If it weren’t for the opening line of this morning’s gospel, I would call this story, “fresh, fresh, fresh!” It’s morning by the lakeshore, everything just beginning, Jesus’ new ministry coming into being, a new church coming into being, the new kingdom of God coming into being here in this gospel of Mark – the gospel we understand as being the very first one written. Fresh - here at the very beginning of the very first gospel.

Well, it’s not quite the beginning; there are 13 verses that precede it. In which Mark, in his concise style, told us the stories of John announcing the Christ, Jesus’ baptism by John, followed by Jesus’ 40 days in the desert in preparation for setting out on this walk by the lake this morning. It sounds as if the news of John’s arrest is the cue for Jesus to set out. And as we heard in John R. Donoghue’s reflections at vigil, this move will lead to a similar path for Jesus and his disciples –  that in their own time, like John, they each will be arrested and suffer death. I recognize this as a very Irish perspective; we need a little gloom from the very beginning.
While Jesus does participate in a fair amount of preparation for his ministry, his disciples noticeably do not. And this is the very beginning of our church! Notice how they do not stop to make a list of pros and cons, they do not seek spiritual direction, they do not even do any lectio divina, they just go! Something is being offered to them, a call is being made and they respond whole heartedly. Elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus praises this kind of attitude - talking with the rich young man, for example. In the first reading from the prophet Jonah, the people of Nineveh responded to Jonah’s call with similar simplicity of heart and in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus holds up the people of Nineveh as a model of the response he expects and hopes for from us, that if we really recognized him, it would be the only response possible. The people of Nineveh that is to whom Jonah appealed and it was the response of the people of Nineveh that led the way for the king of Ninevah to follow suit and repent. Similarly, Jesus starts out with a call to the people – guys fishing -working on the lakeshore – he doesn’t start by calling the traditional religious or political authorities – something which they will never quite get over.

So there they are, the fishermen – taking care of their equipment -things are so new that Simon is not even called Peter yet. But his response and Andrew’s to seeing and hearing the Christ opens the way for so many more of us to come. There are James and John side by side, mending their nets - of whom I am thinking it is interesting to note that their family had hired workers, apparently they were a fisher family of some little means. No wonder it is their mother who later checks in with Jesus on what he will be able to do for her sons, trying to insure or with the expectation that they will be important people in his organization. James and John will also be the disciples who, when the authorities start giving Jesus a hard time, encourage him to call down some lightning and to strike them down. They seem to have enjoyed some privilege in their lives and expect to maintain it, they expect to win. But all that comes later. For now, it is enough to observe and acknowledge that while the disciples’ response is instantaneous their (and our) conversion might be more of a process.

During this week, because I was spending time with these scriptures, as I was doing my own work, I sometimes was graced to notice, different individuals on the journey, at different points on that road of repentance, belief and fulfillment. That is a beautiful, edifying and sometimes frightening or fragile thing, that moment of awareness and choice. It reminds me that the choice, in one form or another, is put before us many times a day and it reminds me to ask for the grace to respond well, simply and whole-heartedly whenever possible.

For ourselves, we also have the example of the people of the vast city of Nineveh, of John the Baptist, of Jesus, of Simon, of Andrew, of James, of John. Jesus is doing something fresh and new this day that at the same time, is grounded in the ancient tradition of Moses who told the people “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice and holding fast to him.” Benedict in the Rule offers us this choice many times as well, for example, in urging us to serve Christ in each other. So many times each day the choice is set before us whether it is presented as a large political question, a personal moral dilemma, a choice about how to spend 20 free minutes, or how to greet the person who crosses our path as we move through each day. And so we strive to recognize that life is always new, each moment and each opportunity to respond to the Christ in our midst is as new here on the shore of Lake Michigan as it was that very ordinary and extraordinary morning in Galilee.