A sermon about choices, binoculars, magnets and following Jesus (1.22.23)

 
Matthew 4:12-23

We give a lot of weight to the power of our choice. Obviously choices matter—where we live, what work or career we pursue, who our friends are, how we treat people, of course these choices matter. But I notice that when we obsess over our choices, we start to imagine that if we just make the right decisions, if we just do the right things, we will be able to per-fect life or, in a sense, even save ourselves from the worst.  For some of us, this can even look like, if we just give enough money, if we just volunteer for this organization, if we just pray clearly enough, God will smile on us, love us, grant our every wish, save us.  

In 1843 Senator Henry Clay used the phrase “self-made man” to describe people whose success lay within them and didn’t come from outside sources. It has become sort of an archetype.  (We’re challenging this in society, but the psychology of it still runs deep). In the 1950s, some historians say that the definition of success was a successful businessman who had made it. 

We do have an awful lot of control over our lives—or we think we do until someone gets an unexpected diagnosis or laid off or something in life goes off the rails. 

In today’s bible story, Jesus runs into four guys on the beach--fishermen—and they are presented with a choice. It’s one with pretty life altering possibilities. Jesus says to them, “follow me. And I will make you fishers of people.”  “Immediately.” The story says, “They left everything and followed him.” 

How immediate does immediately mean? Did they take five minutes or even an hour to think it through? Whatever it was, it seems like they all made the right choice.  After all, they come up all over the gospels as disciples and as key players in the story so they must have done the right thing. 

As we look at how it all this played out, we wonder, yikes, could we do that?  Drop our nets, drop it all and leave everything?  I read this story in a bible study with some members from here at church about a few weeks ago and one of the questions in the resource I was using was “do you think you could have dropped everything and followed Jesus?”  Needless to say, no one jumped in with a resounding YES!  

All four of the brothers jumped on the Jesus’ bandwagon and followed that day at the beach.  And many of us give them a lot of credit for being so bold and courageous.  So extraordinary. “I couldn’t do that…” we think. “They gave up so much.”  Especially James and John. 

While Peter and Andrew were probably more economically stretched—they threw their nets into the water from the beach hoping to catch something--James and John had a boat that they took out to work on the sea. And fancy nets. And a dad, Zebedee, who worked with them and who was probably set to give them the family business some day.  That was a lot to walk away from. But they just did it, there’s no analysis of their decision. There’s no circling back a few chapters later in the story to see if any of them had followers-remorse. In fact, one has to wonder if there was actually much choice in the story or not.  Maybe instead, it was more that something happened in that moment.  

Some people call this a miracle story. In this story, it’s not that the fishermen did the right thing and made this heroic and sacrificial decision to follow, it’s that God walked up to a group of dudes and pulled off a miracle.

Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this. She says that “this isn’t a story about us but it’s a story about God, and about God’s ability not only to call us but also to create us as people who are able to follow.”

But how does that happen? How does God make us into people who are able to follow? Jesus says to the brothers, “I will make you…into fishers of men.”

German theologian and activist, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who worked in the underground resistance movement during World War II said that one of the most striking things about this call Jesus sets out is that it is  “void of all content.” It is so simple. Jesus doesn’t present his followers with a stump speech or a checklist or say, here is the game plan, here are the rules. Are you in? sign here if you agree.  He just says “follow me.”

Could it be that, while the things we choose to believe and the way we choose to behave are important, they’re not actually at the heart of discipleship?  In fact, the heart is following. It’s listening to the teachings, thinking about them, learning, talking it through with folks, putting into practice together, messing it up, reflecting, trying again. There’s movement in that journey. Sacred movement.  

When I look at the stories in the gospels or at the stories of the faithful people around me or even my own practice in following Jesus, I see that this call isn’t one and done—dropping the nets on the sand and taking off. It’s a practice that we fine tune again and again. Jesus will challenge these brothers withal sorts of hard question about generosity, love and justice.  

**********************

Have you ever used a pair of binoculars and noticed that you’re seeing double? There are two identical robins sitting next to each other in the tree.  This can happen with a telescope too.  Sometimes, the lenses and mirrors get out of alignment. (This could also be the product of having some very cheap kids binoculars in your house.)  If your binoculars or telescope are fancy enough, you can fix this problem. Sometimes there is a little dial on the binoculars that will adjust the lenses and slowly bring the two robins into one. Aligning the two images into one single image is called collimation.  

Maybe, in that moment when Jesus called the disciples on the beach, there was a moment of collimation where God’s call and their lives were in alignment.  It’s more than just their lives harmonizing with God’s essence, it was a one-ness.  The kingdom came. And that was utterly miraculous.  

I think that can happen in our lives, but I think that more often, the images drift out of unity, we merge and then deviate we have a moment of clarity and then things are fuzzy. We place so much weight on our choice and while sure, it’s there, God’s call to participate in the struggle for love, justice, mercy, grace is itself magnetic and it pulls us into focus. It synchronizes us.  I think one of the cool things is that while choice is an individual thing we wrestle with, the call of God is a community thing that pulls us together. Believe me, there are other magnetic forces around us that pull us far from this vision of grace, but God is continually fine tuning us and working on us and bringing us back into focus. 

Sometimes following looks like the pairs of brothers (Andrew and Peter, James and John) who set out to journey with Jesus.  Sometimes it looks like James and John’s sisters who stayed home to take care of Zebedee. And then learned how to fish themselves. And then organized all of the folks who were sitting on the dock with a single fishing pole barely making ends meet into a fishing cooperative. Sometimes following is working out the problem with the fisherman on the next boat who kept tangling their nets with yours (or were you the one tangling with them??). Sometimes following is listening to old Zebedee and his elderly siblings who gather in the dusky evenings to tell stories by the firelight while the children played in grass.

How is God fine tuning you and pulling you towards that vision? For following God is nothing short of miraculous. 

A recipe for hope (a message from 1.15.23)

 Matthew 3:13-17

Isaiah 42:1-9 

What is hope? Is it an emotion? Or a feeling?  “A thing with feathers,” like Emily Dickenson said. Is it positive vibes? Or a feeling of possibility or optimism?  

I know that hope has something to do with the future. I am an optimistic person by character, but we’ve got large-scale problems that worry me: deeper authoritarianism and fanaticism, global warming, corruption...  There are small scale problems too: illnesses, family stress, depression, you name it.  Just when I want that light of Christmas to shine (brilliantly please) hope can be illusive.  

Isaiah has some words for us this morning about hope. He writes of someone, of a servant who will “open the eyes that are blind, bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, …and liberate “those who sit in darkness.” This is a very hopeful vision.  While he was probably thinking of ancestors like Jacob or Moses, first century Christians began to understand these beautiful verses as referring to Jesus.

Isaiah’s vision is beautiful. And believe me, I want to liberate all people from all the dungeons that imprison us (from addiction, from debt, from stress, from mental turmoil, all of it). But this grand vision is so bold, and our problems so serious, hoping for something like this can feel like wishful thinking.

Chan Hellman and Casey Gwinn write about how we use the word “hope” in our everyday language:  “I hope you’re well,” “I hope you have a good day.” The thing is, when say those things, we don’t really have a control over whether or not someone is well or if they’ll have a good day.  Instead of a hope, it’s more of a wish. 

I don’t think the prophet Isaiah was idly wishing. “Oh, I wish people could be free from the dungeons that imprison them.” Nor do I think that Jesus, son of God had some kind of warm and fuzzy wish that the captives would be freed.  No, I think they actually hoping this.  

A handful of different researchers—all of them social workers from what I can tell—break hope down into a 3 part formula. 

1. You have a vision.  

We know about a vision as people of faith.  Isaiah is bursting at the seams with a vision of justice and righteousness.  Jesus Messiah, who was seeped in this Jewish tradition of Isaiah’s showed us a vision where people were healed, where folks were generous, where communities would care for the vulnerable, and where folks wouldn’t worship money or power but would worship God. It’s a vision where love would reign.  Sometimes Jesus called this “the kingdom of God.” We know what vision looks like in our faith.

2. The second part of hope is a path.  

How do we get from where we are to that vision? What’s the path?

In something like a recovery program or a training, there’s a clear path from A to B. Isaiah gives us a clear path. He reminds us that the people are called to stand firm in their traditions, which call them to talk care of folks. Isaiah says the very way people live will strengthen God’s justice. Beautiful.

Likewise, Jesus has a path for us.  He calls back to an old religious anchor and says we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and love our neighbor as ourselves.  The path is love.  The path is service, grace, forgiveness.  Some of us have made a particular commitment to this path of righteousness (of right living) in our baptisms. 

3. The third part in the formula for hope is willpower. 

Do you have the mental energy, the passion, the drive to get there?

So about willpower: One of the first times I attempted to drive a manual transmission car in the real world and not a cornfield, I was driving on a highway in traffic with my brother.  I attempted to upshift, killed the car in the middle of the traffic, announced I was done, and swapped seats with my brother. I had my own automatic transmission car and learning to drive a stick wasn’t essential knowledge for me. A few years later when I was living in Tegucigalpa (basically the hilliest city in central America), I realized that the church had a truck sitting out back that no one knew how to drive.  They told me I could drive it.  Problem was, it was a stick. But I really wanted to be able to drive that car. I had a really clear goal and I was deeply motivated. And I learned it! 

I had the willpower to learn. 

The more we desire the outcome, the more likely, we’ll walk the path to achieve it and we won’t give up. 

We can get tripped up in this 3-part formula for hope. Sometimes, we can’t see the vision—that’s hard.  We don’t even know where we want to be.  Things are so tense or so tough or stressful that we can’t even imagine it. 

Other times, we can’t see the path—we know where we want to be, but we can’t figure out how to get there. Or we don’t have the opportunity open before us to get there. That’s a recipe for despair. (Global warming comes to mind here.  We know where we want to be, but we’re not sure of the path to get us there.)  

 

The third part, willpower, can also trip us up. With this one, the tricky question is do we actually want the vision enough to fight for it?  

Martin Luther King, who would have been 94 years old today dug into that vision of Justice, peace and love that the prophets and Jesus gave us. Sometimes he distilled into more manageable bites like a vision of being able to sit anywhere you wanted on the bus with a path of boycott to get you there, but the grand vision always tied back into to God’s love and justice. 

Now thinking of willpower, a lot of people around MLK had the will power to fight for this dream, especially those experiencing discrimination. Many other people gave the vision a solid thumbs up, but from a distance. They didn’t have the willpower to join into the fight particularly when things were smooth in their own lives and fighting for civil rights meant sacrificing something for the sake of justice.  

If you don’t passionately want the vision, you won’t fight for it. And this is tough.  When there’s nothing intrinsic that motivates us but God’s extrinsic higher standard of goodness (just for the sake of goodness), the vision can become a little less magnetic. Our willpower falters. 

Has this ever happened to you?  

It has to me.

*************************** 

There is one final piece of hope that must be mentioned. 

 

Hope, it turns out, is a product of struggle. It is something that we develop in the uncomfortable and challenging times. It’s something that we learn. Isaiah’s hope was born out of the people who had been deported to Babylon.  

(Remember, quick history lesson: 600 years before Christ, the Babylonian empire ransacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, burned the city down and deported all the people to what we call “exile” in Babylon.  It was devastating and Isaiah’s hope was born in that struggle.  Or think of Jesus of Nazareth who lived in oppressively difficult times. A few weeks ago, we heard a sermon about the bloodthirsty King Herod who mascaraed all the baby boys.  Jesus’ hope was born in that struggle.)

Hope deepens when our vision/goals, our pathways to get to the vision, or our willpower and sense of agency are challenged. In those moments, we really have to clarify the what and the why of where we’re headed.

However, in those tough moments, hope doesn’t deepen in isolation. Some of us learn it from our families, but we also learn it from each other. Think of a time that has been really challenging for you—an illness, a family problem, a work mess. Who have been the people who have come up around you and reminded you of the vision or goal that you could no longer see? Who were the ones who shined a light on your path and then took your arm to help you along?  Or when were you the one who encouraged someone? Who said, “c’mon let’s do this.  I’m with you. A different world is possible.”

We restore hope in each other. Hope is a social gift.  It’s not something that happens in isolation.  It happens in relationship with each other. Sometimes, it happens in the church.

The baptism of Jesus drew on a hope that came before it. You can hear it in the way the Matthew story harmonizes with Isaiah.  MLK drew on a hope that came before him.  Our hope is one that has been passed down from our ancestors and that is strengthened and clarified in each other. 

*******************************

Now I can’t say where you might be feeling hopeless today. I can’t name what is going on in your life. I can’t say what is stressing you out about this broken world we live in.  

But I can say that we hold together in the collective a vision of grace where we pause to listen in moments of pain, where we confess and forgive and honor one another’s God given dignity and belovedness where we imagine a world where everyone has life abundant. 

I can also say that we hold together a vision of justice where we will no longer be divided by hate or ignorance or money. Where, as King said in his 1967 Christmas sermon at Ebenezer Baptist “every man will respect the dignity and worth of human personality,” that “the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled,” that “men will beat their swords into plowshares” and that “justice will roll down like water.”

We hold that vision together and whether we are helping one another to take the next steps, or encouraging each other not to buy into the narratives of despair and pessimism, God’s Light Dawns.

We know the dream and the path of love. We’ve inherited it from those who’ve gone before it. We steward it and struggle for it for ourselves and for those who will come after. Now we must walk it.

 I leaned on work from Hellmen and Gwinn and Brene Brown both of whom reference C.R. Snyder as the original author of the 3-part formula for hope.