Sermon: "The real world"
Epiphany III-B 2024
“The real world”
A sermon preached at the Episcopal Church of the Advent (Kennett Square, PA)
1/21/2024, Epiphany III-B
Jonah 3:1-5, 10 • I Corinthians 7.29-31 • Mark 1.14-20
![Title: Christ Calling the Apostles Peter and Andrew
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“The form of this world is passing away.”
That’s what the apostle Paul says today in I Corinthians 7.31.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this phrase. I often digest the Bible this way: there will be a phrase that keeps repeating itself to me day after day. I’ll knead a phrase in my head day after day like dough until it is begins to feel like bread. If you have digested the Bible this way too, it would be wise not to ignore it—the way a passage pops up in your head over and over is a clue the Holy Spirit wants you to open your Bible and read more of the passage. If you remember a phrase from the Bible this week, I implore you to go open your Bible at home and actually read it with the whole chapter. Then go talk to somebody about it.
So anyway, that was the phrase from Paul, I Corinthians 7.31, that I was kneading in my heart this week:
“The form of this world is passing away. The form of this world is passing away.”1
I think the Holy Spirit made me think about this verse because being a Christian is about being drawn into another world. Away from this world, and into another world. As the form of this world passes away, the form of this other world becomes clearer.
This other world feels quite alien to ours, but when you look at it long enough you realize that alien world is your real home—to recognize it is like recovering a memory of a place after so much time away.
This strange new world,2 the Bible tells us, is the real world. This other world is much more real than our world because it is the world that God wishes to bring forth into being—a world that, unlike ours, perfectly reflects his character and purposes.
This strange new world is the world of the Gospel—by which I don’t just mean the four Gospels of the New Testament, but rather I mean the Word of salvation that comes in Jesus, by him, with him, and in him. This world of the Gospel is what Jesus called the Kingdom of God.
What does Jesus say today? “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” He says this in today’s Gospel, where he calls the first disciples from their fishing nets.
“The form of this world is passing away.”
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.”
I believe Jesus and St. Paul are saying the same things today in different ways. What Paul expressed in the form of philosophy, Mark’s Gospel displays in the form of history.
And this world is not far away. Jesus said so! The Kingdom has come near. Other translations say “the kingdom of God is at hand.”3 As if you can reach out and touch it.
But how do you touch this world? How do you access it? How do you enter its doors and make it home? Jesus helpfully tells us how today: “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
You access this world by faith and repentance. These are synonyms in Jesus’ proclamation today. Faith—trusting God—-is the way to see past the muck and muddle of the world into the world God has to offer you and I. Repentance—-a transformation of your mind by abandoning the things that hold you back from fully trusting God.
“Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” This commandment of Jesus is the reason why we hear Jonah preaching to Nineveh today. The citizens of Nineveh, though they were wicked, heard about the new world, and repented. Notice how the text says, “And the people of Nineveh believed God” (3:5). They are model disciples today, unlike Jonah!
I said earlier that being drawn into the world of Jesus—the real world—is like recovering a memory of a place after so much time away.
It makes me think about my mother. My mom came here from China, the more than 35 years ago. She has revisited her hometown exactly once, about 10 years ago, and she told me many things bubbled to the surface—things she never thought about in so many years and seasons she realized were part of her deepest self. How could they not be? This is where she came from—it’s what makes her who she is.
Having faith is a lot like that. You trust in Jesus, and the deepest truth about yourself bubbles up like fish on the shore. And the deepest truth about yourself is that Jesus loves you and is ready give you a new life and a new heart, if you let him. [Cf. John 3:16; Ezekiel 36:26] He is ready to turn your world upside down. [Acts 17:6] “The form of this world is passing away.”
When Jesus called the first disciples, he drew them out of the form of the present world, and into the real world—his world. The world of the Kingdom. They were stuck in the water. They were stuck with their stupid little boats with their stupid smelly fish. Jesus plucked them like fish out of the water and turned them into different kinds of people—not people who lived in water, but people who would walk on dry land and be fishers of men.4
That’s you and me too—stuck. We are stuck in our little boats. We cling to the form of this present world. But Jesus is here today. We can hear his voice. (Literally—this isn’t mumbo-jumbo—you just heard his voice in the Bible today.) And you will be with him at Communion in a few moments. He is as real with us here as he was 2000 years ago in Galilee. He is standing on the seashore of your life, beckoning: “Come out of the form of this world, and enter my world.” It’s a choice worth making. I believe following Jesus is always a choice worth making because it will make you and I a different type of person. It will make us real.
Let us pray:
Grant us, O Lord, not to mind earthly things,
but to love things heavenly;
and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away,
to cleave to those that shall abide;
through Jesus Christ our Lord … Amen.5
RSV (cf. NASB 1995, NKJV). NRSV “the present form of this world is passing away” (cf. ESV, NIV 2011, CEB). “Present form” perhaps is more lexically accurate, but at the expense of some eloquence. KJV: “For the fashion of this world passeth away.”
Allusion to Karl Barth’s famous 1917 essay, published in English as “The Strange New World Within the Bible.” (The original German title was simply “The New World of the Bible.”) This essay is found in Barth’s essay collection The Word of God & the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (Harper Torchbooks, 1957). An updated edition of this collection is The Word of God & Theology, trans. Amy Marga (Bloomsbury, 2011).
The Greek for Jesus’ command “repent” is metanoia, literally “change of mind.” See also Romans 12:1-2 for a related verse from the apostle Paul about transformation and the mind.
Mark 1:17. NRSV’s “I will make you fish for people,” though gender inclusive for contemporary sensibilities, lacks the eloquent cadence of the English play on words in “fishermen… fishers of men” (RSV, NKJV, NIV 1984, NASB 1995, ESV).
Collect for Proper XX After Pentecost, Book of Common Prayer (1979) p. 182.