Join me in this

Calling Disciples, by He Qi

Follow me, up and down,

all the way, and all around.

Make it part of you to be a part of me.

Follow me, where I go,

what I do, and who I know.

Take my hand and say you’ll follow me.

(by John Denver)

Mark 1:14-20

When you are a pastor, it feels like you get a leg up on this text, because you make your living following Jesus.  How are we to follow Jesus?  One easy answer is to become a pastor. Boom. Done.  Box checked off – Kara and Lisa are following Jesus.  But what about the rest of you? How do you know if you are following Jesus?  

Let’s be honest, who among us even knows what that really means?

How do we follow Jesus in our lives today?

Maybe by being nice to people?  Jesus wants us to be nice to people, right? Ok, check. Mostly, at least, some of the time, anyway.

Telling other people about Jesus? Umm… the pastors are good on that one anyway.

Praying and read our bible?  Not as regular at these as I probably should be, but ok.

Going to church? You all get a check for this one today.  Good job.

 How about volunteering our time for good causes, and sharing our money with worthy organizations? Check.

Maybe if we do enough of these things, or if we have a day where we do several in the same day, then on that day we can really know for sure we are following Jesus. 

Or maybe following Jesus means believing certain things about God or life, I mean, that seems to be the way we most often define it. The only problem is that the list varies widely depending on who wrote it and when, so it’s a little foggy. 

Does your list include who to vote for and what to think about same-sex marriage, immigration or climate change?  Does it include the virgin birth, and Jesus as the Son of God, and the bible as the word of God? How many things do you have to agree with on whichever list you are using in order to qualify as officially following Jesus? When do you know if you’ve crossed the line into follower, and can you accidentally uncross it?

OK , so what if following Jesus is about how you life your life, then? 

Is that how we can tell we’re doing it right?  

But the nuns we stayed with up at St. Benedict's are following Jesus one way, and the Soldiers for Jesus International Motorcycle Club and Brotherhood of Christian Bikers quite another.
Are they following the same Jesus? 
And once we figure out what following Jesus means, how can we be sure we are doing it right? Or enough? 

It’s also clear that following Jesus means giving up something – like these disciples gave up their fishing job for their following Jesus job.  And maybe also their whole way of life and community and even their connection to their father. One friend said this week, “He’d just gotten business cards printed – Zebedee and sons, and off they went, leaving him holding the nets.”  We are pretty sure there is some kind of sacrifice involved in following Jesus.  

But most of us didn’t give up our home and go be missionaries in a foreign land, or take in disabled orphans and adopt them, or start ministries that feed homeless people, or whatever other superhero Jesus-followers we might hold up to compare ourselves to when we are trying to figure out how well we are following Jesus.

I would be willing to bet on the “How well are you following Jesus?” scale, very few people, if any, would rank themselves perfectly, including pastors. Most of us would take a “I could be doing better at it” attitude, even when we’re not entirely clear how “it” should look.

Then there are all those who say they are following Jesus, but they are doing or saying things that seem to completely contradict how Jesus was in the world. How can we make sense of what that kind of Jesus-following has to do with the kind of Jesus-following we might aspire to?  So we think they’re not doing a very good job of it, and they think we’re not doing a very good job of it, and somewhere in the middle of it all, we’ve all lost sight of Jesus himself.

So to sum up, then: 

- We know we’re supposed to follow Jesus, 
- We’re not sure we completely know what that means or how it should look in the world.
- We know it requires sacrifice, 
- By any measure, we’ve got a long way to go.

So let’s go back to this moment, before the disciples were disciples, when they were just fishermen, minding their own business, and Jesus calls them to follow him.

There is so much good in translations of scripture that remove barriers to understanding because they take out English gendered language to more accurately communicate what the original language meant say. When the NRSV says, “And Jesus said ‘follow me and I will make you fish for people,” it captures the true meaning in the Greek, which is that it is for everyone, humankind, not just men.  

But by changing “fishers” to “fish for” we make a noun into a verb, and lose something important.  Listen to it this way: As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea--for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”

This poetic contrast splits the open the word “fishermen” into “fishers of men.”  

In that moment, Jesus isn’t just giving them a different job, he’s giving them a different identity, a different orientation in the world. Instead of being fishermen – sustaining yourself in the world and contributing to the whole through this certain set of skills – you are going to be fishers of men – oriented Christ and thus toward other people. You will change, by turning away from the sea and toward your sisters and brothers around you.  

In other words, You are no longer a fisherperson. You are a fisher of persons.

“Follow me.” Jesus says, “and this is what will happen.” 

Jesus is not calling them to follow a way of thinking or believing. 

He is not saying, Acquire more knowledge, or Live differently.  

He is not giving them a list to check off to make sure they are honoring God or living a worthy life. 

He is calling them to follow him, a person.

Bonhoeffer talked about this as the Who instead of the How. Jesus doesn’t give them a How – How should we live? How should we follow? How can we please God? How should we believe, or behave? How do we know if we are doing it right?

Instead, the living God stands before them and calls them as people, to follow a person – the person of Christ.  Who is this calling to me?  Who am I called to be?  Who am I called to be with?  A short time later, they will look at him in the dead calm aftermath of a suddenly shuttered storm and ask, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

This one who calls you is God incarnate. He sees you as a who – and shifts your who away from whatever it is that gives you security, self-understanding and purpose, whatever you thought it is that tells you who you are by telling you how you should live or believe.

Jesus turns your who back toward God and out toward the world God is saving, to seek other whos, to seek Jesus there alongside, with and for these other whos in the world.  

It is not, How do we follow?  Or, How do we know if we are following? But, Who are we being called by, and Who are we called to?

This scene opens with Jesus proclaiming the good news, and what he says sums up the book of Mark’s whole understanding of what the good news of the gospel is: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.

Blah, blah, church language – let me break it down: 

There are two words for time in the Greek, chronos time, which is where we get chronology, meaning hours and minutes and days, and Kairos time, which means the right time, the perfect, opportune time.

Jesus says there is no better time.  Eternity is fulfilled now. Right now God’s reality is fully here.  God’s way is unfolding right around and in and through and despite us. 

So repent! which doesn’t mean feel really bad and apologize. It means, open your mind to this reality, wrap your head and heart around it. Shift your way of seeing to God’s way of seeing.

And “believe the good news” means trust it, the verb pistis is not believe with your head, it is trust your whole being to it. To say, “I believe you” is one thing. To say, “I trust you” takes that belief to a whole other level. 

So here is what Jesus is walking around on the earth, strolling across the beach that day, saying to people, “Wrap your head around this good news and trust in it:  God’s reality is right here, now.”

So follow me, Jesus says. Come join me in this new reality. Let me lead you in it.

And he finds first Simon and his brother Andrew, and then James and his brother John, and calls them with each other, because discipleship is not a solo gig, it always connects us deeply with God and each other.  

And so instead of calling them to a measurement of their goodness, or to right belief or action, he calls them to others, to trade being fisherpeople for being fishers of people.  And he invites them to follow him, to walk with him and live with him and join him in the world – not to adopt a new belief system, or take a profitable place in the salvation pyramid-marketing scheme.  Follow me. I will be with you. I am here. I will lead you.

This changes everything. For them. For us.

The moment is realized; God is right here now. Jesus is alive. Out there in the world. Right here alongside us in this room this very moment.  And he is always calling us to join a who – not adopt a how. Jesus invites us to come as whos – who we each are, and reach out to other whos, real people, and promises to be with us as we are with each other. 

We come here to to this place every week together do that-  to be with Jesus, and to be with other whos and ask together, Who are you, God, and what are you up to? And to practice listening together for God’s response.  So that when we leave here, we are more connected to the who of God and the whos of others, and we can go back into our lives not asking,

How do I follow Jesus today? 

How do I live a good life?  

How do I know if I am doing it right?  

But, instead, Who will Jesus bring across my path today? 

Who will I see Jesus in today?  

Who will see Jesus in me?  

Who is my neighbor? 

Who is the person behind the offensive armor and defensive rhetoric that I’ve labeled my enemy? 

Who am I called to be in this moment, this situation, this relationship?

And yes, it will cost us to follow. Every time we join our who with another who, it costs us.  When your who becomes mother or father, you no longer live for yourself but for this small person in your care. It costs you your freedom and independence, your separateness, and your sleep. 

When you fall in love and commit your life to another person, you lose your singleness, it costs you your autonomy and your ability to disconnect or not care about another’s suffering or pain. 

When we are living in the who of following Jesus, it costs us our illusions and our disconnection. We trade our way of seeing for God’s way of seeing and then we recognize that we actually belong not just to ourselves, but to each other. We are responsible for each other, to listen, to care, to open our lives to one another.  And when we are with and for each other, we are joining Jesus, who is the embodiment of God, right here with and for us.  This is what following Jesus means.

“Hey fisherpeople, Jesus called out that day, follow me and I will make you fishers of people!”  Join me and I will take away what you thought your life was, and give you back your life for real.  Wrap your head around this truth and trust in it: The opportune time is right now. God’s reality is here.  And it is found when we share ourselves with each other, when we open ourselves to Jesus, who sees us as we are, and who calls us to follow him.

Amen.

Something Essential is Happening

Matthew 4:12-23

O God,

says the poet Ted Loder,*

let something essential happen to me,

something more than interesting

or entertaining

or thoughtful.

O God, let something essential happen to me,

something awesome,

something real.

Speak to my condition, Lord,

and change me somewhere inside where it matters,

a change that will burn and tremble and heal

and explode me into tears

or laughter

or love that throbs or screams

or keeps a terrible, cleansing silence

and dares dangerous deeds.

Let something happen in me

that is my real self, God.

O God, let something essential and passionate happen in me now.

Strip me of my illusions and self-sufficiency,

of my proud sophistications,

of my inflated assumptions of knowledge

and leave me shivering as Adam or Eve

before the miracle of the natural –

the miracle of this earth

that nurtures me as a mother

 and delights me as a lover;

the miracle of my body that breathes and moves,

hungers and digests,

sees and hears;

that is creased and wrinkled and sexual,

shrinks in hurt,

and swells in pleasure,

that works by the most amazing messages

of what and when and how

coded and curled in every cell

and that dares to speak the confronting word.

O God,

let something essential and joyful happen in me now,

something like the blooming of hope and faith,

like a grateful heart,

like a surge of awareness

of how precious every moment is,

that now, not next time,

now is the occasion

to take off my shoes,

to see every bush afire,

to leap and whirl with neighbor,

to gulp the air as sweet as wine

until I’ve drunk enough

to dare to speak the tender word:

“Thank you;

“I love you”;

“You’re beautiful”;

“Let’s live forever beginning now”;

and “I’m a fool for Christ’s sake.”

Tonight we hear of something essential happening to these people.

Our text from Matthew opens after Jesus has been in the wilderness, and after John has been arrested.  Jesus has been around, as abrupt and urgent as this text sounds, it’s not entirely out of the blue.  People have seen him, they’ve heard him preach, in this small town, he was most definitely on their collective radar.  Whether these particular fellows had ever contemplated attaching themselves to him or his message in any way before or not, they’ve at least come across him a time or two.  Whether they had longed for something to happen to wake them up and plug them in, we are not told.

On this day they are doing their own thing, their normal thing, they are at work.  And Jesus calls to them.

Now in John, in the text we read last week, there was a gentler invitation, given to those already curious, initiated, in fact, by them. Come and see. Jesus answers them. Come find out. Come and discover for yourself.

Here it’s a bit different. Repent! He walks around declaring, The kingdom of God is near!

And then right to them, they don’t even see it coming, he shouts from the shoreline, Follow me and I will make you fish for people!

This week a vanfull of clergy talked about how harsh that sounds, how it seems to invite an aggressive form of evangelism that seeks to hook people for God (or, as one person said it, “guts them alive and consumes them”). 

So, upon hearing this text people either feel motivated to get out there and get cracking, catching folks for God, or they cringe and shudder at the invitation.  Either way, putting these stories side by side, John’s calling story sounds much more appealing and soothing to our tender Presbyterian sensitivities. 

But let’s talk through this a moment.  First of all, that word that John the Baptist belts out on the edge of the Jordan to all who come to hear his wild message – REPENT!, Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is coming near! 

That word is now in the mouth of the one John said was coming.  Repent in the Greek means a changed mind, a total change of view, all of it- it affects social, spiritual, psychic, moral – a full shift of perspective that impacts all aspects of life and personhood.  Wake up! Notice! Let something essential happen to you!  The reign of God has begun!, Jesus declares, in that “place of deep darkness, on whom the light has now shined.”

What is it to be in deep darkness?  When it feels like nothing can reach you, and there is no clarity or perspective at all? When it’s foggy and fearful and you feel desperate for some indication that there is something beyond this moment? 

When the light comes to that place, when hope shines in, or love breaks through, when someone reaches you and you know now that you are not alone, when something opens up to indicate there may be a way forward – what is that like? 

It just make you leap up and drop whatever you’ve got going, because whatever it is, it’s nothing compared to this light pierces into your darkness, illumining your life.  This is the sense of Jesus’ impact on that region; and there were certainly those for whom his message and his promise - that God’s rule was near, that a different kind of everything was just on the horizon - must have felt like air to a suffocating world.  Sometimes the call of Jesus feels like just that.

But then, there are those who are just sitting in their boats on a Tuesday morning. Mending their nets. Drinking their coffee.  Doing what they’ve always done, and their fathers, and their father’s fathers before them. Filling their role in the world, taking their place, not really drowning in darkness but not really shining brilliantly with light either. Just sort of plugging along the best they know how in life like we do.  And of all the beaches in all the world, Jesus strolls onto theirs and says to them this: Follow me. Follow me and I will make you fish for people.

Follow me, and I will reorient your whole life. Lift your head from your work and raise your face toward others. I am calling you to participate with me in what’s happening here. Put down that net, Get out of the boat, and let something essential happen to you.

And they do. Immediately.  They drop what they are doing; and something in them thrills to the invitation, something in them resonates with the calling – a note is plucked in the universe that reverberates within them and they wake up.  They can’t not get up and go.  So they get out of the boat and they follow the light of the world.

We like to think they just strolled out of the scene and didn’t look back, but that’s not really the case.  They cycled back from time to time, itinerant-like – we see Peter in the home of his mother in law in a few chapters, and Jesus comes and heals her.  Now and then they came home for a round of fishing, they connected with their fathers and ate at the tables of their mothers.  They returned to their wives and kids too, I suppose, those that had them.  But something within them had fundamentally shifted. They themselves had shifted. They had repented. They had a surge of awareness, awake to an utterly new perception of it all, now is the occasion to take off your shoes! to gulp the air as sweet as wine – and because of that no part of their life could be the same. 

And it was a radical enough thing, to walk away from their livelihood, their family trade, their actual nets, even. It probably created quite a stir. But it also was deeply true to who they were, that there was nothing else to do in that moment than to answer the call.  Suddenly, immediately, it was the only thing that made sense. Suddenly something had happened in them that was their real self.

Jesus calls us in all kinds of ways, some gentle, some insistent.  

Follow me.  

Wake up to notice the world with the light in it.  

Participate.  

Get out of the boat.  

Set down those things that seem so very central and important, so very vital to who you are and how you contribute to the world, and dare to let your real self reach out to others.  

I will make you stop fishing for fish, and start fishing for people. 

I will take the you that’s in you and plug it in to the thing that connects us to all the other yous in the world- because if you want to know where I am, it’s there.

Some time ago I was on a flight from Minnesota to Los Angeles and found myself sitting next to a woman who was clearly very distraught.

She sat there next to me weeping, her grief palpable and overwhelming. And to be honest, I desperately wanted to ignore her; she was kind of rocking my boat.  I was tired from my own trip, and embarrassed by her public anguish, and also it frightened me.  I didn’t have any idea what to say. 

But I didn’t feel right pretending I didn’t see her, I felt like I should do or say something.  So I took a deep breath and got out of my boat.  Without having any idea where it would lead, I finally worked up the courage to simply put my hand on her shoulder.  On a stranger’s shoulder.  I had no words, no answers to give her, so I just sat with her in solidarity.  After a time, she started to talk, and told me that she had flown to Minnesota that afternoon for a conference, and upon arriving was informed that her mother, who had been ill in the hospital for some time, had crashed, and taken an abrupt and severe turn for the worse.  This lady turned around and headed back to the counter, purchased a return ticket, and was racing time to get back to the hospital in Los Angeles before her mother died. 

I just listened.  I joined her.  Eventually it became a conversation, about the pain of losing someone, and the tragedy of death.  We even talked a bit about God, but only because we were somehow sharing an experience of God.  For four hours, I sat with a stranger and found Jesus. 

Follow me.  See the person in front of you. Reach out your hand. Brave the tender word.

When Jesus calls us to follow, it is always something essential happening to us.  It is a wake up and take notice.  Instead of smothered in darkness, you will recognize that the world shot through with light, and it will illuminate those around you – for you are not in it alone.  

Because also when Jesus calls it always reveals other people as the ones to whom you’re called,

I will make you not just fisherpeople, Jesus says, but fishers of people, 

not just bankers, but bankers of people, 

not just teachers but teachers of people, 

I will make you accountants of people and nurses of people, and baristas of people and parents of people, and sons and daughters of people, and friends of people, and neighbors of people. 

And in those simple and terribly brave moments that you hear and answer the call to be with them and for them, you are part of the light that the darkness cannot quench – the conspiracy of God-with-us.

The invitation of Jesus to you and to me comes to us every day, into our curiosity and seeking, into our deep darkness and despair, and into our very ordinary, routine kinds of days that blend one into another, The Spirit of Godwithus continues to nudge and prod, I came to be with and for the world.  Come be with and for the world with me.  

 So far this Epiphany we’ve heard:

Come and see: experience it for yourself.

Follow me: join me in this thing. 

Repent: wake up and let it all look different. 

The kingdom of God is at hand: the purposes of God are unfolding.

It’s happening.  Get out of the boat and be part of it.  

Let something essential happen to you. 

Don’t be afraid.

Eternal God,

lead me now,

out of the familiar setting

of my doubts and fears

beyond my pride

and my need to be secure

into a strange and graceful ease

with my true proportions

and with yours;

that in boundless silence

I may grow

strong enough to endure

and flexible enough to share

your grace.*

Amen.

(*opening and closing prayers by Rev. Dr. Ted Loder, found in Guerrillas of Grace)