FINDING YOUR PURPOSE
The Rev’d Phillip Channing Ellsworth, Jr. 
4th February 2018, the 5th Sunday after the Epiphany
Based on Isaiah 40. 21 – 31, and Mark 1. 29 – 39

From Mark’s Gospel: Jesus said, “for this is what I came forth to do.” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The day this building was consecrated, the 6th of November 1955, the Green Bay Packers were mauled by the Chicago Bears at Wrigley Field, 52 – 31. In 1958, when Beverly Bastian and other active members of St Stephen’s were at work organizing the Landmarks Society, acquiring properties so as to preserve open space in Tiburon — Jan Gullet writes that they, “formed a human fence stretching bed sheets between them, end to end, and surrounded the land around Old St Hilary’s Mission, singing America the Beautiful ” — that year the Packers finished with 1 win, 10 losses, and 1 tie. As a matter of record, for the previous ten years the Packers had been able to win only 34 games whilst losing 84, a record of futility which made them the doormats of the NFL.

In 1959 they restructured. They reassessed strategy. They sold off nonproductive assets and acquired a few key new ones. They concentrated fiercely on their core business, blocking and tackling. They assembled a new management team made up of old timers and new talent, got a firm grip on a new purpose, and set about making one of the great turnarounds in the history of sports, or for that matter in the history of management. Over the next ten seasons, the Packers won more than 75 percent of their games and were NFL champions five of those years.

Let me read a few verses from the gospel according to Vince Lombardi: “Running a football team is not terribly different from running any other kind of organization: an army, a political party, a business. The principles are the same. Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. You have to concentrate on fundamentals. You have to want to succeed badly enough to take the pain and the discipline which success demands.”

Now for success let’s substitute clarity of purpose, and let’s leave the gospel according to Lombardi — he went to mass every morning, by the way; receiving the Sacrament was a daily discipline for him — and return to Mark’s. “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for this is what I came forth to do.’” 

For this is what I came forth to do. Because the verb implies a place Jesus was that he has left, the earliest Christians in their midrashim or commentaries thought the place Jesus has come forth from was his life with the Father. They had reason to. If Jesus had a place in the normal sense, it’s hard to know where it was. Jesus goes out, as others did, to John the Baptist in the wilderness, and does so from a Nazareth we hear nothing more about. In Galilee the activity shifts to Capernaum, the synagogue there and the home next door where Peter’s mother-in-law lives, where he heals her and she serves him. After sundown, the formal end of the sabbath, the whole town throngs to that door for healing. It would be a busy night. Without much sleep, Jesus gets up long before daybreak to go pray in the wilderness, and you get the sense that the wilderness is his real home: the place where he prays is home. To Mark it seems that for Jesus no place and all places are the place of his activity, his life such as it is with us. He has come forth for this.

Jesus’ healing ministry takes off. It might have been all he would do, yet he has come forth, and will be forth, for more. He silences the demons. He continues on through the neighboring towns, moving from synagogue to synagogue, healing and teaching. The chapter ends with Jesus returning to the wilderness. People come out to him the way you come to this Altar, to meet him and to hear his message proclaimed: God is offering you mercy, is saying ‘Yes’ to you. Say Yes back. That is it, in a nutshell. It is good news for people willing to take an honest look at self-defeating patterns in their life. 

Even in the wilderness Jesus is ‘forth’. The demon last Sunday who said Jesus had come out against him, he got that right! In the Spirit of God Jesus is always ‘forth’ and must be so. His ministry is who he is. God is not a talisman you can keep in your hip pocket, left or right, handy to bless whatever your preferred politicians approve of. God is not a wax nose. Jesus comes forth into this world and does not grow weary in his very self manifesting the kingdom of God. Hear again from Isaiah, now in the venerable cadences of the Authorized Version: “Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.”

I began with the Packers. What about you? What would a turnaround, a change of mind and strategy look like for you? What would it be like to focus on the core business of being a human being, finding God’s purpose for you? The fisherfolk by the sea of Galilee were doormats to the power of Rome. They reassessed. They restructured. They let go of non-productive assets. They questioned the assumption that life is about benefiting their own. And they did all that by following someone they barely knew. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.