Mark 1:14-20
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 25 January, 2009
Third Sunday after Epiphany
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 How many of you watched the presidential inauguration this past Tuesday? Nearly two million people gathered on the National Mall in Washington and millions more watched it on television or listened to it on the radio. It was the most-watched presidential inauguration in American history, and there seemed to be a special spirit among those watching it. People greeted each other with hugs and broke out into song together, even if they had never met before.
One newscaster described it as “a family reunion” for the United States, where everyone gets together to celebrate and get to know each other again. For me, it felt a lot like church. Perfect strangers greeting each other as though they were old friends, singing together, celebrating together. A sense that we were renewing ourselves for the hard work ahead. ...Don’t we do that sort of thing in church every Sunday?
Then there was President Obama’s inauguration address, which was very sermon-like. As I read this morning’s Gospel lesson, I realized that Obama could have been preaching a sermon on Jesus’ words. His inaugural address was a national call for repentance and a call to serve.
The words we hear from Jesus this morning can be divided into two parts, as can Obama’s speech. The first part is the call to repentance. Jesus tells his listeners that “the time is fulfilled” and that they must “repent and believe in the good news.” President Obama tells us that “the time has come” and calls for repentance: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”1 He goes on to talk about how we must turn away from greed, irresponsibility, and childish ways.
The second part of our Gospel reading, and Obama’s address, is a call to discipleship and service. Jesus approaches some fishermen near the Sea of Galilee and tells them “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” We are told that immediately they dropped what they were doing and followed him and we understand this as Jesus calling his disciples.
In a similar way, President Obama calls the American people to serve: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”2 He goes on to talk about the hard work we will do together to make our country great again.
It’s probably no accident that Obama’s speech sounds like a sermon. He is an avowed Christian (he belonged to a United Church of Christ congregation for twenty years) and a former community organizer with a passion for service. His background showed through his address. I suspect that his speechwriters have church backgrounds too.
I was inspired by the speech on Tuesday and felt like the whole celebration was an enormous, worldly church service. But it was not church. It was a secular celebration and the president’s inaugural address was not a sermon. I can liken Obama’s call to hard work to Jesus’ call to discipleship, but Obama’s speech was not directly based on Jesus’ words, nor was he calling the American people to Christian discipleship or service.
So, how do the two differ? How do we differentiate the work we are called to do as Christians from the work that a politician calls us to do as citizens? How we distinguish between the community service we do as citizens and the service we do as Christians? Both may involve working in soup kitchens (maybe even the same soup kitchen). Both involve coming together as a human community. But the work we do as citizens differs from the work we do as Christians primarily because we do it for different reasons.
When the President of the United States (or some other secular leader) calls us to work together, they are calling upon us to believe in the common good: the nation, or the city, or Planet Earth. We are working together to uphold ideals that people of any faith can have. We are serving our fellow human beings because we, too, are human. But when we respond to Jesus’ call to discipleship -- when we drop what we are doing and follow him -- we are doing so because we believe that Jesus is the Lord of our life. We are serving humankind because we believe that God created humankind in God’s own image. We are doing this hard work because we believe the truth of the Gospel.
These two reasons for service and hard work are not mutually exclusive. As a Christian, when President Obama serves his fellow human beings he is undoubtedly doing so, in part, because of Jesus’ call to discipleship. So, too, can we engage in community service both because we believe in the ideals of a nation and because we believe in the truth of the Gospel. But as Christians our first priority should be to Christ. This may mean we have to make difficult choices. The fishermen Jesus approached by the Sea of Galilee were going about their business, catching fish and making themselves a meager living. But they dropped all of that in order to follow Christ. Their decision cannot have been an easy one. We, too, are compelled to listen for that call, and it may mean that we will be called away from the good work we do in our every day lives. God may be calling us to new and challenging things -- things that we never would have imagined doing. Our job right now is to listen for that call. What is Christ calling you to do? What changes will you need to make in your life so that you can respond?
As President Obama said in his address, we are in the midst of difficult times. It would seem that now is the time to buckle down and work hard at whatever we are doing. But God may be calling us to new work. We must never become too busy with our “hard work” that we stop listening for the voice of God and the call of Christ. We must embrace the challenges that we currently face, but we must do so with our eyes and ears always open to respond to the new challenges to which we are called. Is Christ calling you to something new? Watch, listen, think, and pray.
Now let us pray.
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1 “Transcript - Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address.” 20 Jan., 2009. The New York Times. 24 Jan., 2009
2 Ibid.
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