TEXTS for Preaching

Gospel of Mark
1:14-20

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea–for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

Fishing
by A. E. Stallings

The two of them stood in the middle water,
the current slipping away, quick and cold,
the sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her –
she’d rather have been elsewhere, her look told –
perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
and fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
life and death weighed in the shining scales,
the invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

SERMON

I am thinking the punchline of that “Fishing” poem,
is the last one:
“…life and death weighed in the shining scales,
the invisible line pulled taut that links them both.”

But the one resonating within me
with the golden light of a late afternoon sun, is this one:
“Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
and fishes shelter in the undergrowth…”

When I think of Jesus and the Zebedee boys,
I think of them standing like that
in the brown-green Mississinewa River
running through the unploughed floodplains
of Northcentral Indiana, or
the fast clear water of the White River
in Western Michigan.

Or even more poignantly, for me anyway,
in a heavy gage aluminum fishing boat
with four children, hooking worms
and showing them
where to lower the bobber-line among weeds
that can be seen as if no water was there at all.

I know, all those paintings
of single-sail canvass luffing in the wind,
and white robed men casting nets on the shore
of a big blue lake surrounded by desert hills.
But those paintings are Europeanized depictions of Galilean scenery.
So why not Midwestern-ize
and Mid-twentieth century-ize
my own imagination of how it went down
between Jesus and the Zebedees?

That is what we have to do anyway, to make it our own.

The gospel stories will remain antique old tales
with possible but vague value,
so long as we do not make them our own.
To make them our own,
we have to climb inside and bring our guts with us.
Then we have to pull what is in our gut
through those gospel stories
as if a strainer that catches tidbits
we need to know.

Here is what I mean, and how I happen to do it.

With four kids and limited income,
there were only two times
Katy and I flew with our children together, as a family,
and one of them was to Florida
when our oldest was nine and our youngest was two.

It was a whole new experience for our kids.
They were used to long drives in the car
because we never lived closer than
eight hours from my parent’s summer cottage
in Northern Michigan,
and sometimes we drove there
just for long weekends.
But an airplane, to someplace with palms trees
and hot sun in the middle of winter?
That was different.

Our oldest had deep reservations.

From the very moment we left the car in overnight parking,
to the moment we got our luggage in Tampa
and walked to get the rental car,
our oldest daughter peppered me with questions:
Do you really think we should leave the car here?
Do you have tickets for everyone?
Have you done this and will we
be on time for that?
Wouldn’t it be better if we did this?

I’m talking NINE years old!

Finally, as we were strapping the littlest ones
into car seats in the rented mini-van
at the Tampa airport, I turned and asked her –
actually, I told her in a stern voice –
trust me and just follow along.

But right then it occurred to me
she was her father’s, and her mother’s, daughter.
“Just follow along” was not in the DNA.

Reading that story about the call of the Zebedee boys
reminds me of what a handicap it can be
to question everything and take nothing for granted.
So, I have a love/hate relationship with this story from Mark,
which of course means I’m deeply enmeshed with it.

Here is why it’s a teeter-totter for me.

I love the story because it involves fishermen –
working people with no social clout
and no credibility among the power elite.

I also love it because of Jesus’
unvarnished invitation for them to abruptly quit everything they know,
without even a promise of reward.
It flies in the face of the glittery promises
of popular religion in our own day.

On the other hand…it is unimaginable to me
that someone would feel compelled
to quit everything familiar to him or her and follow a stranger.
Even if that stranger were a celebrity,
it is a non-starter in my little brain.

It is beyond my capacity
to imagine that anyone without seriously impaired judgment
would simply traipse off on an expedition
which they had not helped plan,
and which had no clear objective or point of return.
The whole idea of it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

In fact, just once, I would like to read a Gospel story
in which Jesus tries arduously for three days
to convince some hapless dimwit –
let’s say a priest – to follow him, and then finally,
exhausted and grumpy from the effort,
Jesus hits the resistant priest over the head with a mallet
and orders Peter and the Zebedee’s
to throw him over the saddle of a donkey
and bring him along quietly.

But there are no stories of such coercion
anywhere in the Gospels that I can think of,
at least not with Jesus and his followers.

All we have are a bunch of stories
like this weird one in which we are told nothing
about the motivations Jesus had in calling these people,
and nothing about their motivations for going along with Jesus.

The very sparseness of the event makes it a wonderful story
on which to hang all manner of sentimentalism,
and to preach on the virtue of blind faith –
the kind that responds immediately
and without question.
Neither of those am I able to do personally,
and wouldn’t recommend to anyone else either.
That would be especially true now, given the current spate
of religious leaders perpetuating prosperity gospels.

But like any number of literary stories,
we do not get to know why Jesus
invited these guys to walk into the sunset with him.
And we do not get to know why
the young men went with Jesus.

But there is an additional tension
throbbing in this story
like a thumb hit with a hammer.

Most of us, and I don’t think
I am going out on a limb in speculating this –
most of us have a thirst
for a little control and certainty.

We have our own versions
of digging a routine through the day,
or week, or year.
Maybe we make lists,
or set up a calendar,
or use post-it notes.
However we do it, we like to imagine
that the time ahead of us
has some shape or a plan,
and that we get to shape it
or plan it.

Generally, we know what we have to do,
what needs to get done,
where our priorities are,
and what the overall trajectory is
as we walk, skip, and run
down the pathway of our lives.

But then someone or something comes along
and invites us, or pushes us,
and we find ourselves riding a strange current,
toward an unplanned thing.

When that happens,
especially if we get no warning
and it seems to have no purpose other than
to wrestle us out of our comfort zone,
we get a little grumpy about it.
We resist it.
We may even find a way to stop it
so we can go back to our plan.

But we also know, deep down in our bones,
that wandering away willingly –
that choosing to get up from the desk
of our routine
and follow a whisper or a gut instinct,
or some other voice manifesting itself
in some other vague, peculiar,
or even not-so-subtle way –
may get us in trouble.
Knowing all that, we also know
we ought to go anyway.

We know Jesus won’t hit us over the head
and carry us over his shoulder
in a fireman’s carry.
We know God won’t sit in our drivers seat
and steer us down the road
toward a sure and certain destination.

We know that if we are going to embark
on some hair-brained scheme
or follow an imagined voice
or any such craziness,
we have to choose it.
Doggoneit!

I do not want to believe that Jesus
preyed upon the desperate,
the weak,
and the vulnerable
like those who recruit suicide bombers.
I’d rather imagine
that Jesus’ closest companions
were strong-willed, free agents
that struggled with the decision to be part
of his impossible entourage.

We don’t get any of the details so
we are left to project ourselves
onto the story with our imaginations.

We might as well be honest about it.
Whatever we think about this story
likely reflects a struggle we are working on,
just like our nocturnal dreams
poke our wakeful consciousness.
And that is the value of these stories:
they are a mirror – a reflection in whose image
we not only see ourselves
but sometimes the faint
and fleeting outline of God.

So, what’s the punch line?
What is the “So What?”

It is this:
Every invitation and possibility that comes along
is not a bidding from God.

The fact is, we will likely never know
which opportunities were of God
and which were of our own making
or someone else’s manipulation.
We don’t get to see the map
and we don’t get to know, except sometimes.

That is the way it is for us
and the “so what” begins with accepting it.
We begin by coming to terms with, and accepting,
that ignorance is our way of life –
when it comes to God
and a whole lot of other things
we would rather have certainty about,
a lack of certainty is the ground of our being.

Such acceptance
keeps us from biting the hook of certainty
which is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
Even good science
is held in humility and with openness
to discovering it was wrong
and toward new possibilities.

The Church loves the word “discernment”
but the very idea we can figure out with any degree of certainty,
where and how God is stirring the pot,
is a reach beyond our grasp.

So, what can we do?
Well, first of all,
we can pay attention to our own experiences:
be reflective, and go digging
in what we have done and known,
to mine any gems of wisdom we can find.

Instead of just going along from one experience to another
as if sliding down a fire pole of life,
we can adopt a sculptor’s temperament,
one that patiently
and intentionally reflects
on our experiences;
that listens for the voices in the background
as well as the ones we heard loudly;
and, to see a trustworthy pattern of guidance
that we imagine may be God.

Because we can learn so much from failure,
often more than from success,
we cannot assume our failures and blind alleys
are evidence that we made the wrong choice.
Colossal mistakes often deliver
long sought-after truth.

Always, as we seek to learn from our experiences,
we need the wisdom and humility
to know and accept
that we are not following “God’s plan” –
we are following our own choices
that we hope and pray
correspond with, or somehow dance with, God.

They are our choices.
We choose,
and we must choose.
In this sense there is no following Jesus or God
or anyone else.
We choose.
We walk, one foot in front of the other.

We live our lives led by our choices.
That is what we do
and all that we can do
even if we call it by some other name.

Christian spiritual practice,
which is what the Baptismal Covenant describes,
is a self-honest acceptance that our choice
is the one that matters.

Adopting a spiritual practice,
at least in part, is done to help us
make the best choices we can make,
based upon the values and beliefs
we say we cherish.

The practice gives us a path,
a pattern
that we can follow
like a tracker
following animal signs through the forest.

It doesn’t mean we can’t get lost
or that we won’t make bad decisions
and have failures – even moral failures.
But rather, it means our choices are aimed
and have purpose.

It means we act with integrity
rather than willy-nilly as if it doesn’t matter;
or as if someone or something else
can make choices for us.
We decide.
We choose.
We act.

Although it seems like a bad strategy,
God put our lives
in our hands.
A spiritual practice,
a Christian spiritual practice,
offers us guidance in how to track it
or fish for it:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
and fishes shelter in the undergrowth.