Matthew 4:12-23
The
gospels have two separate traditions about the calling of the disciples Peter
and Andrew. One of them we looked at
last week. The other version combines it
with the calling of James and John, as we’ve heard this morning. That story is one of the dramatic scenes that
Matthew is so fond of repeating.
“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.” [Matthew 4:18-22]
Can you imagine what it would take to make you drop
everything, right then and there, and go?
John
Allen, a U.C.C. pastor in Wellesley, Massachusetts points out that it might not
have taken much to get them to do that. When Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God,
that meant he came preaching that the Roman Emperor was not the be-all and
end-all. Fishermen were heavily taxed
and had to pay for the privilege of fishing whether or not they caught
anything. The proceeds went to support
the soldiers who occupied their country.
He points out how the historian Josephus records that in the year 37,
Galilean peasants who were in the same position simply stopped farming as a general
strike to protest Roman offenses against the Temple in Jerusalem.
“Jesus is inviting Simon and Andrew to take a
profound economic risk and he is calling them away from the business of feeding
empire and toward the work of healing, teaching, and loving ordinary
people. The young men’s eagerness to
follow Jesus is striking: they walk away briskly from the life they had known,
even abandoning family. This is a
response to Jesus’ charisma to be sure, but it also bears witness to a
smoldering sense of dissatisfaction in the brothers, a sense that they were
ready to leave behind the tasks of a dominated people and seek new freedom with
this leader.”[1]
The
call of Jesus always means turning away from something, but it always means
turning toward something else that turns out, in the long run, to be
better. It means leaving behind a life
ruled by frustration or fear or greed or power games – all the things that the
Bible calls “works of the flesh” – and toward a life of freedom that reaches
for justice.
When
I think about people in our own day who have experienced that kind of call, a
man who comes to mind is Millard Fuller, who founded “Habitat for Humanity”. This is from the obituary page of the New York Times for February 3, 2009. It’s long, but bear with me, and listen for
the same theme, of how Jesus calls people away from one way of life and into
another.
“Millard
Dean Fuller was born on Jan. 3, 1935, in Lanett, Ala., then a small cotton-mill
town. His mother died when he was 3, and his father remarried. Millard’s
business career began at 6 when his father gave him a pig. He fattened it up
and sold it for $11. Soon he was buying and selling more pigs, then rabbits and
chickens as well. He dabbled in selling worms and minnows to fishermen. …
Mr. Fuller
went to Auburn University, running unsuccessfully for student body president,
and in 1956 was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He
graduated from Auburn with a degree in economics in 1957 and entered the
University of Alabama School of Law.
He and
Morris S. Dees Jr., another law student, decided to go into business together
while in the law school. They set a goal: get rich.
They built
a successful direct-mail operation, published student directories and set up a
service to send cakes to students on their birthdays. They also bought
dilapidated real estate and refurbished it themselves. They graduated and went
into law practice together after Mr. Fuller briefly served in the Army as a
lieutenant.
As law
partners, they continued to make money. Selling 65,000 locally produced tractor
cushions to the Future Farmers of America made $75,000. Producing cookbooks for
the Future Homemakers of America did even better, and they became one of the
nation’s largest cookbook publishers. By 1964, they were millionaires. …
Mr.
Fuller’s life changed completely after his wife, the former Linda Caldwell,
whom he had married in 1959, threatened to leave him. She was frustrated that
her busy husband was almost never around…
There was
much soul-searching. Finally, the two agreed to start their life anew on
Christian principles. Eschewing material things was the first step. Gone were
the speedboat, the lakeside cabin, the fancy cars.
The
Fullers went to Koinonia Farm, a Christian community in Georgia, where they
planned their future with Clarence Jordan, a Bible scholar and leader there. In
1968, they began building houses for poor people nearby, then went to Zaire in
1973 to start a project that ultimately built 114 houses.
In 1976, a
group met in a converted chicken barn at Koinonia Farm and started Habitat for
Humanity International. Participants agreed the organization would work through
local chapters. They decided to accept government money only for infrastructure
improvements like streets and sidewalks.
Handwritten
notes from the meeting stated the group’s grand ambition: to build housing for
a million low-income people. That goal was reached in August 2005, when home
number 200,000 was built.”
That
just blows me away. All of that happened
because the Fullers realized that they needed to save their marriage, and that
what had endangered it was a kind of endless drive toward acquisition and
outward success that our society both applauds and nourishes. When its consequences began to show
themselves, Jesus called out to them, and called them out of that into
something better – and look what it has done for other people’s lives, as well.
There’s
never any way to know who will hear that call next, or how it will reach them,
or what they may be doing at the time.
There’s no way to tell where it might take them.
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear
the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So
it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” [John 3:8]
All I can say about that is to keep your ears open, because
the call will come to you at some point and in some fashion. Be ready then to put down whatever you’re
doing at the time, and be ready to enjoy the journey.
[1]
John Allen, “Leave Your Nets: the Politics of Matthew 4:12-23” in Political Theology Today (January 20,
2014). Found at http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/leave-your-nets-the-politics-of-matthew-412-23/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+powerintheblog+%28There+is+Power+in+the+Blog%29&subscribe=invalid_email#blog_subscription-4
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