Intro
I have always had strong images of the calling by Jesus of Peter and Andrew, James and John. Perhaps it is through having been brought up in a town with a strong fishing history. Even though the heyday of the fish industry in St Ives was already well past when I was a child, there were many people around who could remember it and nets were hung out around the harbour to dry and to be repaired on a regular basis. I heard many stories of the fishing boats and it was always easy for me to picture Jesus coming along and calling fisherman to follow him. I have often imagined this incident taking place in a St Ives setting.
This week I have looked at this story again, and four points have come out at me about the call of Jesus in our lives today.
They are:-
1. Jesus calls us in the midst of our daily lives
2. He wants a response
3. He calls us to move and become
4. He doesn’t tell us where we are going
We will look at these four points this morning.
Jesus calls us in the midst of our daily lives
Pilgrimages are back in fashion after several centuries. In medieval times, before the reformation people would travel all over Europe, from church to church, visiting relics of saints, or would go to monasteries or to the Holy land, to places where God had worked in power, hoping to hear something from him, to become close to him, maybe to be healed. This ceased somewhat after the reformation, but now many people are travelling, looking for encounters with God. They go to many different places, such as Iona, Lourdes or Lindesfarne that are regarded in some way as being especially holy, more so than ordinary places, hoping that when they get there, God will speak to them in some way.
In contrast, Peter and Andrew, John and James, were simply going about their daily routines. The daily round of hard, and probably quite monotonous, work. They were fisherman, a trade that did not have a high status. It was smelly and they were probably not very clean. But it was in the very midst of that that Christ spoke to them and called them to be his special friends. Their minds were probably solely on finishing the task in hand, they had not specially prepared themselves for a religious or mystical experience of some kind. But it was in the ordinariness of the every day that Christ called them.
When I was a child in Sunday school we used to sing chorus that went:- ‘we don’t need intoxication, transcendental meditation, we don’t need to cross the sea or even cross the street.’ This chorus seems to have been written in the 1960’s or 70’s when various celebrities and singers were espousing practices such as transcendental meditation or were travelling to other continents to listen to teachers and gurus, desperate for some form of mystical, spiritual experience. It emphasises that we do not have to travel to find Christ, that we do not have to abandon the ordinariness of our daily lives, or perform special rituals, but that Christ will come to us and speak to us, if we will only allow him to and listen.
Just as Peter, Andrew, James and John were called in their daily work, so can we be, whether we work in a shop, a nursery, a factory, a hospital, whether we are retired or unemployed or busy bringing up our children, Christ is the lord of the ordinary as much as he is lord of the extraordinary. We can listen to him while we are doing the housework, while we are doing the shopping, in the Post Office or at work.
He wants a response
Many of you will know that I am totally hopeless when it comes to making decisions. If I have to decide what to do when faced with options, I will normally look at Rhonda, wanting her to make the decision, or I will say “It’s up to you” or “what do you want to do?” I take ages to decide, not knowing what to do for the best, or even what I want to do. I weigh the different options up and come to one conclusion, then weigh them up again and come to a different conclusion. All the time precious time is ticking away.
When Jesus came and called the fisherman, he expected an immediate response, and he got one. They did not look at each other for the decision, instead they each decided individually, and quickly, to come with him. They grabbed the fleeting opportunity that they hand to come around with this special preacher and prophet. They did not even have the luxury that we do now of knowing exactly who Christ is, they just knew that he was a special man of God, it had not been revealed to them at that time exactly how special he really was. It could have seemed really quite unreasonable of Jesus to ask them to give up everything at the drop of hat and to come along with him on the spur of the moment. The easiest option for them was to stay where they were, in the life that they knew and in which they felt safe. They could have carried on listening to him preaching, but then return to their Fathers’ boats in the evenings. They could have asked for more time to decide, or say that they would be his supporters, but that it would be impossible for them to leave the family businesses.
But Christ demanded and expected an instant and immediate response. He did not ask them to support him, but to follow him. It is the same with us. He does not want supporters, but followers. The call to us is the same as it always has been:-
“Follow me!”
The required response is to come with him. To leave behind the trappings of our lives without him and to go along with him. To be his active followers, not his armchair supporters.
He calls us to move and become
The next thing that strikes me about the call of the fisherman is that the call to “Follow me!” required movement, not just intellectual assent. Their response was to get up and go with him, not just to stay in the boats and admire him and his teaching. We demonstrated earlier, in the Children’s activity, that to follow somebody implies motion; ‘to follow’ is a verb of motion, not of stasis. When I was a cadet one of my tutors, Major Kathryn Stirling, made a very true statement, she said
“If you go somewhere and people do not come with you, you haven’t led them”.
The converse is true – if the leader goes somewhere and you haven’t gone with him, then you haven’t followed him. Following is an active process that requires movement and change. Following Jesus might mean that we have to move to a different place, it might just as well mean that we have to stay in the same place, but it will definitely mean that we will have to change as people. Our characters will change to become more like his, what is important to us will change. I would go as far as to say that if I am still exactly the same person as I was a year ago, than I have not followed Jesus. I might say that I am following him, but if I am going nowhere and not allowing him to change me, then I am just watching him from a distance, not following him.
He doesn’t tell us where we are going
The fourth that I noticed about the call of the fisherman was that Jesus did not tell them what following him would entail. He did not tell them where they would be going or where they would end up. Would Peter have known as he left his net that his following of Jesus would end up with him in Rome, the capital of the empire, being crucified upside down, or Andrew that he would be crucified on an X-shaped cross in Greece. James’ following ended with him being killed with a sword in Jerusalem not long after Christ’s death and resurrection, John’s with dying as an old man in Ephesus, many miles away from the Sea of Galilee? Would they have suspected that their decision to go with Jesus would be the subject of a sermon in Britain nearly two thousand years later? Almost certainly not!
If they had known these things would it have daunted them, have overpowered them? Probably. Christ only revealed to it to them bit-by-bit. If he had have told them all at once they would probably have felt that they would not be able to cope and not come.
They did not question him about what would happen. Instead they trusted him with their futures. They allowed him to become the Lord and master of what was to come in their lives.
It is just the case with us today. When Christ calls us, he does not tell us where following him will lead us, what will happen in the future, give us detailed career plans. Instead he calls us to follow, to go behind him, to go where he goes. He is to be in charge, to be the navigator; all we are required to do is to follow.
Jesus is calling us all individually this morning to follow him, he wants a response, following him will change you. Just trust him for the future.
