January 26, 2020: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
“In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.”
And with these words, an adventure began. If you are not familiar with them, it is the first sentence of the novel by JRR Tolkien titled The Hobbit: There and Back Again. It is a story about a particular Hobbit in fact, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. Not familiar with hobbits?
Well, they are human like creatures that are about three and a half feet tall on average, favoring the colors of yellow and green in their clothing, and living in homes carved into
hillsides and the like, in a little shire, in the world known as Middle-Earth. Anyway, Mr. Baggins was living a comfortable life in his hole when Gandalf the wizard, sent by – well, something or someone more powerful than he – knocked on his door and invited him to join a quest to help a group of dwarves.
I thought a lot about Mr. Bilbo Baggins this week while reading the texts, particularly the gospel. Maybe it was because I was talking last week about my experience at Oxford University, where I studied the Inklings – that group of scholars there who gathered regularly at the local pub to share their works, and a few pints. They included Tolkien, along with CS Lewis, and so many others.
Still, despite the Christian themes of Tolkien and Lewis, or likely because of it, I kept diving down this rabbit, I mean hobbit, hole as I thought about the gospel reading for today. Jesus is calling the first of his disciples. No, they aren’t hobbits, nor are they living in holes, not that I am aware of anyway. But let’s step back for a moment and remember where Jesus is, who these folks were, and why it matters – oh, and yeah – what the heck a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins has to do with any of it.
This gospel opens with news that John, the cousin of Jesus, the one called the baptizer, has been arrested. Now that ought to make a guy like Jesus a little nervous, right? Apparently itinerant preachers telling folks about a different kingdom isn’t sweet news in the ears of those who have power. So the text tells us that Jesus withdraws to and makes a home in an area we heard about in the Isaiah reading. There is a lot to say about this part, but for today, the important thing to know is that he didn’t go back to where he was comfortable, but to where others were oppressed.
Then we hear that Jesus is taking a stroll by the sea, maybe working on his step-count, and as he is walking along he sees Simon, later called Peter and his brother Andrew out fishing – he tells them to follow him, and fish for people. He does the same with two others – James and John – who he sees mending nets with their father Zebedee. They all do. They leave what they know and follow Jesus.
Now what about them made Jesus call them out from where they were? These were not warriors who could protect him from John’s fate. They were likely not particularly wealthy with means to fund his ministry like he would find in the women disciples like Mary Magdalene. They were not educated like he would later get in the university educated Paul (granted after his resurrection), nor were they religious scholars and leaders, like Nicodemus. And they were far from perfect – most especially Peter.
They were simple people called into something beyond anything they could have imagined, and whether they went as willingly as the gospel suggested, or were more the Bilbo Baggins type, that stumbled into saying yes without really wanting to, we will never know. What we do know is that they were changed by the experience, and nothing for them was ever the same.
While we don’t get a chance to hear what those early disciples were thinking when they saw this guy calling out to them, I think it might be a bit like our friend and hobbit extraordinaire Bilbo – and maybe a bit like ourselves. To say that Bilbo was not pleased about this invitation of Gandalf is an understatement to be sure. First, it is not polite in hobbit circles to seek out adventure and the like, and Bilbo, being a proper hobbit of good standing wasn’t about to rock the Shire by doing anything of the sort.
Bilbo Baggins liked his home, his larder (where he stored lots of good things to eat), his handkerchiefs neatly tucked in his brightly colored jacket pocket, and especially his pipe. Life was good for him – he knew what to expect, and he did not expect, nor want adventures of any kind. In his own words “We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them.” So, he was not happy that he answered that knock on the door from Gandalf.
Nevertheless, for reasons I won’t go into here, he sets off with the dwarves. He is small, doesn’t know how to fight, has no particular skill at all really. Even the dwarves don’t understand why Gandalf called him into this quest to be, of all things, the burglar who would steal back their gold from the dragon, but off they all went.
I have to think that there were times early on in their life with Jesus when perhaps those first disciples also wished they hadn’t been out on the lake that day when he walked by. That’s the thing about call…it is rarely what we want, when we want it, we most certainly never feel up to it, and there may even be others who think we aren’t.
And yet we know that over time, and through many foibles, those earliest disciples – the ones in this story, and the other women and men with them – went from their ordinary lives to extraordinary ones, become the first leaders of the Jesus movement that has continued through the centuries. I bet if you asked them by that lake if that would be their legacy, if that is what they were capable of doing, they would have thought you had been out in the sun too much.
Bilbo Baggins, despite his stature and reluctance, managed to save the day, and grasp the precious brass ring, so to speak, setting into motion more adventures than he could have ever imagined, but more importantly – he was changed as much as Middle Earth.
Yet we often do with stories like The Hobbit the same thing we do with the gospel narratives – we put them into that place of being not about us, not at a time we live, and totally far from our reality. And so we enjoy reading them, but we don’t really see ourselves in the story.
But if we really paid attention to the gospel, we would know that this isn’t something that happened “once upon a time,” or in hobbit-lore “in a hole in a ground.” And the key is there – right there in a single sentence: “From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Now as I reminded folks last week, repentance isn’t about beating oneself up, but about turning, or really re-turning, into the fullness of relationship with God. So Jesus is saying that we should turn to face the kingdom of heaven – to be in relationship with God.
But it is that second part – when he says “…for the kingdom of heaven has come near…” that helps us to understand why this is important for us today. Now, I need to get a little geeky with the Greeky here, because there are some who might read this and think – okay, we need to be better so when we get to heaven, we will be in good stead with the Almighty. No. That is NOT what Jesus is saying at all.
The “has come near” is the tell – in the original Greek it is a perfect tense, meaning, as one scholar noted, “…that the action expressed in the verb has already taken place in the past and still has ramifications for, or continues into, the present. In other words, given this Greek form of speech, the kingdom of God has already come and is still here.”[1]
Jesus is telling everyone who will listen that the kingdom of God isn’t some lofty place in the heavens, or at least not only there, but is all around them – then, and now! He is calling us to repent – to turn and face the kingdom of God. And where is he telling us to turn and face by his very presence? To places like Zebulun and Naphtali, where a people sit in darkness. That is where we will find Jesus – in those who need his light the most. That is where he calls us.
And make no mistake about it – he is calling us – he is telling us to turn and face the kingdom of God in the oppressed here – now. Yet I think much of the time we respond less like those disciples and more like good old Mr. Baggins.
We can’t see what good it will do, what difference we could possibly make – after all, the kingdom of heaven isn’t a little shire, but far more vast than all of Middle Earth, and in a far greater mess than any gold hoarding dragon could bring about. Besides, we might add, we just don’t have the time or the skills or whatever else we think is needed. We also don’t like our little part of the shire getting all messed up with the unknown, it might make us late for dinner.
But the thing is, Gandalf wasn’t sent to invite Mr. Bilbo Baggins on that quest because of what skills that hobbit had, but for who he would become when he entered into relationship with all those others beyond his little shire – the dwarves, the elves, human folk, and even the creature Gollum. And because of that – because Bilbo went there and back again, nothing was ever the same for Mr. Baggins and the land of Middle-Earth.
Jesus didn’t call Andrew, Peter, James, and John because they could catch a haul of fish (though that might come in handy while they journeyed about). He called them for who they were, and who they would be when the entered into relationship with him, and with those who sit in darkness. They were beloved children of God, who by the grace of Christ became far more than they ever could have asked or imagined. And because they left their nets and followed him, the world was forever changed, and so were they.
And the thing is – the same is true for us! Jesus isn’t calling us now because of what we think we can do, but what he knows we can do because of who we are, and what we will become as we deepen our relationship with God through our relationship with those in need. It may seem crazy at first, but sometimes you have to step forward toward those in darkness in order to see the light that is there waiting for you – only to find out that the light – that powerful light of Christ – is radiating from YOU!
Because that is what turning to face the kingdom does – it transforms you into what you are deep down, the person buried beneath all the obligations, routines, hopes and disappointments of life. It moves us out of the depths of the comfortable holes we have crawled into, from the tossing and tumult of life’s seas, to be who we were born to be.
There is a knock at your door.
There is a call coming across the sea of your lives.
What happens next?
Only you, by God’s grace, can write that next chapter, but I pray your decision makes you terribly late for dinner.
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click below, or subscribe to our iTunes Sermon Podcast by clicking here:
[1] The Rev. Bob Eldan preachingtips.com
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
January 26, 2020
The Third Sunday After The Epiphany
1st Reading – Isaiah 9:1-4
Psalm 27:1, 5-13
2nd Reading – 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Gospel – Matthew 4:12-23
