In John’s gospel we hear John the Baptist point out Jesus to a couple of his disciples who choose to follow him – literally. They actually tail Jesus like well-meaning yet unskilled private investigators. When Jesus notices them, he asks what’s up, and they merely say, “Where are you staying” (John 1: 38)? Jesus takes them there, and they hung out for a while.
And I thought I was boring.
In Mark’s Gospel we see Jesus spot a couple fishermen casting their nets. He invites them to drop everything and become “fishers of men” (1: 17). And astonishingly, they drop everything and follow this stranger – the very thing we teach our children NOT to do even if the stranger seems nice and says he needs their help to find his lost puppy and offers them candy.
Clearly, both of these stories are about “being called.” But the interesting thing to me is they contain none of the hoopla that accompanies so many of the Bible stories about being called. There’s no test of faith like Abraham had when God told him to sacrifice his own son. There are no fireworks or pyrotechnics like Moses got with his burning bush. There’s no giant whale like Jonah had, no James-Earl-Jones voice out of the clouds like Jeremiah. With Jesus, it’s just a simple invitation to regular ol’ people going about the usual tasks of their day. It’s couldn’t be more ordinary. One might call it boring.
I think that’s precisely the point. Jesus purposely called ordinary people doing ordinary things not because the use of whales and burning bushes were out of style but because it’s within the ordinary that we encounter the divine. To me, that seems to be the whole point of Jesus being born to an unwed refugee teenager in a barn alongside smelly animals and their excrement. God breaks into human history in the ordinary, boring parts of our lives . . . if only we have the eyes to see it.
Put another way, God is present in the allergy prescriptions and dentist appointments, vacation scams and traffic jams. It’s within the stuff of our ordinary lives that the Incarnation we celebrated at Christmas continues to unfold throughout our lives today. It’s not in the least bit flashy. No booming drum beats will announce God’s presence at the grocery story. No neon sign will point to the presence of God at the office where the new temp in Accounting will take your lunch from the frig if it doesn’t have your name on it and the boss leaves early on Friday’s but thinks no one knows. And that’s a good thing. God at work in our lives today may appear quite boring to the untrained eye. But I’ll take bland boredom over a burning bush any ol’ day.
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