And good morning and welcome to Church of the Resurrection.
On this snowy morning, it is great to see all of you here.
We were guessing how many people would show up, and I was
massively underestimating all of you.
So I praise the Lord for you. I'm so glad that you're here.
I'm also, frankly, grateful for the technology that allows us to
live stream so that the many people at our church who are
elsewhere in Virginia or in Maryland are able to hunker down
at home and stay safe. So welcome if you're on the live
stream, welcome. I suspect my parents are
watching. Hi, Mom.
Hi, Dad. How often can you do that,
right? I do pray that we all stay safe
and that we're able to to care for ourselves, care for those
around us well. So I encourage you to do that.
Let me invite you this morning to turn in your Bibles to our
gospel lesson. That's Matthew chapter 4
starting in verse 12 in the Pew Bibles that begins on page
believe it's 750-9759. We'll be looking at this passage
together. And before we get started, let
me pray. Father, you are the God who
speaks words of life. So I pray, I beg you that you
would speak to us today through your word.
By your Spirit would you breathe life and strength into us for
all that you were calling us to. I pray this in the powerful name
of Jesus. Amen.
Now, as many of you know, Rez, right now, we are engaged in a
strategic planning process. Some of you might have allergic
reactions to that. Some of you are like, yeah,
finally we're doing it. We've, you know, we have new
resources. We've been in this building for
five years now. We are, we are experiencing
growth. We're also experiencing sensing
our limits as as a church and, and we're sensing the need to
pick a direction to pick, pick what we're going to focus on, to
make choices about what we do, what we don't do.
And the goal of this plan is to set a direction for the church
to answer the question, where are we going?
Where are we going? That's the question we we want
to answer. And the question that we as a
church are striving to answer is also a relevant question for us
as individuals, isn't it? Where are you going in your
life? What is your personal mission in
life? Now, for some of you, the answer
to that is probably quite easy. You know exactly what you're
striving to do, you know exactly how you're trying to do it, and
you are moving toward it with decision and focus.
For more of you, I suspect the answer is somewhat fuzzy.
If you still have a kind of direction to it, you know,
generally sort of the direction you're trying to go, you may not
know exactly how different things fit into that, but you
have a sort of general direction and trying to figure out some of
the details. And, and for others of you, the
answer is just not there. Is it?
You don't know what you're doing.
Maybe you just feel adrift, or maybe it's actually that the
challenges and the impossibilities of this city
have worn you down and left you feeling sort of stalled out and
cynical. Where are you going?
Where are we going? However you answer that
question, however we as a church answer that question.
Our gospel lesson this morning meets us with that question.
It invites us to ask the question, but almost immediately
it challenges the question itself and it pushes you to ask
an even better question. I think the most memorable part
of this passage perhaps is it it comes right in the middle where
Jesus calls his first disciples. He calls Andrew and Peter,
they're brothers, and then James and John to follow him.
And he calls them to become fishers of men, fishers of men.
This language about fishers of men is, it's such a, a great
example of Jesus's rhetorical genius, isn't it?
He's, he's talking to these fishermen.
He takes a part of their life, a part of their work, and he and
he turns it into this really rich and provocative metaphor to
invite them into his ministry. It's powerful, it's provocative.
It's something that we can sort of Mull over for a long time,
right? What does it mean exactly to be
a Fisher of men? How do we catch people for God's
Kingdom now? It is so tempting for us to stop
here and to consider this to be Jesus's call to us.
Go out, go be a Fisher of men. Draw people into the Kingdom of
God through word and deed. Proclaim the good news, win
hearts, win lives to Christ. We can view this as our mission,
right? As giving a kind of direction to
our lives. This is the where we're going.
And in a real sense, actually, that's true, right?
That's exactly what he's inviting his new disciples to
do. In my extension, he's inviting
us to do that as well. But that's not where Jesus
starts. He doesn't start with, guys, get
your Nets ready, your metaphorical Nets.
Let's go fishing. Jesus starts with something much
simpler. Follow me, follow me.
And here we see how Jesus is actually undercutting this
question that we start with. We might ask ourselves, where am
I going? But Jesus, he doesn't seek to
align himself with the sort of pre-existing direction of Peter
and Andrew and James and John. He's not looking for sort of
synergy and shared goals. He's not looking to get aligned.
That's sort of been the the trend word of our strategic
planning process. We need to be aligned.
Jesus isn't looking for alignment.
He isn't asking where you're going and how can I join you on
that mission. He says very simply, follow me.
Come and see where I'm going, go where I go.
Join me on my journey. Jesus wants us to be going
somewhere, but he doesn't want us to ask where am I going?
He wants us to ask where is he going.
This is such a a difficult and important question.
And the example of the disciples here is actually shows us both
the challenges and the barriers that we can face when Christ
calls us to follow him. When Jesus first encounters
Peter and Andrew, what are they doing?
They're working. Jesus calls them to follow him
and they must leave behind their work in order to follow him.
And it doesn't take a lot of self reflection to realize,
right, that one of the great barriers to following Jesus can
be our work. When we work, we are exercising
our agency to shape our world. It can be really fun and as a
result, work very easily can become a place of our primary
allegiance. We feel tied to our jobs, and
our work can start to organize not only our time, but our
priorities. Our work can start to define us.
And Jesus here is challenging exactly that approach to work.
Following Jesus means that work does not control and define us.
Jesus does. And when we submit to Jesus in
this way, we are giving up control in a sense.
It's scary. It's scary now and it was scary
then. This doesn't mean stopping
working, exactly, but it does mean refusing to let work set
our priorities and define our value.
And most pointedly, it means being willing to walk away from
our work in order to follow Jesus faithfully.
This is hard, but it's part of what it means to follow Jesus.
Now, that's the first barrier that we can see here, and the
second is perhaps even harder to reckon with in some ways.
When Jesus encounters James and John, they are working just like
Peter and Andrew, but they're working with their father.
And Matthew sort of goes out of his way to note that they leave
both their boat and their father in order to follow Jesus.
They left their family. Now, in a sense, this is a cost
that many of us don't feel. But in other parts of the world,
our brothers and sisters in Christ can and do feel this
acutely. Nabil Qureshi was a Christian
evangelist apologist. He converted from Islam to
Christianity while in college. And in his book Seeking Allah,
Finding Jesus, it's a great book, he talks about the
tremendous personal cost of leaving Islam in order to follow
Christ. The result is, at best, strained
relationships with your family. And he lived in America.
In other parts of the world, Christian converts are
completely ostracized and sometimes even killed for their
faith by their families. Family is so important.
Family should provide a place of peace and belonging.
But following Jesus can sometimes mean that you lose
even that now. For us as as Americans right
now, that that might mean taking little stands that alienate us
from the rest of our family. That maybe that means a level of
generosity to the church that your family finds to be
irresponsible. Maybe it means upsetting the
peace at the dinner table by defending the dignity of certain
people others want to vilify, or refusing to acquiesce to the
demands of someone's personal identity that they want to
impose. Maybe it means continuing to
love and pursue your spouse even when all of your friends and
your family tell you that there is no hope.
In all of these ways, we are choosing to follow Jesus rather
than bend to the demands of our family.
And in this, we are willing to sacrifice the security and peace
of our family in order to follow Jesus faithfully.
Now, to be clear here, the disciples don't totally give up
their families or their work. We know that it's important to
see that these brothers came to Jesus together.
They weren't following Jesus alone, and neither should we.
They also continue to work. They sort of have a connection
to their work. But work and family note are no
longer the organizing and defining features of their
lives. That was Jesus and following
him. They gave up the control that
they had over their lives in order to follow Jesus wherever
he went. It can be so tempting when
thinking about mission to jump over this part of following
Jesus and to think only about the the fishing for men, which
is very important. But my friends, there is no
mission apart from following Jesus.
We must go where he is going. And that's exactly what this
passage presents to us here. It shows us where Jesus is
going. I think it's so telling that
this, this story of the calling of the disciples is actually
framed by these descriptions of Jesus's ministry.
The disciples are not the start of Jesus's ministry, as though
Jesus somehow has to have them to get started.
They're not the end of Jesus's ministry, as though everything
sort of culminates in the disciples.
They're right there in the middle.
He's, he's calling them to join him on this mission, on this
ministry, on this journey that he's already on.
And the same is true for us. We must go where Jesus is
already going. And what we see from the start
of our passage is that Jesus is going into places of deep
darkness in order to bring light and life to the lost and to the
hurting. Now look with me at verse 12, if
you would. We learn here that Jesus
withdraws into Galilee and that implies that he's been down
South in the region around Jerusalem, in Judea.
Now he relocates into this northern area, we're told after
after John has been arrested. And Matthew tells us that this
move fulfills with the prophet Isaiah said about this northern
area. This northern place, far from
the center of Israel, is a place of darkness, but light is
dawning there now. It wasn't just a place of
darkness in Isaiah's time either, though.
During Jesus time it was a place of mixed religion where people
from different areas converged and brought their different
faiths. There were some Jews Jesus is
teaching in synagogues, but there were lots of other kinds
of people as well. There were many Gentiles living
in this area. This is the place that is far
from the religious and the Cultural Center of Jerusalem.
It's a place where many, many people are far from God, you
could say both, both spiritually and physically.
It's a place with connections to many other people who are far
from God. And it's here and precisely here
that Jesus starts his ministry. See Jerusalem and most
specifically the temple, or the place where God's light was
supposed to shine. It was where people went for
healing, for forgiveness, for reconciliation.
It's where they went to meet with God.
That's what you did at the temple.
But by starting his ministry outside of Jerusalem, in this
mixed and diverse land of darkness, Jesus is demonstrating
that he is in fact, the new temple.
By bringing God's light to this far-flung place, Jesus is
showing that he himself is God's light.
Jesus is on a mission to bring light to dark places, and He
does that by going there himself.
This is where Jesus is going, and this last part of our
passage from verses 23 on tells us how he does that.
In verse 23, we learned that he's travelling around Galilee
doing three things. He's teaching and proclaiming
and healing. He's revealing the truth, He's
calling people to believe the truth and he's transforming
their lives in all these ways. He's bringing the light of God
and he's bringing it to everybody there.
He's bringing it to the marginalized, so those who like
agency to the oppressed, and he's bringing it to both Jews
and non Jews. Verse 24 is so striking to me.
We learned there that his fame spread not through all of
Israel, but through all of Syria.
Syria was a much larger and it was a predominantly Gentile
Roman province. And it was these Gentiles that
brought their sick and lame and oppressed to Jesus, and Jesus
healed them. Jesus is on a mission, and this
mission is we're seeing here to everybody.
Everybody needs to come to Jesus to find the light.
Everybody can come to Jesus to receive his light.
Now, by attending to this description of where Jesus is
going, we start to get a picture of what it means to be a Fisher
of men. By himself going into these
places, Jesus is bringing light and life and hope and
restoration to people who need it.
And so for us to be fishers of men, we must do the same thing.
We must bring people not to ourselves, but to Jesus, to the
light itself. Only he has the light.
Only he has the power. We must bring people to Jesus
and the only way that we can do that is by following Jesus.
Now look with me again at verse 19 and see how Jesus phrases
this call. It's it's very careful what he's
doing here and it's phrasing. He says follow me and I will
make you fishers of men. Jesus doesn't actually command
us to be fishers of men. That's not a command He commands
us to follow. And then He promises that He
will mold us to be able to reach people.
Everything starts with following Jesus.
We want to be a people on a mission, don't we?
We want to be active. We want to change the world.
Jesus, even in the next chapter, will say that we are the light
of the world. Yes, Amen.
But Jesus challenges us here to start by following Him, and that
means knowing Him, spending time with Him, slowing down your life
to walk with Him. And when you do that, He will
shape you. He will mold your heart and your
life to make you effective for the Kingdom.
My friends, are you doing that? Are you spending time with Jesus
daily, or are you just so active that you don't have time?
Maybe you've thought about doing the Christian formation cohort
that we're going to be doing during Lent, but then you
figured, I don't really have time for that.
It's too much. These disciplines are too much.
Have you thought that are you so intent on fulfilling the mission
in your life that there is no space to spend time with Jesus?
Friends, we must be careful here.
Walking with Jesus is essential if we are to be effective for
His Kingdom. Whether in our homes, with our
families, or at our work or in our neighborhoods, we must be
spending time with Christ. We must actively be following
Him. In a word, we must worship him
every day. Call of action and personal
mission can be so strong. Perhaps, in a sense, now more
than ever. The events of the last week and
even the last 24 hours in our country have been jarring.
Regardless of your political stance, we live in a city that
wants to act, and we are in a time that feels like it's just
calling out for action. But before we act, we must
remember our first call. Your first call is not to change
the world. Your first call isn't to reach
the World. Your first call, the call that
must come before everything else, is to follow Jesus.
It is to walk with Him, to get to know Him, to sit with him, to
learn from him, to worship him. That's why we've been so
insistent on having church today.
There is nothing more important than spending time with Jesus,
and worship is the primary way that we do that.
In this worship, this following Jesus first sets the pattern and
even the rhythm for the rest of our lives.
Christians are to be active. We are to be on a mission to the
world to proclaim Christ, but we are to be constantly returning
back to the well of Christ, to be drinking deeply of his waters
and to be refreshed. There's this pulsating quality
you could even say to the Christian life, like the rhythm,
almost like the rhythm of breathing.
We inhale by coming to Christ, finding life and joy and hope in
him. And then we exhale by going out
into the world, calling people to him.
Inhale, Exhale time with Jesus mission into the world.
Inhale, Exhale Jesus mission. Jesus mission, my friends, if
you stop inhaling, if you stop coming back to Jesus and
following him, there is no exhaling, there is no mission.
You stop breathing, you die. Let me close by inviting you to
consider how this rhythm shapes us more and more deeply, and how
it shapes our lives and and by extension, the people around us.
What if we were shaped and defined primarily not by our
work or our family or our tribe, but by Christ?
What if Christ were the organizing and animating
principle in our lives more and more and more, and the city were
filled with Christians more and more who were constantly
returning to Him to be refreshed and revived?
Now this rhythm, it shapes us and shapes us in a particular
way. It makes us both less anxious
and more principled because we are following Jesus.
We aren't overwhelmed by the latest outrage, no matter how
outrageous it is. When we watch the headlines on
the New York Times or The Washington Post, as many of us
have been doing, we are driven to prayer, and most obviously,
the prayer of the Psalms, not the explosive outrage that we
see everywhere around us. We aren't swinging from cause to
cause. Instead, we're marked by peace
and grace and patience and frankly, level headedness, even
when everything around us seems to be spinning out of control.
We grieve injustice. We must grieve injustice without
being devastated by it. Because no matter what is
happening, King Jesus is still on his throne and we are still
following him. So we aren't overwhelmed, we can
be less anxious, but at the same time, we are principled and even
more principled. We don't have to hold on to jobs
that violate what Christ calls us to or that compromise our
mission. We are able to stand up and say
with a resolute calmness, this is wrong.
Even if it means that we lose friends, connections, or
opportunities. We work diligently at our work
so long as the Lord has us do it.
But knowing that the Lord calls us not to follow our work
wherever it leads, He called us to follow His Son.
We can hold on to our networks, our friends, our family, and the
city more loosely, precisely because we are holding on to
Christ more tightly. My friends, just imagine.
Just imagine what would happen if our city and our country were
filled with more and more people like this.
Principled and yet patient, calm and yet certain of what is true
and good, level headed while simultaneously longing for
justice to run down like water. Imagine how our rhetoric would
change. Imagine how our policies would
change. Imagine how neighborhoods and
workplaces and our families and our homes would change.
My friends, this is what can happen when people follow Jesus.
Jesus has been transforming lives for 2000 years and he's
calling every single one of you to go out and to help reach
people for him. But my friends, we cannot offer
what we do not have. We must remember our first
calling. We must follow Christ ourselves
first. My friends, let's be a people
who do that. In the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.