III Epiphany – January 23, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
When we hear Jesus say to Peter, Andrew, James, and John: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people”—“Follow me, and I will show you how to fish for human beings”—we have come face to face with Christian evangelism writ large.
Jesus, himself, was the evangelist, the one who had come to spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God, and he was calling these four men, among others, to be his disciples so that he could train them to be evangelists, too.
He wanted them to help him spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God.
Now, the speed with which these men answered Jesus’ call is astonishing.
It is almost unreal.
One minute they were busily engaged in their trade, commercial fishing; the next, they had “left their nets”, as the writer of the Gospel according to Matthew puts it, and right then and there they became Jesus’ followers.
Just like that.
It’s hard to imagine them leaving everything behind, but that’s what it says they did.
As we try to think of some sort of parallel in our own experience, we begin to wonder if Jesus didn’t exert some kind of hypnotic influence on them to make them drop everything and follow him.
Transfixed by Jesus’ steady gaze, they simply walk off the job looking neither to the right nor to the left, in a kind of trance.
We’re used to seeing scenes like that in movies or on television.
When such supernatural forces are at work, a person who comes under their influence simply has no choice.
It may help to consider for a moment the proclamation with which Jesus began his ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,”
Jesus’ call to repent sounds strangely like John the Baptist’s call to repent, and, indeed, the implication is that Jesus’ ministry picked up where John’s left off.
But if Jesus’ initial words were the same, his tone was different.
John the Baptist warned the people to flee from the wrath which was to come.
Jesus announced that the kingdom of heaven had already come near; his call to repent was more an invitation than a warning.
Repentance is an intriguing word.
Often we think of repentance in terms of feeling sorry for our sins.
But feeling sorry for our sins really comes closer to the definition of contrition.
Repentance is something that comes after contrition, and it goes a lot further.
Repentance has a lot more to do with a change of heart, a change in one’s direction—more to do with making a new beginning.
Today’s Gospel lesson intimates that this was the gist of Jesus’ message when he came to the city of Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee, after he had left Nazareth.
There is actually no reason to suppose that Peter, Andrew, James, and John had no contact with Jesus before he called them to become his disciples.
If, as the writer of Matthew puts it, Jesus began to call people to repent from the time that he came to live in Capernaum, then it is very likely that his future disciples had at least heard of him, if not heard him speak, long before he came to claim them for his own on the lakeshore.
They would have recognized him immediately.
If this scenario threatens to take some of the “magic” out of a familiar story, so be it.
The mere suggestion that the disciples could have responded to Jesus’ call while in some sort of trance clearly has no place in a discussion of Christian evangelism.
When Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James, and John to leave their nets, they had all the choice in the world.
They may not have known exactly what they were getting into, but I am sure that they were perfectly aware of what they were doing.
When Jesus invited them to go off in a new direction, to make a new beginning—however bizarre an invitation to start “fishing for people” may have sounded—something in them was already prepared to take the plunge.
They were ready to say “Yes”.
You might say that they were ready to jump into Jesus’ net.
All they needed was someone to invite them.
Someone to invite them—as much a necessity for effective Christian evangelism then as it is now.
And who are the ones who need to be invited?
There was already something in the lives of Peter, Andrew, James, and John that was waiting for Jesus’ invitation.
That something may have been a seed of hope, planted in their souls the first time they heard Jesus preach.
Or there may have been a growing restlessness within them that resonated to Jesus’ promise of a new beginning.
Or it may have been a combination of both.
At any rate, the disciples hardly needed to be asked twice; it really didn’t take much persuasion at all.
Have things really changed all that much?
Some figures available in a recent Episcopal Church publication tell us that 58% of the people in the United States feel “the need for…spiritual growth; 50% believe in angels; 33% have had a mystical experience…. 68% sense the sacred at the birth of a child; 45% sense [the presence of the Divine] during meditation.”
Indeed, what we might call “the spiritual consciousness” of our society is definitely up.
Yet, we’re all familiar with the other glaring statistic: Hardly more than 20% of the population are active members of a religious faith community.
There are obviously a lot of people who, if they do believe in God, are trying to see to their spiritual needs by means other than being a part of the Church or of another faith community.
And, as the late dean of my seminary, Urban T. Holmes, III, notes in his book Turning to Christ, so long as an individual’s value-system works, he or she will see no need to replace it with another value-system, even if that value-system happens to be based on faith in Jesus Christ.
In other words, some people can do quite well without the Church or without believing in God, for that matter, until whatever the value-system is that they have chosen to live by no longer works, when the “maps” they have drawn to guide them, as psychiatrist M. Scott Peck would say, no longer fit their experience.
Once they have reached this stage—a potentially desperate situation to be in—they are probably at the point of being ready to respond to the Good News of God in Jesus Christ, probably at the point of being ready to consider turning away from the old and going in a new direction or, in classical theological terms, they are ready to repent.
Even then, Dean Holmes cautions, the Church will do well not to deliver a sales pitch at this point, but simply offer its hospitality to the one who has expressed the need.
That makes the evangelistic task of any parish church—“fishing for human beings”, if you will—astoundingly simple: Issue an invitation to anyone and everyone, but especially those we sense may be feeling a need for what faith in Christ can offer them.
The worst that can happen is that some will say “No” to the invitation, and even a “no” may be only a “no” for the time being; besides, as one commentator puts it, it’s fishing for people, not necessarily catching them, that’s important.
And as Dean Holmes rightly observes, “…Christianity [whether in Episcopal garb or any other] is always going to appeal to [a certain class of] people—those who are ready to risk [having] faith.”
What we sometimes refer to as conversion, then, requires a certain discontent of the spirit, a restlessness of sorts, which leaves people willing and eager to open themselves up to the mystery of God’s love in Christ.
I wasn’t exactly what you’d call restless when someone invited me to church or should I say “invited me back” to church; at the time it was more like I was just drifting, but I was still receptive enough that when the guy standing next to me in the community chorus I was singing in leaned over and said: “If you like this kind of music, we sing it every Sunday at St. John’s Episcopal Church, down the street where I’m the choirmaster. Rehearsal’s on Thursday night. Why don’t you come? We could use another bass.”, I took him up on his invitation and found myself that very next Sunday dressed in some very unfamiliar “Episcopal garb” processing down the center aisle of a church I’d never been in before trying to remember that all I had to do when I got to the front was nod my head in the direction of the altar, then disappear into the choir loft.
It took me a few months to discover that I needed to be doing more with these people than just hiding out in the choir loft trying to figure out the service, but all it took to get me started in the right direction was an offhand invitation from someone I had just gotten to know.
“Evangelism-Lite”?
I don’t think so.
My comrade did what every Christian is called to do; as we are instructed in the Catechism: “…to represent Christ and his Church; [and] to bear witness to him wherever [we] may be….”
To bear witness to Christ wherever we may be.
That’s all it takes.
Who are the people who are waiting to be invited or maybe invited back, the way I was?
Who are the people you and I have been called to fish for?
They turn out to be people who are like you and like me—people who seek greater meaning in their lives, people who begin to suspect that there’s more, people who come to discover not only that they need God, but that God needs them.
That’s practically everybody.
All anyone needs is an invitation.
The fishing couldn’t be better!
And there’s plenty to go around.
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