Following
Mark 1:14-20
January 31, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/C5nNZGqZE7c
“Every three years all people should forget whatever they have learned about Jesus and begin the study all over again.”[1] So said Robert McAfee Brown, a Presbyterian theologian and professor of the last century. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at Oxford. Later he was a professor at Union Seminary and Stanford and the Pacific School of Religion. Academic learning was obviously a high value, but even so, he said that people should forget whatever they have learned about Jesus and start all over again every three years.
It is not easy to unlearn what we think we know. It is not easy to hear a Bible story as familiar as Jesus calling his first disciples with fresh ears. But I encourage us to try to do it today.
There is an urgency to Mark’s narrative. His favorite word is “immediately”. Jesus’ ministry begins in the aftermath of the arrest of John the Baptist. It an uneasy, troubled time. The risks of making religious-political waves are all too evident, but this is the time when Jesus calls and the time when the disciples follow.
The first ones Jesus calls are fishermen. They represent an independent artisan class. They are an economic step above the day laborers whom they could afford to hire. They are also brothers. They represent households, extended families who depend on their fishing to sustain life. Simon, Andrew, James and John are not people with nothing to lose, but rather the opposite. There is a definite personal cost to following Jesus. Simon and Andrew drop their nets, the tools of their trade. James and John abandon their father. This call is urgent and disruptive, a radical break with business as usual.
Jesus literally says to them “come behind me.” The word for behind (opiso) can be a spatial term, to stand or walk behind someone. It can be a temporal term, to come at a time after something else. It can also be a status term, behind or under in terms of rank or importance. [2]
Discipleship can require all of these meanings, but the idea that Jesus comes first in importance is evident right away. They leave everything to follow him.
“Come behind me,” Jesus says, “ and I will teach you to fish for people.”
We hear those familiar words and we know what they mean – right? We’ve heard those words repeated in song and story more times than we can begin to count. We know that to fish for people means to save their souls, to be involved in evangelism, in sharing the good news. Some of us, in some streams of Christian tradition, emphatically know that is what fishing for people means.
Some of us know that it means something else. We know that the fish hook is a Biblical symbol of judgment, especially God’s judgment on the rich and the powerful in the time of the prophets. To fish for people means to be involved in the struggle against power and privilege, to join Jesus on the side of love and justice. Some of us, in some streams of the Christian tradition emphatically know that is what fishing for people means.
The interpretation that we prefer, that we know to be truest, depends a lot on what we first learned and who taught us. Probably we learned that first interpretation so well that we’ve never even heard the other one. Which is why Robert Brown said that we should forget what we know and start over again every three years.
In the 2,000 years since Jesus walked along the Sea of Galilee, his followers have divided and re-divided into so many camps, each claiming to know what Jesus really meant in this verse or that story. But what if, what if, both meanings are true? What if to fish for people means to struggle for love and justice AND to share the gospel evangelistically? What if it means to be concerned about someone’s well-being in the eternal sense AND also in the here and now?
It turns out that, according to scholar Robert Smith, “in the ancient world fishing was a metaphor for two distinct activities: judgment and teaching. Fishing for people meant bringing them to justice by dragging them out of their hiding places and setting them before the judge at the end of the world. And fishing was also used of teaching people, of the process of leading them from ignorance to wisdom.[3]
We don’t have to choose between interpretations. Jesus could easily have intended both meanings and probably did.
As I said, there is an urgency in Mark’s tone, things are changing quickly, the time to join God’s action in the world is now. That answers the “when” question, but not the “how”. James and John dropped their nets and literally walked behind Jesus. That is not an option for us, so how do we respond to his call?
Jesus first words in this gospel are “repent and believe the good news.” Repent and believe are present tense imperative verbs, which implies continued or repeated actions. “Keep on repenting.” “Keep on believing”. These are not actions that we do once and we’re done. Rather, following Jesus means that we keep changing, keep trusting. That is part of the adventure. Imagine a child’s game of “Follow the Leader” in which the leader’s actions never varied. How boring would that be? Never let it be said that Jesus was boring.
Sometime in the 1990’s the Anglican bishop Mark Dyer suggested that great changes happen in cycles, saying that “every 500 years, the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.” Phyllis Tickle quoted him in her book a few years later and it became a popular way to think about the dramatic changes happening in our time.[4] It is a concept we have talked about often here at Emmanuel.
We know that change is imminent and necessary. We know that following Jesus takes different forms in different times and places, but we have been sorting through our stuff for a while now, trying to decide what is precious and what is junk, perhaps holding on to our favorite things even though they’re broken or missing pieces, or, to tell the truth, they don’t even work anymore.
Meanwhile, we also know that people are desperate to receive the good news of Jesus with meaning and beauty. They want an encounter on the shoreline, something that comes in the midst of regular life, that has an impact on everything from that time forward. By and large, the people I’m thinking of are not finding that in church as we know it. We know that because of the growth of the category of Dones – those who have been wounded or broken by the church and will never return – and the increasing number of those who proudly call themselves Spiritual but not Religious. I have seen this most closely at the Wild Goose Festival – people of all ages whose passion for Jesus is undeniable, but whose support for the business-as-usual church is underwhelming at best. They show up at the festival in droves to be with others who have the same yearning.
We have seen the signs. We have known that change was needed. Perhaps we might even have acknowledged a call to something different, something as radical as quitting fishing was for James and John. But the call was muffled.
Maybe it was muffled by our setttledness. We know how to do church well -- even when our pastor goes on sabbatical, even when we suspend our bylaws, even when we have to worship on Zoom. We are good at this. I’ve been ordained for a quarter of a century now. I don’t know how that happened, but I finally feel like I might know a thing or two about leading a church. And you do too. So, its hard to imagine that Jesus might be asking us to give up that way of life, a way of life which connects and which sustains so many households. (But he did ask it of James and John.)
Maybe the call was muffled by our busyness. Even our church busyness. Maybe we were doing so much for Jesus that we couldn’t really hear the call to drop those nets and come after him. But the pandemic stopped that. We are in a different place as a church than we were a year ago.
It is not a fun place, not a comfortable place, but it is a quieter place, Maybe it is a place from which we can hear a new call or perhaps I should say a place from which we can follow more purposefully. We have dropped many things in the last year. Let us not be too hasty in picking them all up again.
Truthfully I think the call was muffled because we knew we should do something, but we didn’t know what that something was. We still don’t know, in any kind of specific way. But we have identified a direction, a model to explore, in the Fresh Expressions movement. It is an exciting, scary, destabilizing and quite possibly joyful movement of the Holy Spirit that may offer some of us a new way to follow Jesus. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please check the announcements about the retreat at the end of February and talk to me about it.
Finally I want to say that following Jesus might be boring, on occasion, but it shouldn’t be on a regular basis. It entails obedience and trust, but if our following is characterized by duty and drudgery, we may have lost our way.
Anne Lamott says “I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don’t have time to carry grudges; you don’t have time to cling to the need to be right.”
What if we understood the call from Jesus as an invitation to get rid of baggage – personal and institutional, an invitation to laugh and to love, to let go of old wrongs and participate in healing? If we understand it that way, could we follow? Would we?
[1] Robert McAfee Brown, The Bible Speaks to You, p. 87
[2] Brian Stoffregen at http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/mark1x14.htm
[3] Robert H. Smith, Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament: Matthew, (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress Press, 1989), p. 72
[4] Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008), p. 16/