I love that passage from the Gospel of Mark we read this morning. It tells of Jesus' commanding presence and describes the reaction of some fishermen as he invites them to discipleship. In some ways the image shocks us. Jesus bids, "Follow me," and these tough, earthy, roust-abouts, without squawking, without glancing around, without requesting to consult their wives, their families, each other, without suggesting a contract to cover costs, failure or risk, without a high school education, a college diploma, a seminary degree, a psychological exam, or a denominational ordination credential, these rugged, independent, self- reliant fisherfolk drop their nets and launch off into a dramatic mid-life career change following Jesus.

In brooding over this startling story this week, I thought, with your sufferance, I might reflect for a moment on what the call of Jesus Christ has meant to me over the course of my own ministry. I have spent over a quarter of a century of it right here. So this morning, I beg your indulgence for a just a few minutes to share with you the story of one who, like those four on the Galilean shore, figuratively left his nets behind to follow what he believed to be the call of God to serve as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

I

We must insist, first of all, as does Mark, that Christ's message is absolutely the most important message we will ever confront. The most crucial, the most dynamic, the most empowering, the most vital message given us and our world is the one Jesus represents. Those four men in the boat hear that loud and clear. And what is the message? Just this: "The Realm of God is near; repent and hear the good news." That sentence encapsulates it all. It means a new world, a new community, a new way for men and women, races and nations to treat one another. A fresh approach to being human impinges on our life right now in the radical world-changing person of Jesus of Nazareth. Reshape your thinking, reorder your priorities, recast your values, turn away from the things occupying you now and throw your life onto Love's scales so that the human race might become the human family. Bet on the promise of God that Love at the heart of the universe will carry and surround you through whatever contingencies life brings forth, bear you though the challenges your Gospel choices beget, and provide mercy for you as you stumble and fail. But in gratitude and humility you continue your pilgrimage toward Christ's just and compassionate community.

What a message! What a Gospel! Talk about good news! That is the invitation, the beckoning, the exciting and marvelous privilege Jesus offers all of us wherever we may find ourselves in God's good creation. Mark directs the good news of God to all of us. So this morning we begin here.

II

But to hear and to respond to that message as those four fishermen did does not mean we all turn into minister types. Far from it. Wherever you are, whatever you do, wherever you live, however you make your living, your invitation to ministry, your career and vocation are no less an authentic opportunity to make the Gospel present and vibrant than my own.

Because you may teach school, broker securities, manage a company, litigate divorce, design software, sell ties, draw-up wills, write prescriptions, edit copy, compose short stories, wait tables, fill blue books, landscape homesteads, study for theses, serve on community boards-whatever-the quality and authenticity of your discipleship runs as deep as anything those of us in this so-called Christian ministry can claim.

So what are we clergy-types? Who are we? Lael and I-and Katrina, your time will come-we are two people you invite from among this Church community to do a work you would do yourselves if you did not have to make a living elsewhere. Essentially you are saying, "Jim, we want to know about Truth lying behind scripture. We want to understand more broadly what it means to be like Jesus. We want to probe more deeply and discern with other people this mysterious yet gracious, this profound yet healing presence in the cosmos we call God. We have our jobs to do, and for God's sake we want that to be your job. Help us do that!"

And yes, as I wrote in this quarter's Old South Reporter, three questions, I believe, stir in most church people. I suspect these questions propel my own spiritual pilgrimage and no doubt I impute them to you too-these three questions: "Is there any hope? Does anybody love me? and What must I do?" My ministry lies in working at providing clues unveiling answers to those questions. Be assured, however, it is simply a ministry among your ministries. This garb we wear up here, for instance, is not special or fancy liturgical wear denoting us as cultic priests, religious professionals, or spiritual gurus. These are secular, academic gowns denoting our office within the life of this congregation as teacher. These stoles represent the towel Jesus used to wipe the feet of his disciples and mean simply, we are the servants of the servants of God, namely you. Our religious credentials do not supersede yours. We make no claims to faith, hope or love that outdo yours. Indeed, we discover in this work that your faith, hope and love run deeper, more intensely, more radiantly, more of the time than ours. The priesthood of all believers does not mean every person his or her own priest; it means every person a priest, a minister, a servant of every other person.

Now a confession. I personally maintain two privileges that come as a consequence of my serving this congregation. The first is a parking space in the alley. And the second comes as the result of medieval ecclesial culture still permeating a slice of Boston's public life: it is a "Clergy Pass" to all the regular season games of the Boston Red Sox. In the words of our Evangelical sisters and brothers, "Praise the Lord!" But now here this: Otherwise, I am personally committed to join no organization, institution or club that is not open to every member of this congregation.

What I am trying to say, folks, is that we are in this together, that our callings to ministry are varied, and that God needs everyone of us- everyone of us-in whatever niche Christ finds us to carry out the fullness of ministry for the inauguration of what Mark calls the kingdom, the realm, the domain of God.

III

Now, just as we all can receive the sharp invitation of Jesus to follow him, our routes to that decisive encounter can be different. What takes place for those Galilean fishermen on the seashore can take place for us in different settings.

Allow me, please, to offer a couple of personal illustrations. When I went off to college, I entered as a so-called "pre-med" student. One of my surgeon-father's classmates at Dartmouth happened to serve as the Associate Dean of the Medical School and I recall talking with him about medical education, the challenge of the curriculum, the stress of the syllabus, and their putative interest in training doctors who immersed themselves, not in the natural sciences, but in the liberal arts. In any case, two events spelled the end of that ambition.

The first: attending one of my own father's orthopedic operations. I will never forget his scalpel slicing through the skin of an ankle turned into mush from a fall out of a second story window. Nothing happened. I thought he had missed. Then tiny bubbles of blood seeped through the wound and I was gone-a woozy and mad dash to the women's room, there to say "So long!" to my breakfast. . . surely, a most auspicious beginning toward joining the Hippocratic succession. How does hindsight interpret it? A nudge in another direction from Providence? Perhaps.

But that first semester at college bore a second, more decisive message. Calculus proved the culprit. I simply could not do it. The grade on my final, as I recall, hovered about 15. A note at the bottom of the exam from the professor-a grace note, may I say-read as follows: "Mr. Crawford, if you promise to take no more mathematics at Dartmouth College, I will give you a D-." A word from the Lord?

So, how about a career in basketball? For years this elongated frame of mine relished a turnaround jump shot and a soft, looping right handed hook across the key. A high school scrap-book from upstate New York bears headlines like "Brighton smashes Wellsville; Crawford Stands out," or "Crawford Wrecks Fairport." Our college freshman coach, Al McGuire, just arrived from the New York Knicks, was noted most of all for his dirty defense; his assignment when in Boston: slash, hold, hack Bob Cousy. At our season's end Al McGuire cruised down the bench remarking on the prospects of each of us, and when he got around to me he said, "Jimmy. Jimmy. You may be in the pros someday." Just what I wanted to hear! My identity was basketball. Time for divine intervention! As a college senior, shaping up for the season, duck- walking down the court, something-or someone-said, "What are you doing, you duck-walking nerd? There's more to existence than basketball! Stand up! Grow up! Change course! Shed that single, limited, presumptuous identity. Get a life!" With that, I began to prepare seriously for Union Seminary.

Union Seminary? Why Union Seminary? Why this crack at the Christian ministry? Here is why: I grew up in a home where church meant something. My father-surgeon, cellist, painter, magician, raconteur, the best man I ever knew-grew up in a fundamentalist Methodist home. He had, as he said, to unlearn much of what he absorbed as a child about the Christian faith. Nonetheless, while we grew up, he attended church every Sunday, believing it to be the last best hope of humankind, squeezing into our pew, mid-service, after rounds at the hospital, content to miss what he called the preliminaries, but ready to listen to and later over dinner to argue about the sermon.

And my mother? A rare human being in anyone's definition, a magisterial yet upbeat presence, a grace and radiance compelling people- even those who barely meet her-to ask me at the beginning of any conversation "Jim, how's your mother?" For years, along with Bea Norris, Scotty Wight, Rollie Stevens, Ruby Miller, Helen Boynton, she superintended the church school at Third Church in Rochester, and provided in our family and at church a spiritual perspective and religious approach complementing my father's. I do not want to be corny about it, but ours was what the old Saturday Evening Post might have called a Christian home. . . decisive in shaping my vocation and career,

And yes, the pastor of our church? A rabid Princetonian, a consistently excellent preacher, church leader, social prophet-one who reminded me time and again that just as Princeton could use a decent basketball player, God could, too. And when seminary became an option in my later college years, he insisted, in a booming, absolutely head-on, convinced fashion-he insisted on what I considered impossible, "Crawford," he exhorted, "Crawford, you'll love Union much more than you loved Dartmouth." He was close.

IV

But this ministry: so wonderful, so rewarding, so different from what seminary projected.

For instance, I promised at my ordination to maintain the truths of the Gospel, the peace and purity of the church. I have to tell you, peace and purity frequently come to loggerheads. One person's purity is another persons heresy. The articulation of one person's faith is another person's blasphemy.

I discovered that, in spades, as we wandered through the process of approving The New Century Hymnal with its commitment to the language of inclusivity, its readiness, when aesthetics and justice clashed, to choose justice. Let me say, first of all, you in this congregation were fabulous in seeing me through that searing battle, pitting purity and peace against one another. The discussion and debates in this church were civil, faithful, edifying. But on the other hand, the phone calls, the letters, the editorials, the cheap shots, the broadsides castigating or defending one text or another from all across the world demonstrated again the precarious tension between peace and purity in local churches. Just last week a family from Wolfboro, New Hampshire, passed through the greeting line following our service and, with brows raised in friendly but quizzical fashion, asked, not so rhetorically, "So you're the one responsible for our new hymnal?" I denied it.

Ah, that ordination promise to sustain the peace and purity-so facile at ordination. I wonder if those who composed that promise had ever been to church.

V

You know, in seminary they just don't tell you how terrific parish ministry can be. It is sometimes almost as if the church could really be great if only it were not for people ruining it. Wrong!

What could be more wonderful than going to the bedside of a parishioner, ostensibly to offer courage, healing, hope, the assurance of the Divine presence through the worst of it all, and discovering faith courage, hope, healing already richly present, mediated from them to you.

What could be more astounding than facing a monumental institutional crisis, wondering if you have what it takes to stumble through, and then find yourself surrounded by men and women surfacing from all parts of the congregation, standing shoulder to shoulder, rising to the occasion, carrying you through? You have taught me what that is like.

What could be more dismaying in this world than missing appointments, mistaking names-and, oh, good Lord forgetting names-or blundering egregiously time and again, preparing to face the worst and finding someone else has moved surreptitiously to pick up the pieces, heal the breach, sympathized with the circumstances and offered a friendly word, another chance, an open door?

The core of this ministry is working with men and women who plunge themselves every day into the stress-laden issues and accelerating changes of the business, financial, educational, legal, the homemaking world- big people tackling tough problems and fickle issues, who then head for the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston, giving up one evening, two evenings, three evenings and a crack-of-dawn breakfast to make sure this hardy Christian outpost sustains its Divine commission and redemptive witness.

And yes, this particular ministry is knowing your sermon bombed and someone at the fellowship hour informs you, incredibly, that one of your crumbs nourished their spirit.

This ministry cherishes learning of a courageous witness from a child in the church school; hearing of a covey of members working to save one of their company from drifting into despair or moral collapse. This ministry is all about trying to share with you what often comes from me as a mumbling and incoherent, frail and shallow faith that cannot touch yours with a ten foot pole and finds itself always reaching out to draw on yours for succor and support. You see, friends, where seminary fails, the church leaps to the rescue; through you I know the call, the thrill and blessing of Jesus Christ.

And so we close. Picture again, if you will, those four clowns in the boat on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus confronts them with the possibilities of living, speaking, working, acting as if God's new world were about to break in. Hey! that's me on the beach. No, that's you! That is you wrestling those nets. Wherever you find yourself, whoever you are, let go those nets. Follow him! He promises you-you!-the joy of ministry.