roots!

Roots and calls are more challenging than we might think. Living from our roots requires memory, yes, but it also requires trust in God, commitment to God’s work, and continual growing into the ways of God. After Jesus’ call to Simon and Andrew, they spent the remainder of their lives learning to be fishers of people. James and John spent the remainder of their lives learning to mend the nets of the early Christian community. Consider the calls on our lives that arise from our roots and from the biblical texts.

• Trust in God: Our most primal call is to trust in God. The roots that are life-giving are those that come from God. In the words of Jeremiah 5:7-8: “Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. [The tree] shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.” Trust in God is the beginning and the root of all that is to come, but it opens us to another call.
• Commit to God’s work: For plants to bear fruit, they need roots with deep commitment—roots that persistently reach toward life. For people to bear fruit, we need roots that are deeply committed to living in God’s soil and God’s work—roots that we renew repeatedly and redirect as times change, persistently reaching toward God and seeking to follow the paths where God leads. Barack Obama reminded our nation of failed commitments in his inaugural address. He described America’s past willingness to suspend national ideals “for expedience’s sake,” and he chided the U. S. public for “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” Commitment to God requires people to live from roots that are life-giving and God-bearing, which does indeed require hard choices. The Jonah text is a strong reminder of the choices and responses that are needed. In Jonah we read: “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you’” (3:1-2). As with Jonah, God persistently calls us back to God’s work, even when our commitment falters. God calls a second, third, and thirty-third time.
• Grow continually into the ways of God: This powerful persistence of God points to yet a third call on our lives—the call to grow. In the story of Jonah, Jonah finally did what God had asked; he preached repentance to the people of Ninevah. His heart may not have been in it, but he did it. To his surprise (and dismay!), the people of Ninevah also responded: “they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth” (3:5). What is more, God responded to their actions and “changed God’s mind.” God did not bring calamity upon Ninevah after all (3:10). Jonah knew that preaching in Ninevah would be hard and that God might well change courses, which, of course, God did! This was not an easy moment for Jonah. Growing is messy and unpredictable! The challenges continue in the Gospel of Mark. Mark 1:14 reveals Jesus proclaiming good news in Galilee, where John has just gotten into trouble for doing the same. As the story unfolds, Jesus calls four fishermen and they all respond, but this is only the beginning. Indeed, Mark portrays the disciples throughout his gospel as facing one challenge—one growth opportunity—after another.

In popular conceptions, growing is considered a gradual, non-demanding movement, but you can ask any teenager or toddler how hard it is to grow. We can also see the challenges to grow in one of God’s amazing saints, Martin Luther King, Jr., who hallowed these halls. In King, we see all of God’s calls interwoven: to trust in God, commit to God’s work, and keep on growing. King is well remembered for his “I Have a Dream” speech, but some King scholars think his “Beyond Vietnam” speech was just as significant. In 1967 when King preached against the Vietnam War, he revealed himself as growing in his connection to God’s roots of freedom. He was not content to do one important thing in his life; he was compelled to move where God led in the next period of time. He said in “Beyond Vietnam”:

[A]s I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. … ‘Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?,’ they ask. … [S]uch questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling … I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight. … A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle [for freedom]. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor both black and white through the poverty program. … Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated … I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.¹

These words of Martin Luther King, Jr., are words for us still today, as are the words of Jeremiah, Jonah, and Mark. Our roots are our legacy. Will we cut ourselves off from them? Will we relegate our roots to be a stump on which to rest or a beautiful artifact of the past? We do have another choice. We can turn to our roots for strength. We can draw life from them as we struggle to live fully, to give ourselves fully, and to follow God’s paths wherever they lead us into the future? May it be so!

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1 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” delivered to Clergy and Laity Concerned, Riverside Church, New York, 4 April 1967, transcribed by Michael E. Eidenmuller, http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm (accessed 15 January 2009).