"Follow Me"
“Follow me”
Matthew 4:18-22
Worship, to me, is all about practicing making choices. The first choice is to show up at all. There are a lot of other things to do on a Sunday morning: sports practices, a round of golf, a nice long brunch, sleeping in, to name just a few. You don’t have to be here—you really don’t. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you are! However, I refuse to try to leverage that choice by invoking guilt or shame or fear. In fact, for all of us, there are Sunday mornings where the most worshipful place we can be is somewhere else. I respect you and your freedom to choose. So, worship begins with a word of welcome and a thank you—as well as a chance to greet the folks who made the same choice that day.
When you open the bulletin, some things are waiting for you. There’s a quote that might make you think or smile or just wonder, “Where in the world is Mark going with this?” A call to worship is the chance to join our voices with each other. After all, worship is not a private experience. Sometimes the “together” part—the connection to community is the best part. Then, we raise those voices together in a hymn (or at least we open the hymnal to the right page and follow along with the lyrics and maybe receive another clue to that question about where Mark is going.) Finally, are you willing to pray with me—pray in this case for God’s Spirit to fill us? The choice is yours…and on any given Sunday some very different choices are being made by different people: “I’m really only here for the singing or the joys and concerns time or the sermon or communion. Or, to be honest, I’m hear for the coffee hour.”
If you choose, you can give and support the church during our offering. If you choose, you can delight in the children’s time and let you mind wander to when your children were that age or maybe even to when you were that age. If you choose, you can speak from your heart and share what’s happening in your life or the life of someone you love. If you choose you can lean in and listen hard to someone else’s concerns and ask yourself, “What could I do to help them?” If you choose, you can delight in the music of the choir and revel in the luxury of having others sing for you. If you choose, you can listen to Scripture like it matters and open yourself to the possibility that there might be something in this sermon for you.
The choice is yours—are you here and “phoning it in” or are you here in order to tune yourself in to God’s presence, in order to be a part of a faith community—a church family—, in order to practice seeing and listening and responding in a way that might just help you to see and listen and respond in a faithful way to the great unknown of what’s ahead in this next week. I’ve found that almost everything worth doing requires us to practice if we have any hope of doing that thing well.
Imagine that life is one big decision tree. Here’s the next choice. You have to evaluate what’s possible. You have to think things through. You have to ask yourself, “Am I listening as my best self here or am I listening like a tired, or irritated, or hungry, or lonely, distracted person? What am I missing about how I could be helpful in this moment.” “God, help me here. God, help me to see what I’m missing. God, help me to be helpful.” Then, in real time, we have to decide, and our decision will shape where we go next on the decision tree, when it will be time to make the next decision.
In worship, itself, we are living our faith, just like in basketball practice we were playing basketball. In practice, we became a team. We learned each other’s tendencies and abilities. We learned how to work together. Practice, sometimes, was great, in and of itself. Sure, the coach was not going to let you play if you didn’t practice. More importantly, you wouldn’t be ready to play the game. When the crowd was loud and the stakes were high and the game was on the line, you had to rely on the skills you had built, individually and as a team. As my coach used to tell us, “The big games in January are won by how you practice in July.”
So, we, as a church family, practice together. We laugh and cry together. We sing and pray together. We hear the call to be forgiving and we forgive one another. We recognize the needs of the world around us and we respond together. We learn to put flesh on the concept of love and turn it into non-perishable food items and laundry detergent. We see something and then we do something together…and as we do, we build the “muscle memory” to do it with less awkwardness and hesitation the next time. “See the needs…respond. See the needs..respond. See the needs…respond.”
Here’s the problem, though. As important as basketball practice was, as important as the spiritual practice of worshiping is, you practiced basketball in order to play the games. You go to worship and are a part of the church, not just because it feels good or it makes you think or because you can get more worthwhile things done together. We come to church to take what we’ve learned and put our faith into action in the rest of our lives.
To put the matter differently, I knew guys who were incredible practice players who never quite got there in a real game. I was, myself, a little bit that way. I had a tendency in a real game to forget to just cut loose and trust what I had practiced. My coach would yell at me to, “Stop thinking and start playing.” Later, when I wasn’t in the game, he would sit me next to him and ask what I thought we needed to adjust—because I was good at thinking about basketball. At some point, though, you do have to play the game.
The same thing is true of our faith. We can build great awareness and intentions. We can build a wonderful church family that does some great things to help other people. We can really enjoy each other’s company and catch glimpses of God’s face in one another. However, the most daunting challenge is to live this faith not just with our church family but in our home and on the train as we commute and as we sit in traffic and wait for the train to get out of way or as we encounter a stranger. We hone our faith foundation and attune ourselves to the needs of others and learn how to ask God for help and guidance because navigating this world—this super complicated world—is an enormous challenge and will require that we bring everything we have to rise to the calling.
Sometimes, our callings out there in the world come cloaked in the mundane. It’s Monday morning, the beginning of the new week. You’re not really all that restored from the weekend that didn’t quite work out as planned. Your spouse just asked you that question again—the one that annoys you to no end. Your child has decided that there is no acceptable breakfast item available. And, the dog is scratching at the door to go outside. How will you live in this moment and not lose yourself or “your religion?” How will you live in this moment and rise? The answers are as simple, maybe, as smiling at your spouse, or hugging that child or taking the dog outside and thanking the dog for having simple needs. The answer might be simply that instead of becoming reactive you gave yourself a little time out that created the space you needed to send off a silent prayer: “God, I felt you in church yesterday. Are you here?”
Or, every now and then, the calling might come totally out of the blue. Here’s a person I’ve never met before who is in need: they look so sad; they’re asking for food; they ask me a really heartfelt question. Do I risk asking if they’re okay? Do I change my schedule and take them out to eat? Do I hear their question and decide, “You know, that’s a conversation I think I need to have.” Am I open enough and available enough and flexible enough to have God put a wild-eyed, out-of-left field, I-didn’t-see-that-coming moment in front of me and have the courage to say to God, “Okay, you know what…I’m in!”
All of the choices matter, large and small, off the wall or seemingly mundane. There are more faithful choices and less faithful choices. The good news, I’m pretty sure, is that it may be a bit like baseball where, if you get a hit 3 out of 10 trips to the plate, you’re in the Hall of Fame. We all swing and miss regularly when it comes to recognizing the calling before us. The really good news is that when we miss, I’m pretty sure, that God is calling out to us, “That’s okay, buddy, you’ll get ‘em next time! Nice swing!”
All of this is what makes our text so amazing. Four fishermen are presented with a choice. The first two are Simon Peter and his brother, James. Jesus is walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He calls out to Simon and James: “Come, follow me and I will send you out to fish for people.” The fishermen’s life blood is their nets. They clean them and and inspect them and roll them over and over again. The fish that those nets gather feed their village. And yet, the moment that they hear Jesus’ calling, they drop their precious net. Jesus calls them to follow him and they actually follow!
A little while later, Jesus sees James and John, the sons of Zebedee. They are out in their boat with their father, preparing their nets for the day. Jesus calls them. They drop their nets. They leave their boat. They abandon their father, too! They leave the world as they have known it behind and they are off, trailing Jesus, walking into a whole different chapter of their lives. (One of the other Gospels does mention that Zebedee’s servants were with him and helped him get home.)
It’s a dangerous thing in some ways, to make ourselves available to God, to pray, “How can I help” and mean it. The danger is that we might have to leave a few things behind. The danger is that our direction may not make sense to others whom we dearly love. Or, alternatively, the danger might be that we fail to rise to the moment, at all.
Let’s give these men their due. Jesus called them. They followed. This may be their most faithful moment…