Providence is experiencing a deep winter storm of snow and ice, and the resulting parking ban has simply confirmed the wisdom of cancelling church services. This sermon is by way of a reflection on the gospel for Epiphany 3 from Matthew chapter 4 on one of the key characteristics of discipleship – the cost of authenticity. The tone of the audio is more fireside chat than proclamation.
Sometimes discipleship is not hearing a new call
so much as realizing that a familiar and faithful way of life
is being gently loosened from our grasp.
Most of us live with the quiet assumption that if God is going to call us,
it will be obvious. Clear. Undeniable.
We imagine a clarion call.
And so, when we sense even the faintest possibility
that something might be shifting, we mutter—often without realizing it—
not yet.
Most of the time our antennae are finely tuned
to filter that possibility out. Familiarity comforts us.
Routine reassures us. They insulate us from disturbances
that might decenter us.
We are often listening for a call, but we are listening for it
to arrive on our terms.
And of course, it rarely does.
When a familiar and faithful life begins to leave us less satisfied,
when we sense—sometimes reluctantly— that something needs to change,
what often happens first is not clarity, but loosening.
Our accustomed ways of thinking about ourselves,
our settled sense of who we are,
begin—almost imperceptibly—
to slip from our grip.
Even when the light ahead feels real,
we often become alarmed
as the ground beneath us begins to shift.
We say to God:
If the light ahead is real,
then surely you can explain it to us.
We ask for a blueprint.
Presented for our pre-approval.
But even as the way forward remains unclear,
the ground beneath us continues to move—
heedless of our need for certainty.
Discipleship often asks us
to step away from what has been faithful,
fruitful, and trustworthy, before we can yet see
what will take its place.
Not all calls offer clarity at the outset.
For many of us,
facing a call only dimly perceived
fills us with anxiety.
With restlessness.
With agitation.
And that restlessness—
that refusal to let us remain where we are—
has a long spiritual pedigree.
St Augustine gave it words centuries ago:
“O Lord, our hearts are restless
until they find their rest in thee.”
That restlessness is not the enemy of faith.
It is often the sign that faith is being invited
to grow into a new form.
When we turn to Matthew’s Gospel,
this is not always easy to see.
I have often struggled with Matthew’s lofty, elevated portrayal of Jesus.
Matthew’s Jesus can feel remote—hovering above the human fray,
secure in his identity, untroubled by uncertainty.
Matthew gives us a Jesus shaped deliberately in the image of Moses:
authoritative, commanding, decisive.
And because of that, we can read Matthew’s account
of the call of the first disciples as a story from a different world—
a time when people were apparently capable of instant, unquestioning obedience
in a way that seems unavailable to us now.
But sometimes a familiar text changes because we have changed.
Sometimes scripture becomes newly audible
not because the words are different,
but because our lives are.
When Jesus hears that John the Baptist has been arrested,
Matthew tells us, he withdraws to Galilee,
leaving Nazareth, and making his home in Capernaum,
by the Sea of Galilee.
Matthew offers no commentary.
No emotional description.
No interior reflection.
And yet, for the first time, that single sentence stops me short.
Jesus leaves Nazareth.
He leaves his family networks.
He leaves the rhythms of village life.
He leaves behind the identity of the carpenter’s son—
a life that had made sense up until now.
And suddenly, I see this moment for what it is:
a threshold.
A quiet one.
But a costly one.
Before Jesus calls anyone else to leave their nets,
he himself leaves what has been home.
Matthew may not tell us how Jesus felt,
but he shows us the price that must be paid
before discipleship can even begin.
I find myself imagining the scene.
The packing of a few possessions.
The unspoken grief of departure.
The vulnerability of beginning again
in an unfamiliar place.
Capernaum was not a retreat.
It was a border town.
An ethnic and cultural crossroads.
An economic hub marked by opportunity
and deep precarity.
Matthew underscores this by reaching back to Isaiah:
“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali…
Galilee of the Gentiles… the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light.”
Yes, this is mission geography.
But it is also inner geography.
Capernaum is the kind of place you go
when you are no longer who you were,
but are not yet who you will be.
Jesus’ move is not only strategic.
It is formative.
It is there—in that unsettled, liminal space—
that his authority takes shape.
And then, walking by the sea, Jesus sees two brothers fishing
and says simply: “Follow me.”
Matthew tells us they follow him immediately.
No deliberation.
No negotiation.
No farewell speeches.
For generations, this has sounded almost magical.
But perhaps it is not magic at all.
These fishermen already lived with risk.
They already knew instability.
They already sensed the limits
of their current lives.
They were poised.
And the power of Jesus’ invitation lies not only in his words,
but in the life he is already living.
Jesus does not appear as a settled authority figure
asking others to risk what he himself will not.
He appears as someone who has already crossed a line.
Discipleship recognizes authenticity instinctively.
Simon and Andrew follow him not because he is powerful,
but because he is already living the question they have not yet dared to ask.
In our Episcopal Church culture, discipleship is a word we use often
and understand poorly.
We tend to imagine discipleship as familiarity without transformation.
As membership.
As volunteerism.
As being good people doing what good people do.
But Matthew will not let us rest there.
The call to discipleship involves decentering.
Disruption.
Relocation—if not always geographic,
then interior.
It asks us to risk uncertainty in order to discover
a deeper, truer form of life.
And so we come back
to where we began.
Sometimes discipleship is not hearing a new call
so much as realizing that a familiar and faithful way of life—
the habitual way we think about ourselves
and experience the world— is being gently loosened from our grasp.
Discipleship is not adding Jesus to an otherwise stable life.
It is allowing our encounter with Jesus to unsettle us just enough
that the possibility of a new kind of life might begin to take shape within us.
The dawning of the light is a principal theme of Epiphany. Discipleship is how the light breaks through.
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