Tricia's Sermon for 1/25

Epiphany 3B

The Rev. Patricia Templeton



The Broken Key and Bad Carpentry

It was on a hot, humid sultry August day almost 18 years ago that I left Nashville to move to Sewanee to begin seminary. Loyal friends had come over early that morning to help me load all of my worldly possessions into the rented moving van.

Now the apartment I had lived in for seven years was empty, the van and the cars were full, and it was time to leave. But first I wanted to walk through my empty apartment one more time to make sure I had left nothing behind and to say goodbye to the home that I had enjoyed so much.

After the final inspection was complete, I walked out and put my key in the doorknob for the last time and turned it. As I started to pull the key out, it broke in the lock.

I stood there looking at the top half of the broken key that I held in my
hand, and I realized that there could not be a better symbol for what I was about to do.

At age 35, I was leaving behind a career that had brought me enjoyment, satisfaction and success – not to mention a steady paycheck – leaving behind a wide network of friends; leaving behind a congregation that I loved – all to go to seminary.

As I looked at the broken key in my hand, I realized with sudden clarity that I was making a significant break in my life. Just as now I could not go back into what had been my home, I also would not be able to return to my former life.

Even if I came back to Nashville after seminary – which at the time was what I thought would happen – life would not be the same.

Geographically, I was only moving 90 miles south on Interstate 24, but the other changes in my life could not be measured by geography.

I still keep that broken key on my keychain as a reminder to myself that God continues to call me to new ways of life.

The broken key could also be a symbol for Simon and Andrew and James and John, the fishermen who left their nets, their boats and their families to follow Jesus.

The story of Jesus’ calling of his first four disciples is simple and dramatic. We have no indication that any of these fisher folk knew who Jesus was before that day. There is no record of Jesus wowing them with miracles or astonishing them with his insights and teaching.

All we know is that Jesus said to them, “Follow me.”

And they did.

Simply, directly, dramatically they break away from their old life and begin a new one by following Jesus.

This story of Simon and Andrew and James and John and their dramatic response of obedience to Jesus’ call is often held up as the paragon of what it means to be a disciple, of what it means to respond to God’s call in our lives.

And yet, if we take this story of the call of the four fisher folk as the only way to follow Jesus, it is easy to dismiss it as irrelevant to our own lives.

“Yes,” we might think, “it was OK for Simon and Andrew and the others to leave everything to follow Jesus. But I can’t do that. I have a spouse and children and a mortgage and responsibilities at work.

“I can’t walk out on all of that on some quest to follow Jesus. That is not being responsive to God. It’s being irresponsible to everyone around me.”

And most of the time, those who think that are exactly right. Abandonment of families and responsibilities is not the way to discipleship.

But if we think that because we, unlike the fishermen, cannot simply walk away from our current lives into a dramatic new life, we are let off the hook of being disciples, we are very wrong.

Jesus’ call to the fisherfolk of Galilee was indeed more dramatic than anything most of us will experience. But the call to the disciples is similar to God’s call to every person in every age.

Each one of us is called to some life task.

We will not all be called to a radical change of life. For most of us the task of answering God’s call must be done within the life situation in which we find ourselves.

The word vocation is from the Latin word vocare, which means to call. We often use the word vocation in terms of religious lives and works, but the truth is that each one of us has a vocation, a task to which we have been called.

Our jobs – whether they are at home, as a volunteer, in the business world, at school, or in the community – are the primary context in which many of us work out our Christian obedience.

One of the best Sunday School classes in which I have ever participated was a series on faith in the workplace.

On a succession of Sundays, parishioners from a variety of professions, including homemakers, businesspeople, lawyers, educators, journalists, and other groups spoke about how they lived out their faith in their daily work, how they made the connection between what they professed Sunday mornings and what they did on Monday mornings.

Some had always had a sure sense of their work as vocation, of a living out their faith in their lives. Others were at first unsure of what the connection between faith and work might be, or were hesitant to talk about it.

But as the weeks went be we all began to realize that in every form of work there is the opportunity to serve God.

As Martin Luther said many centuries ago, “There is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a shoemaker or an apostle – all are pleasing to God.”

Among the most important work that those of us who do work in the church can do is to help others make that connection between faith and our daily lives and routines, between Sunday and Monday.

The preacher at my ordination service many years ago reminded me of this, quoting the British writer Dorothy Sayers, who bemoaned the church’s shortcomings in this area.

“In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation,” Sayers wrote more than a half century ago.

“She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, uninterested in religion.

“But is that astonishing?” she asks. “How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?

“The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.

“What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

“Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement certainly – but what use is all of that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry?”

There are times when God’s call to discipleship results in the dramatic, radical gesture – and so we have the Albert Schweitzers, and Mother Theresas, and Martin Luther Kings, the Andrews and Simons, and Johns and James, the forgotten missionaries and martyrs throughout history.

But for most of us, the call to discipleship, the call to follow Jesus, means taking a look at where we are now, and figuring out how in our daily routines we can live in a way that increases the reality of God’s love in the world.

And when we begin to do that we may soon realize that our lives – and the lives of those around us – are indeed radically changed.

Amen.