Immediately...

Immediately…

Matthew 4:18-22

A few weeks ago, I texted a friend about a book that I thought that she would enjoy. That’s what we do.  What was unusual was what happened next.  At 3:18 in the morning, I received a text back from her.  I was in the deepest sleep.  Somewhere far, far away, I heard the tone and it did what it always does:  it yanked me straight out of bed.  I was instantly wide awake.  The text read:  “Thanks!”

Oh man…let’s start here.  Most people don’t have their phones on next to them all night, right?  Maybe my friend assumed that was true for me, too. Either way, the effect was the same:  I was not going right back to sleep.  You see, after thirty five years of ministry, I am programmed to be on call, to hit the floor running, to grab my clothes and head out:  to the hospital; to someone’s home; to wherever the need may be.  

It’s not that this happens all the time.  We aren’t that big of a church.  We tend to have one crisis at a time with a little recovery time in between.  I appreciate that.  It is also why I appreciate vacation, when I put my head on my pillow and know that I’m not going anywhere.  The rest of the year, though, there is always just a little something in the back of my head that is whispering, “Be ready…just in case.”  If the call comes, I go.

Ministers aren’t alone in this response.  Doctors and EMTs and firefighters all get the call and go.  For a lot of other folks though, the experience of, “I have to go now!” is a little foreign.  Most of the time we think, “I’ll get there in good time.”  Most of the time, there is just not that sense of urgency.  Most of the time, we have time to think things through.

I think this is what makes the call that comes in the middle of the night a lot more traumatic for most people.  They have not signed up for a profession in which such calls are a part of life.  They did not think to themselves before they went to bed, “Be ready if that call comes.”  They just put their heads on their pillows and drifted into a peaceful sleep…until the urgency of the moment grabbed them by the shoulders.

In some ways, most of us are at an even greater disadvantage when it comes to the call that comes in the middle of our day.  At night, the call gets our undivided attention.  During the day, though, we are busy.  We are working.  Someone could be in real trouble in the parking lot at the store but I might not notice because I am thinking about the next errand.  I might vaguely perceive the “call” in whatever form it may come but may think, “Oh…that can wait.”  Somehow, the call that comes at 5:00 p.m. always seems less urgent than the call that comes at 3:00 a.m.

I mention all of this to invite us to really open our hearts and minds to the men in our text.  They are about to receive a call.  They have no idea it’s coming.  It is not the middle of the night.  Rather, it is the middle of their working day.  This raises the chance that they may miss what’s about to happen.  They are hard at work, fishing in one case and mending their nets in the other.  Ask yourself this, “How many really important things do you think you’ve missed in your life because you just knew that work was more important than whatever else was going on?”  We all do this, all the time.  My joke to myself when I think I know what I’m going to be working on and it turns out God has other plans is the thought:  “I hate it when ministry gets in the way of my work.”  Of course, my work is ministry—being ready to respond to the needs of those around me, even when I was just sure that I was going to be writing a sermon.

So, the odds are really against these future disciples.  They might have missed the opportunity before them altogether.  (Did you even wonder about the opportunities you might have missed because you had other plans.  We’ll never know, right?)  That’s the thing, though.  They don’t miss the moment.  Jesus appears to Simon and Andrew.  He says to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”  A few moments later, Jesus appears to James and John and he calls to them, too:  “Follow me.”  Amazingly, in both cases, all four men not only follow Jesus but they follow him immediately.  They don’t ask for a few days to consider the offer. They don’t negotiate the terms of the deal.  In fact, they don’t hesitate for a second.  Jesus calls them.  They follow, right now!

“Immediately…” That word is so powerful.  When that phone call or text comes at night, I respond immediately mostly because nothing else is going on.  I’m responding reflexively.  I can go through the drill of getting out the door without really even being fully awake.  I’ll wake myself up along the way.  During the day, though, doing anything “immediately” is tough.  I’m in the middle of something here and I think I’ll just finish it.  Thank you very much.  Or, maybe I should change my clothes.  Or, I stop to talk to the person in the office and it turns into more than just a minute or two.  That’s the thing about the disciples, they are in the midst of their routine and, against all odds, they abandon that routine immediately.

This response should be enough to earn our respect, a respect that only grows deeper when we think about their situation a bit more. They don’t ask, “Where are we going?”  They don’t ask, “When will we be back?”  They don’t wonder if they should bring anything with them.  They just go.  Of course, the truth is that they will not really be back for three years.  Bottom line…they will never be the same.  Their lives are about to be radically altered by a single decision—which ought to impress those of us who can get stymied by the question, “What should we have for dinner tonight?”

If we push things further, they not only respond immediately without asking a single question but consider what they left behind.  Just think about their work.  These men had a lot to lose.  Undoubtedly, they had worked hard to own their boats.  They had been through a lot of ups and downs and made plenty of sacrifices to make their businesses work.  They relied on skills that they had built up over years on the sea.  They were leaving their boats and nets behind.  Even more significantly, they were leaving their reputations and their sense of competency behind.  There was nowhere where they felt as comfortable as on a boat with a net in their hands.  They would never feel that competency or the sense of satisfaction that they had known in immersing themselves in their work again.  Those days were over.

What was also over was the satisfaction of knowing that because of their work, a whole village would be fed.  Beyond whatever financial exchanges might have happened, these men had a place of respect in the community.  People relied on them.  Every day they came through was a good day.  If they had a leaner day with fewer fish every now and then, well…that just doubled down their resolve to do better tomorrow.  It’s nice to have people rely on you.  It’s nice to build a good reputation.  Imagine how that reputation was destroyed—immediately—when the fishermen hightailed it out of town and word began to spread:  “How could they leave us in the lurch?” 

That’s the thing about callings in life.  Most of the time, other people don’t understand what’s happening.  We don’t get it at all.  We hear about a change in direction in someone’s life and instead of thinking, “Good for them!” we tend to think, “How’s that going to affect me?” Generally, I can be doing exactly what I’m being called to do and more often than not run straight into a wall of resistance from the people around me.  For the most part, we don’t like changing our own lives.  When it comes to someone else changing, well, we tend to like that even less.

So, at face value, if instead of reading this story in the Gospel we were living it in a village, we would likely not view it as some holy moment.  Rather, we would be a little taken a back.  “Do these men not have any sense of obligation to the community?  How does someone just throw their work out the window? What are these men thinking?”

Of course, such feelings of resentment would have ratcheted up to a fevered intensity when folks thought beyond the men’s work.  It’s one thing to have a few less fish in the market.  That’s irritating.  It’s threatening at still another level to think that someone can just toss a good business aside.  However, what would have really made folks back home despise these men would have been the fact that James and John not only tossed their nets and their boat aside but they tossed their father out, too.  Matthew says, “They left their boat and their father, and followed him.”  What?  Since when are parents disposable?

I really don’t think I’m being overly dramatic here.  For us, two thousand years later, it is hard to imagine what was so threatening about Jesus of Nazareth that people would not only oppose him but despise him and want to kill him. Every time Jesus would touch a leper or speak to a woman or challenge the authorities’ power, he would give the world one more reason to hate him.  Yet, it starts here on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  In a society which is very stable and orderly, Jesus is disruptive.  He throws everything up for grabs.  In a culture in which family means everything, Jesus’ faithful followers leave their families behind.  To an awful lot of good people, Jesus must have looked like a guy who was personally opposed to everything that was good and, even worse, who called others to do the same.

Much as we might want to feel that sense of calling in our lives, we should be careful.  Jesus doesn’t tend to call us to do what we want to do or to do what everyone will admire.  There’s no time for questions.  Even if there was plenty of time to think up every question we’d love to ask, there likely wouldn’t be a lot of answers ahead of time.  Instead, the questions that are put in front of us, in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, sound like this “Are you in?  Will you follow me?  Are you willing to take this walk with me?”  Jesus needs an answer…immediately.