Epiphany 3
January 22, 2006
Rev. Andrew Walmisley

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
— Mary Oliver

Today, as we hear the story of the call of the Apostles, we must honestly strive to understand to what Jesus calls them. It's generally assumed that, of course, we know. They’re to become disciples, “fishers of people”, teachers and preachers and healers who will follow their Lord to the bitter end. Yes, there were many pitfalls on that vocational journey: faithless stumbling, bumbling, betrayal, and denial. But in the end only Judas doesn’t go to the limits of the world to witness and die for Jesus. And despite those moments when they betray the fact that they don't get it at all (making their story compelling for the likes of you and me), this is a tale of great heroism, beginning with the astonishing simplicity of the initial call: they leave everything and follow him.

Perhaps it is easier for most of us to relate to the call of Jonah, who resists God’s dangerous assignment to go and preach repentance to the wicked people of Ninevah by getting in a ship and sailing to Tarshish – about as far away as one could imagine in those days. But God thwarts Jonah’s resistance by sending a storm, in which Jonah is sacrificed to the sea gods by angry sailors and tossed overboard into the mouth of the big fish. He must have had quite a merry time contemplating existence for three days in the dark belly of the fish until he was vomited up on the very shore of Ninevah. The rest is history: Jonah listens to God this time and begrudgingly preaches to the Ninevites. And when they do repent and turn to God, he is irritated because those people don't deserve God's blessing. Now that’s a story of call and response that most of us can relate to (above all the sensation of being regurgitated!). In the end, God simply says, “Just love the Ninevites”, for this new call is not to fulfill the old loyalties to nation and conventional religiosity as Jonah had imagined, but to a radical compassion for the “godless” enemies of Israel. God demands nothing less.

The story of Jonah brings us a step closer to understanding the vocation to which Jesus calls us. We tend to think that the disciples were called to follow Jesus in the establishment of a new religion and to pass on his moral teaching. After all, the Church needed to legitimize its own religious establishment and authority and so it was important to pass on the understanding that Jesus was committed to the creation of a new faith community with critical and specific demands of its followers – demands so complete that they called for the ultimate sacrifice. Actually, I do believe that Jesus stood for the creation of a renewed People of God, but one which wasn’t merely a repetition of the old purity system based on moral precepts and committed to the notion that there are “insiders and outsiders.” In short, his “Kingdom or Reign of God” was a new way of being that stood for a fearless and radically inclusive Love. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Jesus, then, called his disciples, and he calls us, to a new way of loving, raising us to a relationship in the heart of God that is infinitely above all previous ideas of “religiosity” or “godliness.” The fruit of this new way, revealed in his parables, his teaching, and his healing miracles, but above all in his self-offering on the Cross, is our liberation to live lives of abundance and joy that we never imagined possible. We are freed to love as openly and fully as we ourselves are loved and we, thus, release the potential to heal this broken world. Not a religion, but a relationship, a new dimension in the Spirit of freedom and hope. This is the Kingdom of God – neither a practice, nor an ethical system, but a transformation into the very nature and being of God who is Perfect Love.

I was personally surprised at the degree to which I was moved by the film, Brokeback Mountain, and not simply because it is groundbreaking in its sensitive and beautiful portrayal of the love between two men (which it is). It has brought up a strange, unimagined grief from my own personal life, mingled with a deep sense of thankfulness for the possibility of love literally to raise the dead. But in truth, the power of this film is in its universal appeal, for it speaks to the brokenness that renders us all incapable of bringing to fruition our vocation to love. Let’s face it, all of us have wounds from our past, or societal constraints, that make it impossible to fully open our hearts to love one another. As such, Brokeback Mountain is parabolic of the deep alienation from our true nature as lovers and, despite is tragic ending, it speaks to the endurance of love’s power in the face of impossible circumstances.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, Wyoming cowboys in 1963, are literally blasted by the forbidden love they discover for one another. Pursuing conventional married lives many miles apart, they live out the true life of their love in “fishing trips” to the mountains several times a year. Hidden from the society that would condemn their love as evil and perverted, their wilderness trysts enable them to achieve what many in the so-called “real” world never have: an abiding love. The “true” world is the mountains, the false one lives they feel constrained to live in society. The film culminates in a truly Shakespearean tragedy, when their two worlds collide, as Ennis always feared they would, and Jack is violently murdered.

It strikes me that Jack is really a Christ figure, going to the Cross of human hatred and brutality in his stand to live for a new way of loving. Whether that love is for the outsider, the stranger, the leper, the so-called sinner, or for a person of the same sex is almost immaterial, for “the evil powers of this world, which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God” seem bent on thwarting that love in the name of conventional wisdom and religiosity. The “religiosity” that sent Jesus to the Cross and the hatred and prejudice that murdered Jack Twist and Matthew Shephard ( in another Wyoming story) are tragically alike.

Mark Morford, in his editorial in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday, writes of the possibility that Brokeback Mountain, is drowning the “screech of the religious right’s homophobes.” “This pitch-perfect film,” he writes, “is now considered a movie that, quite literally, changes minds. Shifts perceptions. That moves the human experiment forward and makes people truly think about sex and gender and love in new ways… Brokeback slaps bigotry and intolerance upside its knobby little head…” Perhaps this is how Ennis and Jack’s story becomes one of death and resurrection, for any nail in the coffin of hatred and intolerance is new life for all humankind. If this is true, that this film will be a catalyst for real change in opening people’s hearts and minds to a fuller and deeper understanding of loving, then we in the Church should be humbled. Once again, a secular movement, this time the film industry, is doing what Christ has called us (and those earliest disciples) to do: expand in ever wider circles the dimensions of love and to fully embrace the truth that when we all are liberated to love as we are created to love, then all humankind will be free.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.