Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany – January 21st, 2018
Text: Mark 1:14-20 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
The Beginning of the Galilean Ministry
14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”
Jesus Calls the First Disciples
16 And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.” 18 And immediately they left their nets and followed him. 19 And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zeb′edee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. 20 And immediately he called them; and they left their father Zeb′edee in the boat with the hired servants, and followed him.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
Imagine that you were there, somewhere in Galilee, when this unknown itinerant preacher from Nazareth named Jesus proclaimed in the village square “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” What would you have thought? How would you have felt? How would you have reacted?
I would guess that most people would have shrugged it off, and gone about their daily business. That’s what often happens with great events and movements. One single snowflake isn’t much; but then comes the second, then the third, and soon the entire sky is full of whirling snow, and then you know it’s time to get home. Or, to use another analogy, those of you who are gardeners can attest to the fact that you really don’t know how much of the seed you’ve purchased will actually grow into tomatoes or roses or chrysanthemums. Some will, but there’s really no telling how much.
The Jesus Movement started small, like that snowstorm that starts with just one snowflake. Even though most of the people who heard his proclamation just continued going about their business, there were those who really listened and really took it to heart. The seeds were planted, and began to grow in their hearts. These people might well have been among those who later on are described as “the crowds” who followed Jesus and his disciples.
But at this point, all that was in the future. When Jesus first issued his call, it didn’t look to anybody that God’s Kingdom was even close, much less “at hand.” His hearers still had to work long brutal hours to scratch out a living. Hearing that the kingdom of God was at hand was welcome, but it didn’t plow the fields or put bread on the table. For Simon, Andrew, James, and John there were still fish to sort on the beach and prepare for sale. As David Lose writes, “Whatever challenges they had at home were still there. Whatever unfulfilled dreams they entertained were no closer to being realized. Moreover, Rome was still in power. They were still living in an occupied nation. Herod was the brutal puppet leader of their region and Pontius Pilate still governed Judea with an iron fist from Jerusalem. No, I doubt that it looked very much like God’s kingdom was coming.”[1]
Those of us living today, too, might feel the same way: “A jogger stood atop some rocks on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago. The young jogger’s body silhouetted dramatically against the dawning sky. All of a sudden he cried out across the water, ‘For God’s sake, Jesus, why don’t you do something about this crazy world? What’s holding you up?’”
Our lives are no less hard than in Jesus’ day – we have jobs to do, kids to feed, mortgages to pay, our share of those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” as Mr Shakespeare wrote so long ago. It’s also hard for us to imagine that the kingdom of God is at hand.
But maybe we make the same mistake that those first listeners did. Before Jesus says “the kingdom of God is at hand,” he says “the time is fulfilled.” The time he’s talking about isn’t our normal, everyday time of minutes and seconds, which the Greeks called “chronos” (Χρόνος) but the royal time of God’s own activity and action, which the Greeks called “kairos” (καιρός) – in other words, God is getting directly involved. Imagine that for a second – God’s kingdom is at hand, and God himself is at hand, too.
Lose goes on to say, “Second, and more important, is the word translated here as ‘fullness.’ It comes from the Greek verb πληρόω (pronounced play-ro’-o) and means not simply fullness but totality, completeness, something rendered perfect and filled to overflowing.”[2] Despite all evidence to the contrary.
We – you and I – live right now – in that fullness, whether or not we can see it, whether or not we can feel it.
In the midst of that fullness, and the breaking-in to our world of God’s own kingdom, Jesus calls his first disciples, a nondescript bunch of no-account laborers with absolutely no pedigree and nothing to distinguish them from all the hundreds of other such men in the area. But Jesus deliberately chose these men over all others: “It’s as if Jesus said, ‘Give me twelve ordinary men, and with them, if they will give themselves to me, I will change the world.’ We should never think so much of what we are as of what Jesus Christ can make us.”[3]
And, make no mistake: Being a disciple is tough. Nonetheless, these men dropped everything to follow Jesus. Maybe these common men weren’t so common, after all.
But what does it really mean to be a disciple of Jesus? Does it really mean that we have to drop everything, like those first disciples did, and go off to far-away places and preach the gospel?
For some people, that is exactly what it means. But for most of us today, as back then, too, it means something no less, and maybe even more, important: Being faithful disciples where we are. And, believe it or not, that might actually be harder than going off to foreign climes.
Saying “yes” to Jesus’ call to become his disciples is to do nothing less than embrace life, abundant life, eternal life. It means going along with Jesus down that long, sometimes rocky, often hard road of faith. And for most of us, it means doing that right here in your hometown, in your community, among the people you love – or at least know – whom you see and with whom you interact every day. And, unfortunately, not everybody you meet, not everybody you know, and not even those whom you love, are going to be at the same place on that road as you are. Some will start down that road, but turn back. Some won’t go down that road at all. Some – actually the majority of the people living on Planet Earth with you – will be indifferent, or scornful, or downright hostile, to your discipleship.
To be a disciple of Jesus means to learn from him to be like him.
I think that, at the end of the day, to be a disciple of Jesus in this day and age has three basic characteristics: Worship, Servanthood, and Witness.
The first, worship, is easily understood. Or is it? When we think of worship, we automatically think of our Sunday morning gatherings – and, for the most part, that’s exactly what “worship” means.
But not entirely. To follow Jesus means to worship him exclusively. That means not just here in church on Sunday mornings, but all the time. Worship is not just an act, it is a lifestyle. It means to arrange your priorities in such a way that puts God first. This does not necessarily mean that everything else you love will have to go away, or be lessened, or anything else – yes, you can still watch the Vikings or the Packers! It just means that your list is rearranged, with that most important thing – living a life of worship – on top.
Secondly, to be a disciple means to be a servant. No, this does not mean that we all have to go get jobs as wait staff at Applebee’s. It means that we keep in mind that it’s not “all about me.” The Apostle Paul puts it very well when he writes in his letter to the Galatians, “Let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). The people I remember with the greatest fondness are those who went out of their way to help me. Each one of us can be a person like that. “To be a disciple of Jesus means to serve like him. It means to serve, primarily, by looking at your brothers and sisters and ‘going low’ in acts of love, even when it’s an inconvenience to yourself, even when it flip-flops the world’s social order and expectations. Making disciples of Jesus means making servants who love one another.”[4]
Thirdly, to be a disciple means to witness. This is a word that those of us in our faith tradition don’t hear a lot – for many of us, it’s a word that carries a lot of negative baggage. Yet we witness all the time, whether or not we realize it.
All the word “witness” means is that we have been given the great and joyful task of proclaiming the good news – that God loves us, and has sent Jesus to us to redeem us. “To be a disciple of Jesus means to point people to him. It means to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love so that others would know him and worship him. It means, in other words, that we gladly seek more worshipers-servants-missionaries. Which is to say, a disciple of Jesus makes disciples of Jesus, as Jesus tells us to (Matthew 28:18–20).”[5]
That’s where I see this lesson hitting home for us. First, we are called upon really every second of our lives, to be intentional in our discipleship. And then, secondly, we follow Jesus in our own particular and distinct ways. Maybe we follow Jesus by volunteering at the Senior Citizen Center, or by working for Habitat for Humanity, or spending an evening packing food at Feed My Starving Children. Maybe we follow by keeping an eye out for kids at school who are being bullied and standing up for them….
Well, you see what I mean. At any given moment, we have infinite opportunities to follow and serve. Every single one of them is important – in fact, vital. Vital, because they are life-affirming and even life-changing!
Ours really is a glorious calling, friends! Let us go forth and follow!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Lose, David, “Epiphany 3 B: Fullness Where We Least Expect It,” …in the Meantime, http://www.davidlose.net/2018/01/epiphany-3-b-fullness-where-we-least-expect-it/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Barclay, William, The Gospel of Mark, The New Daily Study Bible, Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 31
[4] Parnell, Jonathan, “What Is a Disciple?”, Desiring God, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-a-disciple
[5] Ibid.