“Called to Follow” - January 26, 2020

Matthew 4:19-20

            Before the disciples, there was Jesus.

            While Peter and Andrew were still fishing on the Sea of Galilee, while James and John were still fixing their nets, there was Jesus.

            After his birth and his early years, after the Holy Spirit descended and the voice of God came from heaven, saying,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” [Matthew 3:17]

After he faced down the devil’s temptations in the desert, it was time to begin.  He left Nazareth, where he had worked as a carpenter, and went to the town of Capernaum where he then made his home, says Matthew, and

“From that time, Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” [Matthew 4:17]

There were no crowds cheering for him or jeering at him.  There were no five thousand people demanding to be fed, no eager learners straining to hear his words.  The time would come when could not show his face before there were people rushing to bring the sick to him for healing, but that was not yet.  At this point, there was just Jesus, heading out into the world to find them and to proclaim the good news. 

Eventually he would ask others to help him to do that, and the gospel writers tell us how that happened.  He said to two fishermen,

“‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’  Immediately the left their nets and followed him.”  [Matthew 4:20]

Next, it was two more,

“and he called them.  Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.” [Matthew 4:21-22]

That was how it went from there on, but it began with Jesus and his announcement of the kingdom.

            In fact, everywhere Jesus went – everywhere he goes (because he cannot be limited to the past when he is alive even now) – the kingdom of heaven draws near.  When Jesus called one of his earliest followers, Nathanael, he described himself as the one whose job it is to join heaven and earth together.  He said,

“Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” [John 1:51]

Jesus does that just by being who he is.  That never changes. 

His call to his disciples is a call to follow him, not to tell him where we think he should go.  He calls his people to join him in his mission, one that he initiates.  We may think we know where he’s leading, and sometimes we are right.  A lot of the time he surprises us, however.  We may spend a lot of time and energy trying to get somewhere that just isn’t where Jesus has planned to go, in which case we are only banging our heads on the wall. 

If you look back at the early Church, the very earliest days as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, what you find is that the Lord is at work in people’s souls before his followers ever arrive on the scene and that when they do arrive their job is often to explain what is going on to people whose lives are already being turned around.  The Holy Spirit sends Phillip to a spot on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, where he meets a chariot carrying an Ethiopian official who is already reading the book of the prophet Isaiah.  Phillip offers to explain what he’s reading, and the next thing you know the man becomes the first gentile convert to Christianity [Acts 8:26-40].  Phillip helps to finish what God began.

Again, Peter has a vision that he should go and speak to a Roman centurion and when he arrives, he finds that he was expected [Acts 10].  A man named Saul persecuted Jesus’ followers and on the way to Damascus to arrest more of them he is struck blind by the brightness of Jesus’ appearance to him from heaven.  Carried to Damascus, he waits for three days without his sight, until God speaks to a man named Ananias as he prays and tells him to find Saul, then to pray for his sight to return.  Ananias, of course, says, “Do I really have to?”  The answer is, “Yes.”  So he goes where he was told, and before long Saul has changed his name to Paul and is on his way to becoming the person whose letters to churches that he founded make up a good chunk of the New Testament [Acts 9].  In each case Jesus gets there first and then says, “You can take it from here.”

Gil Rendle, who for decades has been studying what makes a church faithful and effective and what makes a church falter in its mission, shares this observation:

“Instead of constantly asking how a person or congregation can be an agent of God’s Spirit, leaders also need to ask where and how God’s Spirit is already at work – and then ask how they can get behind that work and help.  It is a challenge to functional atheism through which people have convinced themselves that they are the (only) hands and feet of God, and unless they get up and about with their own doing they believe God’s Kingdom will not advance.”[1]

In other words, it’s up to us to get with the program, not to design it. 

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

            and what does the Lord require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”  [Micah 6:8]

            I was comparing Christmases with a friend of mine, also a pastor.  She is on staff at one of the large, almost-but-not-quite-mega-churches out in the middle of the state that has a string of services on Christmas Eve and I asked her, with all that goes on that day, which service she herself finds most meaningful.  She told me that it never shows up on the schedule.  A few years ago she went to visit one of their shut-ins the week before Christmas and saw that the woman had left her Bible open to the Christmas passages from Luke.  Next to it was a picture of a young woman taken sometime in the 1950s.  It turns out that the picture was of her daughter, who had died a few years after it was taken.  The Bible also had belonged to her.  So my friend read from that Bible before she left, finishing at the end of the shepherds’ visit where it says,

“But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” [Luke 2:19]

That’s the part where the mother is thinking about her baby, Jesus, and the meaning of his life.  They both started to cry.  But every year since then, they have started out Christmas Eve Day together in the same way.

            You follow by going where your heart shows you that Jesus has already gone.  You go where you know perfectly well he would want you to be, and you find he’s waiting there already.

[1] Gil Rendle, Quietly Courageous (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 86.