The Church of the Ascension
January 27, 2008

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

“Immediately they put down their nets and followed him.”  “Immediately,” the scripture says, they stopped what they were doing and followed Jesus - not after thorough analysis, not after talking it over with family and friends or with their therapist, not after drawing a line down the center of the page with pro’s on one side and con’s on the other.  None of that but immediately.

Can you imagine being so bowled over by someone that you would leave what you were doing – your job, your family, your possessions – and follow him or her?  Honestly, it is a stretch for most of us.

When I got out of graduate school the first time, I ran a large social welfare program for developmentally disabled people.  The staff was comprised of people like me – young, idealistic, liberal – it was the 70’s after all.  One of the social workers on our team was eccentric; actually…..she was crazy.  Nutszoid.  For some reason that no one ever understood, she nicknamed all of us on the staff.  I was Johnny Floyd; isn’t that just pitiful?  I shall be eternally grateful that it didn’t stick, but what she named my secretary did.  Betty was older than most of us; she had jet black hair that she wore in a Baptist bouffant.  Use your imagination.  She was nicknamed Betty Beauty-Box.  One afternoon, I buzzed Betty several times, all to no avail.  So I walked out to her area to find her.  Not seeing her, I asked another staff person, “Where is Betty Beauty-Box?”  With no emotion - I can still see her blank face - the person said, “Elvis died; Betty Beauty-Box left immediately for Graceland.”  And so she had…immediately departed without so much as a fair thee well.  Now Elvis is not Jesus; let us all be relieved; and Betty Beauty-Box is neither Andrew nor Peter.  But she knew when she had to go; and she went.  As crazy as it was, gathering with other disciples of Elvis was a moment not to be missed, and she didn’t miss it.  There is something to be said for that.

Andrew and Peter had walked in darkness for a long time, fishing day in and day out, sometimes catching a lot, sometimes not.  But when they saw the great light, they knew it was not to be missed for they realized the moment might never come again.  And so they put down their nets at that very moment and followed Jesus.  Have you ever wondered what on earth they saw in Jesus that made them leave everything?  What about seeing him and hearing his invitation filled them with such hope, what about him led them to believe that perhaps the great gaping hole in their souls could be filled?  Was it his eyes?  Was it his tone of voice or the tenderness of his demeanor?  Or was it just that his energy and enthusiasm were unmistakable and more compelling than anything they had ever encountered?

Of course, we don’t know, but it is a good exercise to wonder about it.  Even though it is frequently used by spiritual masters, in common worship we are rarely invited to pray using our imagination.  Probably we lose something in not doing that.  Since we don’t really have time to do at this moment, take this scripture home with you for the week and sit with it in an unhurried space.  Imagine what it would feel like to be in this scene not as one of the apostles but as you; imagine feeling the great compulsion to follow Jesus.  Let the words of his invitation, “follow me,” surround you.  Ponder your feelings and speculate about what you might say.  I don’t know what will happen in such a prayer exercise – maybe nothing.  But you never know; you have to in it to win it.  Maybe imagining what it would feel like to be in the actual presence of Jesus like that will stir some deep yearning within us, a yearning we thought we had long ago lost.

I heard someone say recently that through the mystery of this table, through our gathering and entering into the ritual of the Eucharist each week, we not only symbolically experience the presence of Christ but in fact we can know Him in this moment even as the disciples did.  Now in some ways that is just Eucharistic Theology 101, but I wonder if we ever really think about the power of that claim.  In our tradition, we talk about the presence of Christ at the Eucharist as Real Presence.  That is to say we believe that beyond hocus pocus and magic, the offering of these elements of bread and wine and of ourselves before God creates a container for God’s presence that is real; it is real contact with God.  So every week, every time we present ourselves at this table – when we feel like it and when we don’t, when we believe a little and when we believe hardly anything at all, every time we approach this table, we connect with the One who says, “follow me;” and the connection is not just metaphorical but an encounter that is real.  Extraordinary, maybe even a bit frightening.

Shall we too go immediately?  Where would we go?  As a child growing up in the Bible Belt of the South, when I would hear a preacher talk about following Jesus, I was terrified, believing that if I followed Jesus, I would have to go to a jungle somewhere.  Even then, I knew I would much prefer taking Christ to lapsed Catholics in the South of France!  What would it look like to really follow Jesus?  Perhaps we would change much about us, perhaps new vocations would emerge, or perhaps not.  Maybe we would do just as we have been doing but differently - more justly, more compassionately, less compulsively.  What would it demand of us and what would it give us if we were to immediately follow Jesus?  Perhaps we would have to give up all our money; some of us might be called to do that.  I doubt if I could gather a bus load of us today who would so choose. Perhaps the changes would be much smaller, volunteering here or there, being as Christ for some whom we had heretofore hardly noticed.  Or maybe the change that would come from following Jesus would in fact be much more internal, perhaps we would be called to let go of how we have always understood ourselves.  Hmm…

Peter and Andrew were invited to go beyond what they knew of themselves.  Simple fishermen they were, deeply entrenched in their roles, proficient at their jobs, probably more successful than we normally imagine – after all they had boats and nets to leave.  Loving them, Jesus looked at them and saw capabilities they did not know they possessed, and he called them to lives beyond that which they could ever have imagined.   They might have said, “You are amazing, Rabbi, and you excite us like no one ever has, but we know who we are: we are fishermen; we fish for fish not for people.  Thank you for considering us, but we are not the people you need.”  The drama of their following Jesus rested on their willingness to believe the unbelievable about themselves.  Though they stumbled so many times in the course of their following him, at the moment he called them, they had to sense and the grace to believe him enough to believe in themselves.

That gives us a hint about what following Jesus is like: becoming people we may not have imagined ourselves to be capable of being.  My deep sense is that these men had never experienced the presence of love as they did in Jesus; they knew at the core of their being that they were loved by the very one who called them – and that they were loved even before they began to follow him and that they had never seen or felt such love before.  I believe, my brothers and sisters, that we are loved and called in just that way.  If we really believed that – if we really believed that we are called by a God who cherishes us simply because we belong to God – and that nothing can make us worthy of that love and that nothing can cause us to lose it, we would be so free that we would drop our nets and be gone in a minute – just like Betty Beauty-Box on the way to Graceland.

“Follow me,” he said, “and I will make you fishermen of men.  Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

In the name of God:  AMEN.