Follow (sermon, January 23, 2011)

Matthew 4:17-23

Presbyterian pastor Rodger Nishioka recalls watching a Nova documentary about elephant seals when he was a child. The cameras followed one particular female seal who had just given birth on the shores off the coast of Argentina. Soon after, the famished mother abandoned her newborn pup to go find food. The pup stayed on the shore while the mother fed in the waters off the coast.

But when the mother came out of the water, she was on a different part of the beach than her baby. Not only that, but because elephant seals all breed and give birth around the same time, there was a multitude of mothers and babies on the same beach, all searching for one another. The cameras stayed on this one mother seal, who kept calling to her baby, and listening for her pup who called back with cries of its own. Using their senses of hearing and smell, the mother and baby were finally reunited. The host explained that, from the moment of birth, the sound and scent of the pup are imprinted on the mother’s memory, so that there is no question in her mind which baby seal is hers. Eventually, she will find her baby.

At this, Nishioka’s father, also a Presbyterian minister, remarked, “You know, that’s how it is with God. We are imprinted with a memory of God, and God is imprinted with a memory of us, and even if it takes a lifetime, we will find each other.” (1)

Even if it takes a lifetime, God will find us.

In Matthew’s story of the call of the first disciples, it is as if nothing less than an imprinted memory of God is sparked in the minds of Jesus’ first followers. “Follow me,” Jesus says as he walks along the beach and sees Peter and Andrew fishing in the sea. And “immediately they left their nets and followed him.” What could possibly have compelled these hardworking fishermen to leave behind their livelihood, their stability, everything familiar, to follow this man they had never seen before?

It is as if Peter and Andrew recognize in Jesus the answer to the deepest longings of their hearts, the longings that nothing else in their lives had been able to fill, not their work or their family life or their hobbies or even their faith. Matthew doesn’t tell us what Jesus says next to James and his brother John, but whatever it is, their response is as dramatic as Peter and Andrew’s: “Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.”

It wasn’t so different then as it is for us now. You simply don’t turn your back on a decent job or on the family that job supports to follow after some guy who happens to walk past your office and invite you to follow him. And besides, no teacher worth his salt has to go out and recruit his own students -- teachers, then and now, are supposed to be sought out by students who have heard of their reputations, not the other way around.

But clearly, that’s not how Jesus works. He doesn’t find a place to settle down, join the faculty of the local seminary, build a reputation, and sit back and wait for students to come to him. He goes out, preaching the same short message we heard from John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Or, as Dale Bruner puts it, “Turn your lives around, because here comes the kingdom of the heavens!” (2)

It’s as if this gospel, this good news, is simply too good for Jesus to sit around and wait for people to discover for themselves. He has to go out and tell people about it. And when he does, there is just something about him -- whether it’s the man himself, or the words he speaks -- there is something about Jesus that compels people -- immediately! -- to leave behind everything and follow him.

Tom Brady is the quarterback for the New England Patriots and the winner of three Super Bowls. Until last Sunday’s upset, the Patriots appeared to be well on their way to another Super Bowl victory. Regardless, Tom Brady is considered to be one of the best to ever play the game. He’s well liked by fans and teammates, and he's been named one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People - more than once. He’s also married to a supermodel.

By all our society’s measures of success, Tom Brady should be happy and content and at peace. But a few years ago, during his team’s quest for a perfect season, Brady was interviewed on 60 Minutes.

He told the interviewer: “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there's something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what it is.’ I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think, ‘God, it's got to be more than this.’ I mean this isn't, this can't be, what it's all cracked up to be?” 
 “What's the answer?” the interviewer asked him. 
 “I wish I knew. I wish I knew,” Brady answered.
Three Super Bowl rings.
Married to a supermodel.
And he’s convinced there’s something more, something else, something different. (3)

We all feel it at some point in our lives. Some of us feel it most of our lives. That persistent ache. That restlessness. We too are convinced there is something deeper, something more.

It is almost as if God created us that way, with a God-shaped hole in our souls that nothing but God can ever fill. More than sixteen centuries ago, Augustine of Hippo put it this way: “Thou hast made us for thyself, so that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Even longer ago than that, the psalmist wrote, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb...In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”

It’s as if there is something innate in all of us that is primed to respond to what was imprinted in our memories at birth, something primed to recognize God and to know that only with God can the deepest longings of our heart be satisfied.

The problem is, there are so many things in our lives and in our world that we mistake for the something more we’re longing for. Sometimes we think all we need to finally be satisfied is more knowledge -- more awareness of how the world works. We see this tendency all too often now in elementary schools, which keep cutting out time for play and creativity in favor of more time for instruction, when the science clearly shows that kids learn more and concentrate better when they have had time for physical and imaginative play. Or we think that we could fill the emptiness by perfecting our physical selves with the right diet or exercise plan...which is precisely why every year there is a new fad for how to eat or how to exercise. Or maybe we’re like Tom Brady on a smaller scale, we know that we have everything we could want -- food, shelter, work, family, resources -- and yet still we cannot shake the feeling that “there’s got to be more than this.”

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” Jesus says. “Turn your lives around, because here comes the kingdom of the heavens!”...”Follow me!” God finds them, God invites them to follow, and Andrew and Peter and James and John drop their nets and wave goodbye to their father and follow after Jesus like people in a trance.
God finds us, and we show up at church Sunday after Sunday and give our time and energy and money toward this institution that certainly has its flaws. Why? With all the options we have for self-improvement or even for entertainment on a Sunday morning, why are we here?

The answer might just be in the last verse of today’s reading. What happened after the first disciples followed Jesus? Well, we don’t know what happened to the disciples, at least not right away. Matthew tells us instead what Jesus did: “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” Teaching...proclaiming the good news...curing every disease. Later, these very tasks are the ones Jesus will call his disciples to do. These are the tasks Jesus calls us to do.

And isn’t that why we are here today? Because at some point we discovered that the only true satisfaction in life is found in following the one who shows us that the most important thing is being a part of something bigger than ourselves, finding meaning in something beyond our insulated circle of work and family and friends. We are here because we follow the One who shows us that the most important thing is love in action, love that teaches and proclaims and heals. We are here because at some point, that love found us, perhaps just when we needed it the most, and that memory compels us to do what we can to share that love with others.

Nishioka tells another story that happened when he was a speaker at a youth conference in California. One night, after preaching a sermon on discerning God’s call, an adult leader of a youth group came to see him with a teenage boy, asking if Nishioka would talk to the young man. Nishioka agreed. The young man told Nishioka and his youth group leader that for some time he had been hearing God speak to him. And what this voice -- which he was sure was the voice of God -- kept telling him was that he should end his life, that the world would be better off if he were dead. At this, the young man broke down sobbing. Nishioka and the leader held onto the young man and prayed with him and for him.

Then, after a few moments, Nishioka told that man that although he believed he had heard God telling him to kill himself, there was simply no way that voice was God’s. “Are you sure?” the young man asked. “I am absolutely certain,” Nishioka responded. “But how do you know?”

“I know because the Bible says that we are made in God’s own image. I know because Psalm 139 promises that God knit you together in your mother’s womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. I know because God sent Jesus that you might have life. I know that those voices you are hearing are not coming from God.” (4)

“Follow me,” says Jesus, “and I will make you fish for people.” When we follow Jesus, we follow the one who calls us to turn around and turn away from all the voices in our lives and in our culture that make false promises and false accusations. When we follow Jesus, we receive the privileges but also the responsibilities of discipleship, for to follow him means to imitate him...teaching, proclaiming the good news, curing disease, sharing God’s love with all people. It can be as drastic as Nishioka’s encounter with a suicidal teenager or as ordinary as sharing a meal at the annual meeting with someone you don’t already know. When we follow Jesus, we discover the truth: from the first disciples to the ones who will be baptized today, we are all created, loved, found, and called by the God...to share God’s love with all. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Rodger Nishioka in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1, WJK Press, 2010, p. 284, 286.
2. Dale Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary, Vol 1: The Christ Book, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004.
3. From a sermon by the Rev. Amy Miracle, “Asking the Right Questions,” Westminster Presbyterian Church, Des Moines, Iowa, January 20, 2008.
4. Rodger Nishioka in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 1, WJK Press, 2010, p. 288.