I wonder where they were when he found them?
I mean, we’re told they were there at the Sea of Galilee’”Peter and Andrew, casting their nets out into the sea; James and John with their father, Zebedee, mending their nets on the boat.
But I wonder where they were’”what had happened in their life, or even that day, that hour, the minute before, so that when this young, traveling preacher-prophet approached them and said, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near,’ they didn’t tell him to shove off, but ‘immediately’ dropped everything to follow.
I.
It makes me think of different folks I knew years ago after 9/11 who, upon seeing the news reports of that day and processing not only the disaster itself but what it meant, how the axis of the world seemed to shift, dropped everything’”school, their jobs, the lives they thought they had in front of them’”and joined the armed forces or the civil service hoping to make a difference. Couldn’t have imagined that path just 24 hours before, but something happened that changed everything.
Other things. The death of a parent, a spouse, a child’”Christ, have mercy’”and suddenly things are different, you are different. You rethink everything. You make a change. A new career. A new relationship. A new path emerges, and you find you have the courage now to take it, though it may not feel like courage at the time; it may feel like the only choice you have.
Didn’t some version of this happen to just about all of us during the pandemic’”a season that has flooded back to me this morning as we’re here leading worship in a mostly empty sanctuary. Everything thrown on its head. The old world suddenly gone, the maps we had no longer worked, and so we were forced to find or make new ones. We bought Pelotons and baked sourdough. We took risks, which in some cases didn’t even seem like risks at the time; it was just what we knew we needed to do. It seemed less risky than not doing it, not adjusting, not changing, not dropping everything.
I wonder what it was for these two sets of brothers? The lives of whom we’re told precious little about. What happened to these men for them to respond to this call for repentance and then to follow, with the promise of a fresh start?
II.
Maybe something had happened’”something traumatic or transformational. Maybe there’s a reason a father is mentioned, but no mother, or why the gospels tell us Peter has a mother-in-law, but say nothing about a wife.
Or maybe it was just the opposite, and that nothing had happened. Nothing of substance. Nothing that they were promised would happen in so many ways when they were younger. There had been no moment when they chose, once and for all, their own path’”this climactic scene we imagine in our youth, someplace out in our future, when we’re able, finally, to claim our lives as our own. When a light shines down from the heavens telling us who we are and what we’re to do with our lives’”something, I’ll confess, I’m a little jealous happened to Jesus at his baptism. How many of us would have appreciated that at 30?! Or at almost 43’¦
Or maybe it was, for them, that they’d had a moment like that, of clarity and conviction, but it had passed. The opportunity faded. The chance was missed, their lives, once alive with possibility, had steadied back on their inevitable courses, until that morning as they were beginning their day, the many tasks before them, each day so much like the last, with their boat and the fish and those nets’”those nets that keep showing up. These nets that Andrew and Peter were casting into the sea. Over and over again, day after day, the motion so familiar, so routine, the muscle memory so intact that it had become involuntary, almost like some say a prayer should be, so close to us that we lose ourselves within it’”and yet dangerous too, because the mundane can be the garden of distraction or even the seed of resentment.
Or the nets that James and John were mending in their boat. Those old, dry-rotted nets they’d been holding together for years. Nets, they should have let go of a long time ago, but they always seemed to get tangled up in’”what else besides fish was hung up in those nets, I wonder?
Did Jesus say to them: Follow me, but to do it, you’ve got to leave those nets behind. Even if they work, they’re pulling in far less than you’re capable of, and if they’re worn out, you’re spending more time than you ought to just holding them together.
We all have our nets. Those routines and rhythms that, over time, are reduced to ruts. Or those things we’re always trying to hold together, to make work, that, in the end, we just need to be let go. What if Jesus’ call to follow was a call to leave all that behind? Would that change how we hear this story?
What we’re told he did say is, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Which is an interesting invitation, and something I’ve always struggled with a bit. ‘Follow me,’ it’s always been explained, ‘and I will equip you to bring others into the fold.’ A message of evangelism. ‘Follow me, and you’ll catch something bigger,’ I remember my Sunday school teacher explaining.
And that may be what Jesus is offering to them, but it seems somehow disconnected from what he does in his ministry to come. Now, he very much wants to bring others into the fold, but he does this through healing, welcoming, and giving hope. By finding people who are used to catching the hard edge of life and offering them unexpected tenderness. He was intentional, personal, caring, and kind. Not just casting a line out to see what or whom he can reel in. So I wonder if we can hear this call to discipleship a little differently. I wonder if we could hear Jesus say not, “Follow me and I will help you fish for people,” but “Follow me, and I will help you fish for others.”
In other words, follow me, and the work you will do will not be solely for yourself. Follow me, and your life will not be so wrapped up in your own. Follow me, and your world will widen, your vision will brighten, and your heart will expand to hold the needs and hopes and joys of others as closely as your own, and you will see just how full your life can be.
In other words, follow me, and you won’t have to fish just for yourself anymore. You won’t be caught in that net of self-fulfillment. Follow me and learn what a gift it is to live with and for others.
III.
Each year during this season of Epiphany, the brief few weeks between Christmas and Lent, we encounter scriptures from early in the gospels when Jesus was revealed, which is the meaning of epiphany: when light shines, and the true nature of a thing is uncovered. First, it was with the wise men, who followed the star revealing this child king, worlds away. Then, Jesus’ baptism, when he joined so many others down in the water of the Jordan River, and a voice from above revealed that he was God’s Beloved.
Last week, it was the call of the disciples in John; now, here in Matthew, we’re shown the next step in this gradual epiphany, which, in many ways, will continue throughout the gospels, right on through the crucifixion and resurrection.
In calling his first disciples, Jesus reveals what his ministry and message will be about. Repent! He says. And we hear this word, I think, in the punitive sense, as if we’ve made a grievous wrong and must make amends’”but that’s too small an understanding. Metanoia is the word in Greek, which means to ‘change your mind,’ or even deeper, to have a ‘change of heart.’ The call to discipleship here in Matthew, the revelation Jesus offers, is an invitation to change. To change your mind about something or someone, maybe even yourself. To have a change of heart toward a question, a problem, or a person.
The revelation may be simply that change is possible’”that the world is not fixed on its axis, that we ourselves are not who we must be.
And we learn right here from the start something that we will hear again and again in the gospels and discover in our own lives if we are open to it, which is that the surest way to make or discover the change we want in ourselves, or our world, is to open our hearts and our hands toward others. To fish for someone else, maybe many others, and see how we all get fed.
IV.
This way of approaching life and the world has never been easy, but it feels especially under attack right now. I don’t think it is reactionary to say we are living in perilous times. Preaching to this empty sanctuary is not all that has me thinking about that hard season of social unrest five or so years ago, when our physical separation was matched by, and no doubt intensified, our spiritual and social separation.
It seems every day we are subjected to images, quotes, and events meant to challenge and, in some cases, to flaunt and embarrass many of the values we hold dear as a people, values that, in so many ways, hold us together, though we forget it. Respect. Decency. Restraint. Truth. Justice. Common neighborliness. Let alone the higher callings of love, compassion, and humility we claim as Christians and share with so many other people of faith and goodwill’”a truth of which we were reminded this past Friday night when so many of us from Northminster and other congregations and houses of worship gathered in this room, which was much fuller, in support of Beth Israel.
We celebrated our shared values and commitments. Our shared hopes for the world, for our country, for our community. It felt so necessary to reaffirm those ties that bind, certainly in the wake of the tragic arson attack, but also in the face of this fraught moment in our common life.
Moments of crisis are also moments of judgment, for how we respond. This is true of us here in Jackson in the way we respond to the awful act of religious violence that has visited us. And it will be true of our nation as we reckon with the crisis erupting in Minneapolis and simmering in so many other communities. Who will we choose to be? What will we say is too much? Will we step back from the brink, and who will lead us in these things?
And in this season of Epiphany: What change of mind and of heart and of action are we willing to make? What are we willing to risk for this change?
I’m so heartbroken right now. I have to believe you are too, wherever these words find you. I’m praying that God would show me, and all of us, a way through it.
The great lie of human power is that it is inevitable. But our faith teaches us that the only thing truly inevitable in this world is the love of God.
A love that calls us out of our isolation and to each other in our times of distress. A love that says, Follow me to a better way. A better way of living, a better way of loving. A better way of seeing and learning this world that is so precious, so fragile.
Follow me into this broken world, Jesus says, and we will all find each other, and the Kingdom of God will be alive among us. And the good news for us this morning, wherever we are, is that the offer still stands. So many years later, the offer still stands.