This past weekend I went home to California for a few days. It was a perfect weekend in California. Highs were in the high 70s to 80s, with the temperature never dipping below 60 the whole time I was there. I must admit it was with a tinge of sadness that I dug out my coat, hat, and scarf to leave on Tuesday. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to come back to Syracuse; it was that I didn’t really want to come back to winter. Could I have found some way to return to Syracuse in, say, May, I would have been all for it.Even nicer than the weather was the chance to be with friends and family. I caught up with some friends from high school, had lunch with my pastor, looked at pictures with my grandmother, went to church on Sunday in the place I was baptized, and played endless games of croquet with my parents and cousins. It was nice to be for a while in a place where I did not have to explain who I am and where I come from, because people already know. In California I am not Vicar Kjersten or even adult Kjersten, I am Nancy and Glen’s daughter, Ralph and Charlotte’s granddaughter. It is nice to be surrounded by people who knew me before I reached my current height, and who in some ways know me better than I know myself, having seen all my quirks and foibles before in my parents and grandparents.
In the last ten years, I have lived in five different states. The transient nature of being a young adult has stretched my understanding of what it means to be “home.” Home, I have discovered, is not so much about a place as it is about a feeling. So California for me is home, but so is my best friend’s couch in DC. Home has been an apartment in Chicago, a dorm room in Spokane, and even, for one amazing summer, a mattress in a church basement three blocks from the beach in San Diego. Home, more than a location, is a feeling. A knowledge that one is in a place that is safe and with people who love you. Home is not necessarily in one’s house then, or with one’s family. The families we create can be just as much or even more home as the one into which we were born.
Whatever expression “home” takes for us, leaving home can be hard. It is difficult and painful to let go of the places and things we love and move on to something new. Even positive changes bring stress and uncertainty. What will this new phase in my life look like, how will I settle into this new home? Whether the new home is literally a new house, or a new job, or a new life circumstance, leaving a place we are comfortable and settling into a new one is challenging.
In today’s Gospel reading, we learn that Jesus has left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum. In the five weeks since Christmas, this is maybe the fifth home Jesus has had. First, we heard of the Word who was with God since the beginning of time. Then the Word was born in Bethlehem, and had to figure out how to make a life for himself as a human being. But before he even had a chance to settle in, the infant Jesus found himself in exile in Egypt. After a few years, Jesus and his family are able to return to Israel and they settle in the Galilee region, in Nazareth. And for the first time since his birth, Jesus is able to settle in for a while, to put down roots, to discover what it means to be home. But now Jesus is all grown up. We heard of his baptism a few weeks ago, how the spirit descended like a dove, and a voice from heaven claimed him as God’s own son. So Jesus finds himself doing what many of us do when God calls and our life circumstances change, he moved. He left Nazareth, left Mary and Joseph and the rest of his family, maybe left childhood friends, and he went in Capernaum, where he had to make a new life for himself, build a new network of relationships.
So Jesus settles into Capernaum, and as he’s walking along the beach at his new home, he comes across four fishermen, Simon and his brother Andrew, and James and John, sons of Zebedee. Jesus calls to them and says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” And the text says that immediately, they left their nets and followed him. Jesus, who is no stranger to moving, no stranger to how hard it is to make a home for oneself, calls Simon and Andrew, James and John, to give up everything they know, everything they find familiar, and follow him. And immediately, they do it? I have to wonder if the text is leaving something out here. I don’t know if some stranger approached me on the street and said, hey, leave everything you know, if I would jump at the opportunity…
But this stranger on the seashore isn’t any ordinary stranger, this stranger who calls to the fishermen is the Word made flesh. And I think it’s important to note that Jesus does not tell the fishermen, leave everything you know and make a new life for yourselves, Jesus says, leave everything you know and follow me. Make your life with me, and I will lead you, and I will be with you, and I will guide, forever. Jesus does not call the fishermen to travel to new places alone; Jesus calls them to travel with him. To make their homes with him.
And then Jesus says, and I will make you fish for people. Fish for people, the fishermen must have thought, what does that mean? We know how to fish for fish; we are pretty good at fishing for fish. But fish for people? How does one do that? Our nets, and boats, and tools, will not work in this new occupation.
There is a phrase that gets thrown around in vocational conversation a lot, God does not call the equipped, but God equips the called. God does not call the equipped, but God equips the called. Jesus sees in the fishermen a penchant for catching things, and the potential for catching people. And Jesus sees in us skills and gifts that we did not know we had, or maybe did not know how to apply, and calls us into situations where we can use these gifts.
One of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, writes about moving as a young adult from her childhood home in rural Kentucky across the country to Tucson, Arizona. Kingsolver writes: “If someone had told me what I was headed for in that little Renault—that I was stowing away in a shell, bound to wake up to an alien life on a persistently foreign shore—I surely would not have done it.” But reflecting further, she goes on, “But I can’t be sorry I made the trip. Most of what I learned in the old place seems to suffice for the new: if the seasons like Chicago tides come at ridiculous times and I have to plant in September instead of May, and if I have to make up family from scratch, what matters is that I do have sisters and tomato plants, the essential things.”
Jesus comes into our lives and he calls us to pick up and move. Sometimes literally, to a new town or job or school, and sometimes figuratively, to a new position, a new relationship, a new place in life, a new outlook, or a new dream for the future. Jesus calls us to move, and those moves can be painful and frightening. But remember that Jesus does not call us to move alone. Rather he says, follow me. Come with me, and I will lead you. And like the fishermen, Jesus calls us to places where our skills can be used, even if we don’t recognize those skills in their current form.
Jesus, who knows what it is to be a stranger, calls us to move. But in these moves and changes, Jesus promises to be with us. Things may look different on these new shores, the skills we have may be used in different ways, but Jesus promises that we do have the skills and that we will not be alone, but that he will be with us. May we, like the disciples, put down our nets and follow him. Amen.
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