Heart of the Rockies Christian Church in Fort Collins, CO

From Come and See to Follow Me, Jeff Wright, 1/26/14

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From Come and See to Follow Me

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church

(Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, Colorado

January 26, 2014

Peter and Andrew left their nets, their livelihood, to follow Jesus.  James and John left their father.  To turn toward someone, something other, involves a turning away, a leaving behind, a cost.  We are moved by the hope that the joy will outweigh the pain, that the gain will exceed the loss.

 

Texts: 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 & Matthew 4:12-25

“Come and See”: that was the title to Melissa’s sermon last week.  She was preaching from the Gospel of John: John’s report of Jesus’ baptism and how two of the twelve who would eventually become Jesus’ first disciples were there at the river when he was baptized; how their curiosity moved them to follow Jesus as he walked away from the river.  When Jesus saw they were following, he turned and asked, “What are you looking for?”  They said, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”  He said, “Come and see.”  Melissa preached a great sermon on the “e-word”, evangelism.  After acknowledging what a hard time we have with the word and how evangelism is often malpracticed in our culture, she asked us to think of it as a ministry of invitation.  We all know folks who are curious about our faith and why we’ve allowed our lives to be shaped by Jesus.  She said we don’t have to preach or cajole.  Instead, we can offer a simple invitation, like Jesus.  “Come and see.  You want to know why my faith, why the community I’m a part of, is so important to me, why I follow Jesus, come and see.”

That is Jesus according to John.  The Great Inviter, making room for persons to come and go, to check him out: the Pharisee Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the dark of night – it was just a conversation, no pressure, no threat; the woman at the well – Jesus asking for a drink of water, letting the woman draw her own conclusions.

Matthew’s Jesus is more direct.[i]  Jesus is walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  He sees two brothers casting their nets, fishers Simon and Andrew, and another two, James and John.  There’s no easygoing invitation.  Jesus speaks in the imperative, “Follow me.”  Immediately, they drop their nets and follow.  It’s tempting to imagine that the four knew Jesus – I’ve preached the text this way, that earlier they had responded to his invitation, as John writes, to come and see, then one day Jesus stops by their work and says, “O.K., guys, you’ve seen enough.  Let’s go.”  This scenario would explain the seeming abruptness of Jesus’ call and their response.  It makes for a more natural transition from come and see to follow me.

But this isn’t how Matthew describes their call.  There’s no hint that the four had ever heard of Jesus.  He simply shows up unexpected, tells Peter and Andrew, then James and John, “Follow me”, and just as unexpected they drop their nets, leave their families and follow.

This is a theme in Matthew’s Gospel.  We’ll be spending much of the liturgical year exploring Matthew’s account of the Good News.  According to Matthew, God’s advent was a surprise, wholly unexpected, even though Matthew keeps quoting from the Old Testament as if to say, “Look, we should have known.  It’s all over the Torah, our sacred texts, God showing up unexpectedly.”  I think this may be the main reason that so often, when Matthew points to something that Jesus had said or done, especially something nobody was expecting, Matthew reaches for a text to say, “This was in order to fulfill the Scriptures.”

Take the setting of Jesus’ ministry.  Nobody expected the Messiah to come in the north, in Zebulun and Naphtali.  They were expecting the Messiah to appear in Jerusalem, the political, social and religious capital of Israel.  That’s where most of the prophets did their prophesying.   Everybody was expecting the Messiah to begin his ministry in Jerusalem.  But Jesus started his ministry to the north, in Galilee.  He made his home in the town of Capernaum along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, in “the territory of the Gentiles” which, roughly translated, means a land full of nobodies: Jews thought to be compromisers in the faith for their mixing with the Gentiles, and the Gentiles themselves thought to be outside the circle of God’s grace.

Comparing Capernaum to Jerusalem is like comparing Ault – you been to Ault? – it’s like comparing Ault to Denver.  Nothing important happens in Ault.  We don’t go to Ault to see the action; we go to Denver.  It makes sense that the Jews would have said, “The Messiah, in Ault?  Huh-uh.”  So Matthew turns to the prophet Isaiah, who spoke of Ault and Zebulun and Naphtali, saying that one day, the people who sit there in darkness, will see a great light.  Turns out, they’re the first to see the Great Light, Gentiles.  Nobody was expecting that.   Should have, Matthew says, it’s right here in our Bible.

Here’s another example.  In Capernaum, a Roman centurion – need I remind you that he’s a filthy Gentile (and I mean filthy in the kindest way) – the Roman centurion approaches Jesus and asks him to heal his servant who is lying paralyzed in terrible distress.  Unexpectedly – a good Jew observes the prohibition against speaking to a Gentile – Jesus turns to the crowd that had gathered, and says, “Wow, I have yet to see this kind of faith in a single Israelite.”  Then he turns to the centurion and tells him that his servant has been healed.  The Israelites were expecting the Messiah to come with healing in his wings.  They weren’t expecting his first healings to be effected as gifts to Gentiles.

Here’s what I think Matthew is thinking.  I may be making this up.  Read the story and decide for yourself.  I think Matthew is thinking that we’ve become so familiar with the faith – Matthew’s thinking this, of course, about the Jews in his day, the folks to whom he was writing; I’m thinking this about the church today, you and me; Matthew’s thinking – that we’ve come and seen and hung around for so long and become so familiar with what we think it means to be a person of faith that we’ve fallen into a rut.  We aren’t expecting God to do anything new in the world, in our own lives.

In his book, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain reflected on his sense of loss when he completed his apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot.  Twain, Samuel Clemens, wrote, “When I had mastered the language of the water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered that great river as well as I knew the palm of my hand, I had made a valuable acquisition.  But I had lost something, too…. All the grace and the beauty and the poetry had gone out of that great river.”

I think Matthew is writing to a people who have been up and down the river of faith so many times – know it like the palm of their hand – that the grace, the beauty, the poetry have slipped away, their expectation of the unexpected too. I spoke recently with an Episcopalian who’d rather be out in nature on Sunday mornings than in worship.  She’s the daughter of an Episcopalian priest, has three uncles who are priests, and is married to a bishop.  She’s been in the church her whole life long.  She said, “I’m tired of the liturgy.”

Does any of this feel vaguely familiar?

Listen, there may be some here this morning who have responded to Jesus’ invitation to come and see.  Welcome.  No pressure, no threat.  We’re delighted you’re here. Come and see, stay awhile.

I’m talking here to those of us who’ve been around so long that the grace, the beauty and the poetry may have gone out of our following Jesus. We’re still going to Shiprock and the Tennyson Center to do mission, still helping with Faith Family Hospitality and at Laurel Elementary, teaching Sunday school, maintaining property, serving on the board or leading a team, coming to worship, coming to worship, coming each week to worship – but we’ve lost our sense of joy and adventure.  We’ve stopped anticipating the next surprising thing God wants to do in our lives.

Maybe this is why, just before he records Jesus’ call of his first four disciples, Matthew records Jesus’ first sermon.  We read it in our Gospel lesson this morning: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  This word repent, it doesn’t carry in the text the same meaning we may have been taught to think of it: a falling to our knees in sorrow and remorse, promising to do better.  In the Greek, the word simply means turn around, change your mind.  In the Aramaic Jesus would have used, it means change direction, turn back.  Maybe Jesus is saying that to recover something of the grace and the beauty in the great river that is the Christian adventure, we start with the simple act of turning around.  Stop what we’re doing, put down our nets for a time, and pay attention.

What does this look like?  Matthew goes on in his Gospel to give us some clues.  The kingdom Jesus talks about is marked by forgiveness, healing and grace, and acts of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger – that’s how Jesus describes it later in Matthew’s Gospel – and what Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Being reminded can help us recognize the next time Jesus intrudes.  It may come when we least expect it, but we’ll remember that Matthew told us to expect the unexpected – that it’s in our holy text.  In something we read, a picture we see in the paper or on the Internet, in the familiar voice of a friend or loved one, in a movie we go to see to be entertained: a “Follow me.”

A few weeks ago, we prayed Amy Austin off on her mission to Africa.  Our congregation has been gifted by God to help a number of persons hear the divine voice to follow Jesus into ordained ministry.  But we’re not all called to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth or into the calling of ministry.  Where does that leave the rest of us?

Here’s how I think Matthew answers this question.  This is the Gospel, the good news in this text.  Matthew says that we can start anew in repentance.  We simply stop what we’re doing for a moment, put down our nets – the things that are occupying us, even the good things – and turn around.  It’s a deliberate act of discernment, through which we prepare ourselves to here Jesus’ “Follow me.”  He will likely take us back into the familiar places in our lives – our homes, our neighborhoods, here in the church and beyond in our community, where a renewed conviction that it’s Jesus we are following has the potential to stir in us again the grace, the beauty and the poetry of our faith.

— Jeff Wright


 

[i] Thanks to Eugene Boring (“Matthew”, The New Interpreter’s Bible) for his challenge to a familiar interpretation of this text, that the four disciples must have known of Jesus and his teaching for them to have seemingly dropped their nets, left their families and followed so abruptly.