God is Faithful

It’s always hard to get back in the groove after the Christmas/New Year’s break. Like Holy Week in the church, there is a flurry of preparation for extra services, attendance by people who only show up on major holidays (who are all those faces, anyway?), and the weariness that comes from staying up too late. For R and me, there’s also trying to keep up with N’s schedule when he’s home. It all shows up in the dog: she’s exhausted. And so Christmas, Epiphany, and the Baptism of Jesus have come and gone before I get around to writing another blog entry. Great subjects to write about – someday. By now we have returned to seven weeks of green “ordinary time.”

Yet even ordinary time is blessed by God. “The Lord called me before I was born,” Isaiah writes, “while I was still in my mother’s womb he named me.” Well, you may say, that’s true for a great prophet like Isaiah, but it doesn’t include the likes of us. Unfortunately, we don’t get off that easily. St. Paul, also “called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God,” extends God’s call to everyone who receives his letter: “to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.”

“God is faithful,” Paul writes; “by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” The Gospel of John gives a very literal example of that. Two disciples of John the Baptist were hanging around him one day, when a man named Jesus walked by. “Behold, the Lamb of God!” John said, and that got their attention. They took off after Jesus, who heard the commotion, turned around, and asked them what they were looking for. Too embarrassed to say “Uh, you?” they simply asked him where he was staying. He replied, “Come and see,” and they followed along. One of the disciples was Andrew, who went to get his brother Simon. Jesus took one look at Simon and gave him a new name. “You are to be called Cephas [=Peter].”

Simon Peter was lucky that his brother was looking out for him. How many people are waiting for an invitation from us to come and see Jesus? “There’s a place I go that changes my whole week, and just might change my whole life. Come and see.” God calls us; God calls everyone. It’s best to be aware of it. Then we aren’t spending our lives seeking God where God is not to be found, living lives that are not fulfilling, not being the person God knows us to be.

We can no longer follow Jesus literally, as Andrew and Peter did. The way is not so obvious. Yet it helps to remember that even those who lived in the presence of Jesus stumbled along. Even Isaiah, so sure of his call, could write: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.” Yet Isaiah knew that God is faithful, for he immediately added: “yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”

That’s the key, isn’t it? God is faithful. Even when I walk the other way, when I think that I cannot be the person God has known me to be since before I was born, God is still there, patiently waiting for me to return. And so I turn back. May you, too, remember the faithfulness of God and turn back. God will be there.

Epiphany 2: Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42. For those who like words, “rock” is Cephas in Aramaic and Petros (Peter) in Greek. This isn’t the last time Jesus will play on Simon’s new name.