DATE: January 26, 2014
SCRIPTURE:
Psalm 27: 1, 4-10, 14 and Matthew 4:12-23
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
When you read scripture, it sometimes helps to ask: Why did the writer choose to tell that part of the story? There are four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John written at different times and by different hands. And while you’ll find significant overlap among three of those gospels a lot of the time (John is the odd one out), you’ll also notice, if you look closely, that each gospel writer has made different choices along the way, included different – sometimes even conflicting details. For example, only the gospels of Matthew and Mark say that Jesus began his public ministry just after John was arrested.
The question is, why? Why mention that particular detail at all? We’re talking about John the Baptist, the wild-haired, honey-and-locust-eating prophet who’s been standing out past the edge of town, calling folks to “repent and prepare the way! For the kingdom of God is drawing near.” Those were his words. He made such a scene with those treasonous proclamations about the coming of a new king, that eventually he was arrested and thrown in jail.
Enter Jesus, who walks onto the scene and himself proclaims, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” Or, in the Common English translation we read this morning: “Change your hearts and lives: here comes the kingdom of heaven!”
If you were paying any attention, say, if you were living in Galilee at the time and knew what John had been saying just before he got arrested, you might not choose that same time and place to say, well, the same stuff. Unless, of course, you were trying to make a point. Unless this was a kind of hand-off, a passing of the baton from one prophetic leader to the next.
Which is what appears to be happening here. Jesus knew what he was walking into, knew that John had stirred up a bit of a hornets’ nest, that Galilee was abuzz with gossip about John’s message, and the people John had baptized, and the officials he’d annoyed. Still, Jesus stepped into the fray and said, ‘Thanks, John: I’ll take it from here.”
It was a risky move, a stunt worthy of Nick Wallenda, the famous tight rope walker. Nick Wallenda is the guy who crossed a gorge near the Grand Canyon on a high wire last June – without a net, 1,500 feet above the canyon floor, as winds buffeted the 2-inch thick wire. He’s also crossed Niagra Falls. For his next stunt, he wants to walk between the Empire State Building and the Chrysler building – without a net. Fun Fact: the network that broadcast Nik’s Niagra stunt insisted (at the last minute) that he wear a tether – I guess they didn’t want to risk capturing him plummeting to his death on live T.V. Nik complied, but only begrudgingly: The tether, he said, made him nervous: he worried that it would get caught on something and cause him to fall. I heard him interviewed on the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and he explained that an uncle had once fallen from a high wire and bounced out of the net. Ever since then, generations of the Wallenda circus dynasty have passed down the philosophy that nets should not be trusted; they give you a false sense of security and disrupt your focus. (To which the quiz show host, Peter Seigel, said: “If I was watching someone on a tight rope and I watched him fall into the net and then he bounced out of the net, I would not have said that the problem was the net… [I’d say] You shouldn’t be up there in the first place!”1
But Nik was unphased. Quoting his grandfather, he said: “Life is on the wire and everything else is just waiting.”
Life is on the wire. Is that what Jesus thought, as he waded into the fray, risked getting arrested on day one of his public ministry? Is it what he said to those fishermen, when he called them away from their nets? “You won’t be needing those anymore. They’ll just distract you. You’ll need all your faculties where we’re going – all your heart and mind and focus, because I’m going to teach you to be fishers of people…”
Last time I checked, fishing was a far less risky vocation than pretty much anything involving people. Fish may prove hard to catch, but once you’ve got them in the boat, they don’t argue with each other, or demand too much of you, or baffle, or break your heart, or expand it!, or challenge your motives or introduce new perspectives that stretch your mind so much it hurts; they don’t require all your patience and all your love.
People, on the other hand, do all of that. Still, Jesus said, “Leave your nets; you won’t be needing those, anymore.” And James and John, Peter and Andrew dropped what they were doing, stepped out onto that high wire and followed Jesus without a backward glance.
“Immediately,” it says in Matthew’s gospel. And “Right away.” Which is why I find this to be a particularly challenging passage for Christians, would-be-Christians and might-be-Christians – really all of us who find ourselves somewhere on this journey of faith. Does God really expect that kind of split-second response? Doesn’t She understand that most of us need a little time to seriously consider the implications, weigh the benefits and calculate the costs, get to know Jesus a little? It’s true, some of us have stories of coming to faith in a flash, of feeling called by God or Christ in ways dramatic or mystical, sudden and compelling. Maybe there are those in this room who have experienced a moment of clarity that inspired you to drop your nets and change your course in the blink of an eye.
But for many, hearing God’s call, discerning God’s purpose in our lives, discovering what it might mean to ‘follow Jesus,’ these are slow, arduous, even life-long tasks. More like creeping along the edge of a ravine, clinging to the guard rail and peering over the edge than like launching out onto the high wire. Even those who begin the journey because of some vivid epiphany may at some point find themselves groping in the dark, unsure how to proceed. This pursuing a life of faith, this business of being called, it’s daunting, it can throw us temporarily off-balance, cause our knees to knock and our hearts to pound. Better, it may seem, to hang back, to depend on our nets.
For Peter and Paul, owning nets meant having a good job and reliable income; for James and John, the nets also stood for family, symbol of the business they would inherit from their father Zebedee. And we? What are the nets we rely on? That give US a sense of security? Whatever’s familiar, old habits (sometimes even the bad ones)? The promise of financial stability? The need for order? The myth of absolute safety? The answer may differ for each of us, but I suspect we’ve all experienced them: the forces that weigh us down, distract or tangle us up in feelings of trepidation, or anxiety, the need for perfection or the fear of failure.
With luck, we’ve also experienced more positive forces, the ones that lend us the confidence to try something new or the courage to wrestle our demons. They are the people who love us enough to give us a nudge; communities that clap when we experiment, and dust us off when we fail; these forces are less like nets, and more like the long balancing pole that Nik carried across the ravine. Nets holds you back; a balancing pole might just set you free.
Brene Brown, a shame and vulnerability researcher, has discovered that living a whole-hearted life depends on our ability to be vulnerable. Creativity, innovation, deep interpersonal connections – all require us to take risks – to step out onto that wire, in her words: to show up and be seen. This was not good news to a woman who preferred to be in control, methodically managing her data – and her life. To try and make sense of her findings, and what it meant for her own way of moving through the world, Brene went into therapy, and she went back to church. She says she hoped church would be like an epidural, that it would take away the pain; instead, it was more like a midwife, who just stood next to her as she tried to birth something new and said, “Push – it’s supposed to hurt a little…”2
I’m guessing that some of you may have started to eye the exits as soon as I compared faith to walking on a high wire without a net. And I may well have just lost the rest of you by comparing church to natural child birth. So maybe I’d be prudent to move quickly to a good Country-music style conclusion, something catchy like, “It’s all good ‘cause Jesus is my safety net.” And it’s tempting to go there, to say the risks aren’t really real, because Christ will always catch us. But it’s not that simple, is it?
Having faith, living faith, it has never guaranteed anyone’s safety. We do, in fact, fall off the wire sometimes, or get tangled in our nets; we get hurt, and we hurt others. The disciples certainly didn’t have an easy time of it: they got it wrong all the time: they misunderstood, stumbled, tried again. Eventually, they suffered the heart-wrenching loss of the man into whose hands they had placed their lives, a man they had learned to trust, and come to love, who had loved them to the last, even when they all panicked and fled. Pain is part of this package called life-on-the-wire. The goal, no, the call, Christ’s call, might just be an invitation to move through life unencumbered by the things that keep us from being fully human, from living whole-hearted lives.
Here’s something I didn’t know about Nik Wallenda’s Grand Canyon stunt, until I watched a video clip of the performance this week: Nik spent about 20 minutes crossing that wire. He wore a small microphone so that spectators could hear him talking as he walked. You know what he did? He prayed, the whole way. For God to steady the wire, yes, but also to keep him calm. Mostly, he said, “Praise you, Lord. Praise you!” It was like listening in on one side of an intimate conversation. Now, maybe this comes as no surprise; most of us find it a little easier to pray when mortality is staring us in the face – or crouched 1,500 feet below on the rocky ravine floor… But Nik’s prayer seemed to me to be rooted not in fear, but in gratitude and in awe and in something like … surrender.
I’m not suggesting that God kept Nik Wallenda on that wire. I am suggesting that Nik trusted God, trusted that God was with him as he performed his stunt, tangibly, palpably present –in the grandeur of the canyon, in the weight of Nik’s balancing pole, and in the very fibers of his being. Trusted that God was with him the whole way.
Following Jesus: Building community, deepening faith, exercising our gifts, cultivating relationships, dismantling injustice, forgiving each other… all that takes work. Anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.3 Jesus did not promise an easy road.
But neither did Jesus leave those disciples floundering in mid-air: the last line of the text says that Jesus went out, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. The work to be done, it’s good work, holy work, healing, reconciling, life-transforming work. We don’t have to do it all, and we don’t do have to do it alone.
I think that’s what Jesus may have been getting at when he told the disciples he would make them fishers of people: not that he wanted them – or us – to ensnare anyone; the choice to follow Jesus should never be coerced, and living into faith is truly a life-long journey, the paths as varied as the people in this room. Rather, I think Jesus wanted us to find each other, to exercise all our love and patience, to cheer each other on and to dust each other off, to lend each other courage to abandon those nets on the lakeshore, to reach out and grab each other’s hands so that we might head out across the wire together to check out the view, to experience a wave of gratitude and awe…to meet the God who loves us all the way.
Scripture Texts
Psalm 27:1, 4–9 — Common English Bible Translation)
1 The LORD is my light and my salvation. Should I fear anyone? The LORD is a fortress protecting my life. Should I be frightened of anything?…
4 I have asked one thing from the LORD — it’s all I seek— to live in the LORD’s house all the days of my life, seeing the LORD’s beauty and constantly adoring God’s temple. 5 Because God will shelter me in God’s own dwelling during troubling times; God will hide me in a secret place in God’s own tent; God will set me up high, safe on a rock. 6 Now my head is higher than the enemies surrounding me, and I will offer sacrifices in God’s tent— sacrifices with shouts of joy! I will sing and praise the LORD. 7 LORD, listen to my voice when I cry out— have mercy on me and answer me! 8 Come, my heart says, seek God’s face. LORD, I do seek your face! 9 Please don’t hide it from me! Don’t push your servant aside angrily— you have been my help! God who saves me, don’t neglect me! Don’t leave me all alone!
10 Even if my father and mother left me all alone, the LORD would take me in. …14 Hope in the LORD! Be strong! Let your heart take courage! Hope in the LORD!
Matthew 4:12–23 — Common English Bible Translation
12 Now when Jesus heard that John was arrested, he went to Galilee. 13 He left Nazareth and settled in Capernaum, which lies alongside the sea in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali. 14 This fulfilled what Isaiah the prophet said: 15 Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, alongside the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, 16 the people who lived in the dark have seen a great light, and a light has come upon those who lived in the region and in shadow of death. 17From that time Jesus began to announce, “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!”
18 As Jesus walked alongside the Galilee Sea, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, throwing fishing nets into the sea, because they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” he said, “and I’ll show you how to fish for people.” 20 Right away, they left their nets and followed him. 21 Continuing on, he saw another set of brothers, James the son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with Zebedee their father repairing their nets. Jesus called them and 22 immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
23 Jesus traveled throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues. He announced the good news of the kingdom and healed every disease and sickness among the people.