January 27, 2008 – The Third Sunday after Epiphany
Matthew 4:12-23
Subscribe to the sermon RSS feed
Grace and peace to you from God our Creator, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
It is good to see so many familiar faces. To be in a familiar place. And to engage in a familiar text. What 6 year-old Sunday school student hasn’t heard this story about becoming “fishers of people” or maybe even sung “I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.”
But sometimes, while comforting, familiarity brings some challenges with it. Not the least of which is being able to see something new in familiar surroundings. In an effort for us to feel in control of our world, we often want to keep the familiar, familiar. We want to keep it the same.
Going to seminary involves making a lot of decisions. As you go through the process, the decisions continue to increase in number and, many times, significance. When my family and I left to go to seminary one of those decisions was to sell our house and move into student housing. For the first two years, we lived in an apartment. A very nice but very small, at least to us, apartment. Our daughters shared a room for the first time and had bunk beds. We stored many of our things and got the rest to fit very snuggly into the apartment.
Upon returning from internship last fall, one of the decisions senior students have to make is, once again, where to live. Seniors actually get a preference in student housing. Kim, my wife, voted for the student duplexes because they had more space and more windows. Katie, my oldest daughter, voted for the duplexes because she wanted her own room downstairs. Taylor voted for the duplexes because she wanted to be closer to friends and the playground. I was the sole vote for going back to the apartments. They were familiar to me. I knew how everything fit there, where all the furniture went.
I probably don’t need to say this but, in case you are wondering, we are living this year in the student duplexes.
So here we are at this familiar Scripture and for years I have read this with familiar eyes, in a familiar way. In the same way. Jesus calls Simon and Andrew and “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” As they go, Jesus calls James and John and “immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.”
If we read right before this text, we see that Jesus has just been baptized by John, then tempted in the wilderness, and now is beginning his ministry in Galilee. It appears he walks up to Simon, Andrew, James, and John, who don’t know him, to whom he is not familiar, and says, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people” and immediately they leave and follow him. What authority Jesus must have spoken with! What faith the first disciples must have had! It’s a rather amazing story and for some people it works like that. Jesus’ call and invitation hits them like a bolt of lightening and immediately they follow him. And all we can say is thanks be to God.
But for so many of us, that’s not the case. And I think this story has something for us as well. You see, this Scripture doesn’t say this is the first time that Simon, Andrew, James and John have seen Jesus. We may have read that into the text or maybe that is how we heard it in Sunday school, but in fact, our best scholarship leads us to understand that they had already met Jesus.
Galilee is not a big place. Our text tells us that Jesus made his home in Capernaum by the sea. The same Sea of Galilee where those first disciples worked and lived. Jesus lived among them. He has started his ministry. He was proclaiming, preaching throughout the area. He was living among them. They heard his preaching. They heard him. They most likely had conversations with him. They knew him. He was familiar to them.
Now I suppose it would be easy to think that this somehow lessens the faith of these early disciples, that they really just left to go with someone who was familiar to them, someone they knew. But remember our human tendencies. Our desire is to keep the familiar, familiar. To try to control our world. What they could control was the mending of the nets, where to cast their nets, when to make repairs to the boat, what time to fish.
During my internship year in Seattle I worked with a mission developer to help start a new mission church, an emerging mission start. The traditional church I also worked with was a key financial contributor and prayer partner in much the same way Advent participated in the beginning of Kaw Prairie Community Church.
The idea of helping to start a new church was familiar to them because there were still charter members there who remembered starting their congregation. What this traditional church could control was whether or not to give their money, how much, and for how long. But did you hear me say that this was an emerging mission church? This meant taking a group of non-churched individuals and allowing a faith community, through the working of the Spirit, to evolve into being. It was led by a lay mission developer in torn blue jeans with a ponytail and tattoos. He had no seminary education. There was time taken for small group discussions in the middle of worship. At times, communion was served using whatever bread and wine was left over from the potluck that happened prior to each service.
Now even in the most non-churched portion of our country, the Northwest, there were voices in Seattle at the traditional church that said, “They should look and act more like us.” “Are they even Lutheran?” “Why do we even need a new church? They can just come and worship with us.” They simply wanted to keep the familiar, familiar. To keep it the same.
The disciples woke up that day and went through familiar patterns of their day. As the Scripture tells us, Simon and Andrew were “casting a net into the sea – for they were fishermen.” James and John were “in the boat with their father mending their nets – for they were fishermen.” A familiar pattern to a familiar day. Yes, they knew Jesus. He was familiar to them but I doubt they woke up that morning and thought, “Okay Jesus, where are we going today?”
Do we? Do we wake up each morning and say, “Okay Jesus, where are we going today?” Just like those first disciples, for most of us, we know Jesus. He is familiar to us. He isn’t a stranger. For most of us, we’re not talking about stranger danger. No, it’s much more dangerous than that. We are scared that as we greet Jesus in our familiar way, as we are casting our nets, mending our nets, teaching our students, taking our classes, driving our trucks, working in our offices, meeting with our customers, caring for our parents, doing our homework, playing with our children – that Jesus will see us and say “Follow me.”
Just like those first disciples, we also know Jesus. He lives among us. He is familiar to us. And the reality is, just because Jesus is familiar to us, that doesn’t make it any easier to follow him. No matter how familiar we are with Jesus or how long we have been contemplating a change, we know that Jesus’ invitation to follow him still calls for a response that to each one of us feels immediate.
And so we struggle to keep the familiar, familiar. We struggle to control our lives. We may say, “Okay Jesus, I’ll meet you here in worship each week for one hour.” Or, “I’ll meet you in prayer each day”; or, “I’ll meet you twice a week, once in worship and once in Sunday School”; or, “I spent a week with you last year during a mission trip.” It’s like saying, “Jesus, we’ll get along quite well as long as you show up where I expect you to, where I choose, where I can control.”
And here is where it gets dangerous. This living Word, God’s very Word, Jesus the Christ, sees us, meets us where we are at, and says, “Follow me.” We no longer are setting the agenda. We no longer know the outcome, where he is leading us, and we can only say, “Okay Jesus, where are we going today?”
You will be surprised where Christ leads you. He may say, “Well today, we’re finally going to sign up to teach Sunday school or Confirmation” or “Today, we’re finally going to attend our first AA meeting.” He may say, “Today we are going to call on that relative or friend and begin to fix that broken relationship,” or, “We’re going to go to Bible study tonight,” or, “We’re going to start tending to your health, all of it, physical, mental, financial, and spiritual.”
As our Scripture points out this morning, Jesus came to the disciples. He saw them. He met them where they were at. He invited them and said, “Follow me.”
The Gospel here this morning – the Good News – is that this morning Jesus comes to us. He sees us. He meets each one of us where we are at. He meets us through the water. He meets us in the bread and wine. He meets us in this assembly and he invites us again by saying, “Follow me.”
And just like with those first disciples, he walks alongside us on the journey. We are refreshed for the journey through the water, the waters of baptism. We are nourished for the journey through the bread and wine, Christ’s body and blood.
Refreshed and nourished, may we leave today, this morning and every morning saying, “Okay Jesus, where are we going today?”
