Come, Follow Me

"Come, Follow Me"

Matthew 4:12-23
January 27, 2008

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left
Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and
Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
“Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee
of the Gentiles— the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those
who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” From that time Jesus
began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter,
and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And he
said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately they left their
nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of
Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their
nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed
him. Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the
good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the
people.

I’m in the midst of reading a book entitled Do You Hear What I Hear: An Unreligious
Writer Investigates Religious Calling, by a woman named Minna Proctor, and it’s a
fascinating look at this woman’s experience of being a self-described “secular Jew”
whose father received what he believes to be a calling to the Episcopal priesthood.
Now, she grew up in an interfaith family, with a mother who was Jewish and a father, the
one called to the priesthood, who grew up Christian, but who essentially become
uninterested in the church during the middle of his life, while he was a professor at
Ohio State University. Many years after her parents got divorced, she discovered that
her father had been secretly going to church at a local Episcopal church, and he had
kept it a secret for years because he didn’t want to deal with the reaction of his very
non-religious daughters to his newly rediscovered faith.   Eventually, he came out to
them, so to speak, but he not only shared with them the fact that he had come home to
the faith of his childhood—he also told them that he had a sense of “call” in his life, a
call to become an Episcopal priest and do parish work. Now, the author not only had to
deal with her father’s newly rediscovered religion, but now she had to somehow
process the idea that her father wanted to become a candidate for the priesthood. And
yet, within months of finding out this piece of news, her father told her that the
Episcopal Church had essentially rejected his candidacy, a piece of news that was
devastating for him, I am sure.

Though I haven’t quite finished the book, I think Minna Procter spends most of her time
in the book exploring what it means to be called, and how a church bureaucracy, even
a well-meaning bureaucracy, determines the validity of that sense of call for each
individual candidate. She writes, in a telling moment, these words: “I don’t think I
believe in a God who sends psychic messages through bureaucratic processes.”
Now, you can explain that away by saying how it is understandable that a daughter of a
man who has just been rejected by that same bureaucratic process might feel that way,
but I do think there is something there for us ponder, to sit with. I too don’t believe that
committees or bureaucratic processes can necessarily ever really determine whether
someone has a call to ministry or not, and I say that as someone who is actually
involved in that very bureaucratic process within our own Southwest Association and
larger United Church of Christ, the denomination of which we are part of. Sometimes it’
s a matter of not being the right fit for the denomination, or not having the right sets of
gifts for parish ministry, or not having a clear grasp of the very theology one is asked to
share in the pulpit and in the coffee hour, so to speak. The bureaucracy is meant to
protect the churches who will one day be hiring these women and men, so its important
they exist, and yet, of course, having a sense of call cannot be ultimately validated or
confirmed by a group of well-meaning women and men who do not know the heart of
the one before them, or the heart of God, for that matter. All they can do is to see
whether a sense of call can be reconciled with a church in need of certain gifts, certain
passion, certain strengths that person may or may not have.

And the unknowability of whether a call is valid or not, real or false, is rooted in what a
call is, in the first place. You see, a sense of call is something that goes deep in the
bones, that voice of the heart that calls to you in the middle of the night like it did for
Samuel in the Old Testament, it is that shattering experience on the Damascus road
like it was for Paul on the Damascus Road—and you know what?   Having a sense of
call is not just for the priests and the ministers, and the missionaries, or the do-gooders
amongst us. Being called is something that everyone in this room has experienced,
though it may not be as dramatic as Paul and Samuel’s call stories, or it may not even
be something you can articulate, or put your finger on, but if you are here, and you are
a disciple of this Jesus from Nazareth, you too have been called. The stories we have
today speak of that truth, these stories of ordinary people being called by Christ to
follow after his way, to do as he does, to love as he has, to help heal the world as he is
doing. Jesus comes to these fishermen and he asks them to put down their nets, and
follow after him, and to let down their nets in the spiritual harvest all around them, to
fish for men and women.

Now, last week, we had Jesus turning around to some disciples who were following after
him, uninvited by him, and him asking them what they were looking for, to which these
two disciples replied with a question about hotel reservations. But this week, the
teacher/student model gets even more turned upside down because of how these
disciples become Jesus’ disciples. You see, in the ancient Jewish world, the disciple
would seek out the master, just like what happened in last week’s Gospel story, but
here you have the complete opposite model—you have the master, the rabbi, seeking
out the disciples. It is Christ who calls them, not the disciples calling after Jesus. It is
he who issues the invitation, who calls them to go on the journey with him, rather than
the disciples begging him to allow them to be his disciples—again, the world is turn
upside down, but it’s always turned upside down when one follows after the ways of this
One from Nazareth.

Now, before you go saying that, “well, these disciples were being called into a full-time
ministry, and that’s a ‘call call’, a real call, it’s not what I have,” keep in mind that most of
these men—and women, too, really—would not become professional preachers, they
too would have to make a living in this world, the bills continued, the kids still needed to
be feed, even as they were sharing the good news that Love is the foundation of the
world, and that Love will set us free, because love itself is free, a free gift from God.
Christ called them to do something else, to do another work in the midst of the other
work they needed to do to pay the bills, keep the lights on, etc. We all have some sort
of calling, we all have moments when Jesus calls us to follow after him, to do his work of
his love, to do his of capturing his children inside the net of love that he has cast out
into the whole world. There is something each of us is called to do, and that calling
doesn’t have to be about becoming a professional minister, or some sort of missionary,
or a social worker, or something else people would naturally associate with the idea of
being “called.” It may mean being called to hospitable to those with no friends, it may
mean volunteering at the food pantry, it may mean picking up the phone to touch bases
with that person who is at the end of her rope, or taking care of a loved one until he
can go home, or deeply loving a grandson who needs the stability only you can
provide. It may mean becoming passionate about the poor, the supposed nobodies of
this world, or it may mean being the kind of boss at work you think Christ would be, or
tending to the place where so many of us gather to worship on Sunday.

Don’t dismiss what you do naturally, or instinctively by saying that its not your calling—
more than likely, it may be that very thing you don’t think twice about doing or being, it
may be that very work that God has called you to do—that may yet be your calling.
You know, Paul and Samuel get the booming voices, and the disciples get the gentle
invitation of Jesus by the sea of Galilee, but most of us, we just get that pull within us,
that twinge about what we’re supposed to be doing, we get something like that instead
of the booming voice or the gentle invitation from God. Me—I would prefer a letter with
clear directions, but I usually don’t always get what I want—and what we all seem to be
stuck with is the Spirit of God within us, a spirit whose voice is hard to listen to because
of the clatter in our lives, the competing voices in our lives that crowd out God’s own
voice in our lives. We have a calling, each one of us, and it is special, and it is
particular to you alone—the invitation, the call, is to you, and no one else, because no
one else can do what you alone have been created for.

And yet, we can neglect the call of God on our lives, we can choose not to listen to God
amidst all those other competing voices in our lives, and not follow after this Christ.
The danger, of course, is that who we are as particular people, the particular and
unique creations of God that we are, we may end up losing the very gifts God has
given to us alone to do the work we were called to do. The Spanish author Miguel de
Unamuno tells of an ancient Roman aqueduct, located near the city of Segovia. The
aqueduct , which is a sort of elevated trestle over which water flows, was constructed in
the year A.D. 109. For 1,800 years, the aqueduct carried cool water from the
mountains to the hot and thirsty city. As many as 60 generations depended on this
marvel of engineering for their drinking water. Then came another generation, in more
recent years, who said to each other, “This aqueduct is an architectural marvel. It’s a
historical treasure that ought to be preserved. We should give it a well-earned rest.”
That’s exactly what they did. They detoured the water flow away from the ancient
stones and channeled it through modern pipes. They put up historical markers so
tourists would know who had constructed the aqueduct, and for what purpose. They
celebrated the fact that their city’s water system was now modern in every way. But
then, a strange thing began to happen. The Roman aqueduct began to fall apart. The
sun beating down on its dry mortar, without the constant flow of water to cool it, caused
it to crumble. In time, the massive structural stones threatened to fall. What 18
centuries of hard service had not been able to destroy, a few years of doing nothing,
idleness nearly did. So, don’t neglect your calling, don’t forget to be the trestle that you
were created to be, don’t neglect being the means by which God loves this world,
because the One who called you to follow him, to go after his way of love and grace
and to cast wide his net of love, needs you and I to do what we were created to do,
whatever that might be. The kingdom of God, the realm of love all of us keep hoping
for, keeping praying for, it is in our midst at this very moment, and it is even more so
when we practice our calling with those around us, those in need of the good news.

And yet, there is yet another cautionary note if you and I should accept the invitation to
come and see, to go and follow after the way of this Jesus. It is best illustrated, I think,
in a story I heard from the Director of the Back Bay Mission, the place some nine of us
just returned from a few weeks ago. I didn’t know this, but there were actually three
United Church of Christ congregations in Biloxi, MS in the early sixties, which is
amazing, especially when you realize that there are now no UCC churches in the whole
state of Mississippi. There had been a large German immigrant population that had
flocked to work in Biloxi’s fishing and shrimping industry, thus three churches from our
predecessor denominations came into being in order to serve these folks, including a
mission to help out the most of them, especially the poorest of the shrimpers and their
families. Of course, the early sixties was also the time of the civil rights movement, and
a painful time for my home state, as it was for many Southern states, as whites were
being confronted with the injustices and inequalities they had often inflicted upon their
fellow African American citizens. During that time, it was decided that rather than trying
to racially integrate the lunch counters of Biloxi, it would be better to try to integrate the
segregated beaches of the city. Two or three of our UCC clergy participated in these
“sit-in’s” at the beach, which, from what I understand, were some of the few whites to
actually stand with blacks in this particular social justice action. The result of that
stance by these ministers was deep division amongst those three UCC churches, with
many whites leaving because of their anger at these UCC clergy participating in the “sit-
ins.” The churches never quite recovered from the controversy, and eventually all
three closed, because they had acquired a reputation for being troublemaking and
radical churches, traits that are not all that prized in Biloxi, even today, I bet. All that
was left from these three churches was the Back Bay Mission, and over the years, even
it has been effected by this reputation for being so friendly to the African American
community and for its ts cry for justice for the poorest in Biloxi. And yet, Back Bay
Mission continues to this day and is generally highly respected, perhaps more than
many organizations in Biloxi, especially amongst the other nonprofits in the area,
because of those early stances of solidarity with the supposed nobodies of this world.
To this day, it still, advocates for those no one else is interested in standing up for and
yet the cost of that legacy was three thriving congregations, congregations now lost to
time and history.

What I am trying to say is this: if you and I take up the call, if we actually do go after the
way of this one of Nazareth, if we go and follow Christ, if we do the right thing, we need
to know this…that it may cost us our life, and it may get us killed. When those
churches did the right thing, when they stood up for the folks Jesus would have stood
up for, it cost them their lives as congregations. When Jesus answered the call to be
the Savior that he was, he paid for it with his life. When those disciples on the sea of
Galilee answered the call of Jesus to follow him, they could have not imagined they too
would pay the ultimate price, with their lives, if we are to believe the tradition of the
church. All of those disciples we’re reading about today were eventually killed,
murdered because of that one moment, that moment when they put down their nets, on
that bright day on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, and followed after this Jesus. If you
do the right thing, if you say yes to the call that only you have from God, you may pay a
heavy price for it, and it may get you killed, whether that it be literally or figuratively.
But also know this truth: after the cross, comes the empty grave, after the death of
those three churches, comes the Back Bay Mission that continues to “speak and do” in
the name of those three long gone churches; after the martyrdom of those early
disciples, comes the eternal church, now almost 2000 years old. You see, the end of
the story is an empty grave, the end of every story written by God is life, and so the
called of this world are promised not the easy way, but the good way, the gentle way,
the right way, the way of Jesus, who calls to us, even now, even in this moment. Amen.