Before and After
Matthew 4:12-23
Emmanuel Baptist Church
January 29, 2023; Rev. Kathy Donley
A long time ago, I first learned this story in Sunday School. As a child, I understood this story in a particular way. I understood the disciples to be impulsive. I thought that this was the very first time that Simon, Andrew, James and John had ever encountered Jesus. That Jesus was so charismatic, so compelling that the very first time they ever saw him, all he had to say was “Follow me” and they immediately dropped what they were doing and walked away from their livelihoods no questions asked.
It could have happened that way. For a long time, I thought that this was their very first meeting and that the disciples made a life-changing decision in an instant.
Now, I tend to think differently. Now, I suspect that Jesus had been hanging out on the shore of the lake and in other places where people gathered. I suspect that he had been listening to the news of the day and people’s reaction to it and their concerns about their own lives and families. I expect that Jesus had been systematically sharing ideas about who he was and who God is. I expect that by the time Simon and Andrew and James and John dropped their nets, they had a pretty good idea that following Jesus was going to be risky and adventuresome, but also purposeful and important.
This is the pivotal moment, the point that divides what came before with what came after. Before, they were fishermen. After, they were followers of Jesus. Before, they might have been identified primarily in relationship to family members -- Simon and Andrew were brothers. We know that Simon was married, probably the others were too. James and John were identified with their father Zebedee. But that was before. After this, they are identified in relationship to Jesus. After this, they are his students, his apprentices.
Jesus has had his own before and after moments. Before and after he was baptized. Before and after he spent 40 days in the wilderness. And before he called the disciples, he left Nazareth. Nazareth was the place he had grown up, the place where his mother and siblings still were. Matthew writes, “Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum.”
Up to that point, he had been a carpenter, the oldest son, who was responsible for the care of his younger siblings and for his mother, Mary, who appears to be a widow now. But then, one day, he walked away from that. He left the carpentry business, abandoned the security of a regular income, deserted his responsibilities to his family. Before he was a carpenter. Before he was Mary’s son. After he is a Teacher. After he is a Healer. After he is also a trouble-maker, a disturber of the peace, and a revolutionary.
Jesus calls people to follow him, to abandon what they were doing, and go where he leads. They leave behind what is known and familiar. They leave what is precious and loved, in order to be part of what Jesus is doing. And what Jesus asks of them is something he himself has already done.
Friends, sometimes we don’t see the Before and After until later. We don’t see it in the moment, but later we look back and say “that was when everything changed. The new step I took, the habit I broke, that one decision, was the pivot point.”
As a congregation, we are deciding how to follow Jesus. Again. And some of us may be figuring that out again as individuals. It is not a decision you make just once. You make it over and over again, as circumstances change. God calls us in the context of our particular lives.
The Greek verb for “follow” (akaloutheo) is found eighty-seven times in the Gospels. Following Jesus is a dominant theme in the New Testament. We talk about it a lot. But it seems sometimes that we have tamed it down. Some would say that we have substituted believing in Christ for actually following Jesus. Believing in Christ lets us answer doctrinal questions, to say that we believe that Jesus was the Son of God, to affirm that Jesus lived and died and rose again a long time ago. Believing in Christ allows us to theorize and to wonder at how salvation works, how the death and resurrection of Jesus reconciles us to God. Believing in Christ is good – don’t hear me saying otherwise. But sometimes it becomes an intellectual exercise, something that keeps us at an arms length from actually following Jesus. Following Jesus means stepping out and doing something, usually something risky.
Ernest T. Campbell was a Presbyterian minister. He was senior pastor at Riverside Church in New York in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, a great preacher and wise teacher. He said that “the aim is not to imitate Christ, but to follow Christ – that is to situate ourselves in history as Jesus did. [Jesus] wants us to live our history, not his; to love our enemies, not his: to see our signs of the Kingdom, not his.” [1]
There are defining moments in our lives that we recognize after the fact. Those moments happen, I believe, when internal and external realities create a certain pressure or open a new opportunity.
This moment has been coming in stages for Jesus. From the time of his baptism and possibly before, he knows that he has a mission. In the wilderness, he struggled with temptations to pursue the mission in other ways and overcame them. Those are some of his internal realities. But now, Matthew tells us, that John the Baptist has been publicly executed. John’s death creates an external opportunity for Jesus. It is at that point, that he leaves his former life in Nazareth and moves to Galilee.
We aren’t privy to the internal thoughts of the disciples. But we do know that the fishing industry was in crisis. Herod Antipas has basically taken it over, commercializing it for his own profit and export. Simon, Andrew, James and John “could no longer cast their nets freely from the shore. They could no longer own a boat or beach a catch without being taxed. They probably had to sell what they caught to Antipas’ factories.”[2] The cost of getting a fishing license, the taxes they would have to pay, and the rates that they would be paid for their fish, would all be determined by sources higher up than they.
This is their reality. The family business, which has been their work for generations, is in danger. Unless something changes, it will not likely provide enough to sustain the same way of life for their children and grandchildren. And then, Jesus comes along, inviting them to something new, something risky and unknown, but something that offers its own kind of hope.
Those who followed Jesus in ancient Palestine followed from within their context. I don’t think the disciples impulsively dropped their nets the first time they met Jesus. I think they knew enough about who Jesus was to understand the risk and the opportunity he was offering. I think they chose to follow as an act of faith in God.
I agree with Ernest T Campbell. The aim in following Jesus is to situate ourselves in our history, to attend to our reality, as Jesus did in his. There are many facets of our current history we could attend to. In some conversations we are attending to the systemic racism of our time. In others, we consider the threat of climate change and the lack of affordable housing in Albany. All of those things and many more should affect how we follow Jesus. But today, I want to focus on two pieces of our church context. Here are just two parallels that I see between the scripture and our lives.
One external reality is that we are living in a time of great cultural shift about religion. There used to be great social pressure to be part of a church. Whether or not you were actually following Jesus, spending an hour or two in a church building on Sunday morning was a normal thing to do. And many people actually did follow Jesus that way. But in this moment now, there is little social pressure to be in church. Many people have some very good reasons, actually, to be somewhere else on Sunday mornings.
Unless something changes, church as we have known it will not be enough to sustain the faith lives of the children and grandchildren of our current faith community. We have to find ways that we all can follow Jesus in twenty-first century America, which may be as different from the 19th and 20th centuries as it is from first century Palestine.
One internal reality is that we are a small congregation in a large needy building. The building is familiar and precious, like the fishermen’s boats and nets were to them. In this building, for generations, people have affirmed their honest belief in Christ. But the question that we must face is how to follow Jesus now. What if Jesus is calling us to occupy just a small part of the building? What if Jesus is calling us to allow others to take on responsibility for renovation and deciding what rooms are used for what purposes? What if Jesus is asking us to follow him right out of the building? To leave it, just like the disciples left their nets and followed him. These are the questions and possible opportunities in front of us.
Friends, you have been adventurous and faithful in following Jesus as individuals and as a congregation. We have had many Before and After moments. One example would be Before the pews were removed and After. Before this church was called Emmanuel Baptist, it was Pearl Street Baptist Church. That was a long ago Before and After.
More recently, in 2020, we were in the lectionary year of Matthew, the same as we are now. On the Sunday that we read this same story in worship, we used the same bulletin cover that we’re using today. You might notice the quote from Joseph Campbell “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”[3]
When I put that on the bulletin in January 2020, I had no notion of what was already happening, a virus was spreading that would wreck all our plans for the rest of the year and beyond. But I’m pointing this out to remind us that the conversations about following Jesus and seizing opportunities for radical change are not new. We have been engaged in this work for a while. Like every other congregation in the world, we have been changed by the pandemic, but we are not starting from scratch. One of my colleagues recently said to me, “If any church is ready for the tasks ahead of us coming out of Covid, it is Emmanuel. You’ve been preparing for this moment for years.”
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Jesus is still calling us to be part of his mission, to risk, to discern carefully not impulsively, and then to boldly step out in faith, following him even when we don’t know where we are going. May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1] Ernest T. Campbell, “Are You Following Jesus or Believing in Christ?” August 1981 sermon as quoted by the Rev. Victoria G. Curtiss in her January 2011 sermon “More than Just Tagging Along” https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2011/012311_8am.html
[2] John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, (New York: HarperOne,, 2008), p. 122
[3] Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, Diane K. Osbon, ed, (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 8.
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