Sermon Preached on February 6, 2022

It is easy for me to get lost in some of the metaphors that Jesus uses when he is either teaching or simply living. It’s all the sheep, the goats, the weddings and parties and even lakes of fire and gnashing teeth. I hear them and suddenly I find myself catapulting down a couple of metaphors myself, like rabbit holes and black holes. I keep getting lost in mustard seeds and fig trees. It’s important to understand that the world that Jesus lived in was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. You, like me might need to step back from time to time so we don’t lose sight of the proverbial trees in the midst of the forest. 

To make things more complicated, Brian Zahnd reminds us that ‘Our age is no friend to faith, and the challenges we face are real. I hear the melancholy whispers of Galadriel at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings: “The world is changed: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.” Zahnd, Brian (2021-11-08T22:58:59). When Everything’s on Fire . InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.  

For me (and probably you), we need to be reminded from time to time what the issues are… what is it that Jesus came to do and how does that help me, not just in the sweet by and by, but also, maybe most especially in the here and now. And not for those living in a different time and place, but for us who live right here, right now.  I believe it helps us all to aska basic question that is easy to lose from time to time. “What was Jesus’ message? What was his mission? [We shouldn’t get too complicated here because] Quite simply it was to inaugurate and establish the kingdom of God. Everything Jesus ever did—his preaching, his parables, his miracles, his table practice of radical hospitality—was an announcement and enactment of the kingdom of God. Jesus called upon those who heard his gospel announcement of the arrival of the kingdom of God to believe the message, rethink their lives, and to be baptized as a public testimony that they now belonged to this new way of being the people of God. Jesus was not offering private or postmortem salvation—Jesus was offering salvation as being personally gathered into the kingdom of God. A close reading of the Gospels reveals that Jesus used the concepts of salvation and kingdom interchangeably. For example, when the disciples asked Jesus whether few would be saved, Jesus spoke of how many would “recline at table in the kingdom of God.” Salvation is best understood as a kind of belonging. To be saved is to belong to and participate in the kingdom of God—a kingdom where Jesus is King (Christ). This is why in his itinerant ministry Jesus called people in the towns of Galilee to band together and live out the kingdom of God in assemblies he called “church.” We should never forget that the church originated as Jesus’ own idea. The church was not an optional addendum to the mission of Jesus, but the very heart of it! The Christian life is not a solo project and it was never intended to be. Christianity is not primarily a set of privately held beliefs but a shared life. Nevertheless, the rise of Christianity as private pietism has obscured this truth. Beach, Joseph. Ordinary Church: A Long and Loving Look . Spello Press. Kindle Edition.

Any of that quiet pietism, which simply means making faith into a private expression of deep sentimental faith, which has little to do with fishing for people, goes out the window when one looks closely at today’s gospel.  At the most basic of levels, the calling of Peter to follow Jesus and to become a fisher of people, suggests that faith is more than simply saying the right prayers, confessing sin and making into heaven, even if its by the skin of your teeth. No. Following Jesus has very little to do with that and a whole lot of helping others know that there is a different, more vibrant way of living.

It does not take an artist’s leap of creativity to arrive at this truth: following Jesus to get to heaven has little or no connection to what Jesus proclaimed. If our faith in Jesus was simply to insure our eternal destiny in paradise, then the Romans would not have been so threatened by Jesus. Let the people believe whatever they want, as long as there  isn’t a threat to the Empire. But if these Christians overstep their boundaries and begin talking about systemic issues, then we may have a problem, the Romans thought. Indeed, at first the Romans looked at the communities that emerged after they attempted to destroy this movement by crucifying the leader of it, and thought, they’re not much of a threat. They were just a kind of subset of Judaism, they thought, which they seemed to have pretty much under control.

But it appears that this new community that Jesus began was committed to standing up and against the Empire. Evidently fishing for people meant standing up and against the power of the Empire. “Telling the story of Jesus’s crucifixion in an open way, and celebrating it, was an act of resistance to Rome. Jesus’s crucifixion was not unique but was duplicated over and over throughout the empire, and the stories of Jesus being tortured to death allied his story with those of hundreds of thousands similarly executed. Early Jesus groups dramatically described how their Anointed leader was crucified by Roman soldiers. They proclaimed openly that Jesus was an executed enemy of the state. Later Christians obscured Rome’s violence by highlighting Jesus being crucified to save people from their sins. Without being sidetracked by that later Christian doctrine, most communities of the Anointed of the first and second century publicly acknowledged the paradox that Rome’s defeat of Jesus the Anointed was actually Rome’s defeat. The stories of Jesus’s death would have produced sympathy for other victims of Roman violence. This is clear in the stories of his death in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, both of which describe Jesus being mocked as he was crucified and Jesus screaming out to God, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mark 15:34; Matt. 27:46). The empathy in these stories is anti-Roman. Most of the stories of Jesus’s crucifixion also proclaimed that Jesus was vindicated and raised up by God. This claim would have been understood as an anti-Roman claim of victory over Roman violence.” Vearncombe, Erin; Scott, Brandon; Taussig, Hal; Westar Institute, The. After Jesus Before Christianity (pp. 42-43). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. And this was a threat to the power they possessed.

“The word translated as “gospel,” meaning “good news”, occurs 101 times in the New Testament across eighteen books. Good news is not a religious expression but means what it says. It is an expression that celebrates a joyful event as a sort of public statement or proclamation. Often in imperial accounts, good news is the birthday of the emperor. 

Two things help us understand good news in the ancient world. First, unlike so often in the contemporary United States, good news was not measured by the amount of money and property one had. Good news marked a significant event that changed the world, whether it was the birth of an emperor or the coming of the Anointed. Second, most of the members of these groups—perhaps two thousand people twenty years after Jesus’s death and maybe a total of twenty thousand fifty years later—were mostly peasants, day workers, the enslaved, and craftspeople. Although there were occasionally wealthy people in some groups, in many there were none.”Vearncombe, Erin; Scott, Brandon; Taussig, Hal; Westar Institute, The. After Jesus Before Christianity (p. 44- 45). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

These were the fish that Jesus told Peter, and the Church to go and fish, to bring the good news to them. What is this good news? The Empire tells us that happiness is found when you have everything together, you have the money to buy stuff, the health that keeps you from suffering and the good life, which, if you have watched the HBO series Succession (I can’t be the only one who has seen this series) only brings heartache and desperation. 

I want to reminds us all as I mentioned last week that the Gospel is most appealing to those who are on the outside, without privilege, status, or wealth. It becomes appealing to us when we come to the realization that not only should we identify to those who the world rejects but we, too, are outsiders. 

In a sort of ultimate topsy turvy way, God offers us entrance into this community when we let go of privilege and what may seem like something we earned and grasp it by letting go. Just think about it for a moment, this whole kingdom thing makes no sense to the satisfied, the comfortable, the well heeled, those who’s future is secured.  But for the downcast, the lowly, those who are not sure if they’ll survive the next catastrophe but they don’t have anything stored up in barns or an IRA, they are the ones Jesus addresses by saying, “You are the salt of the earth . . . the light for the world . . . Don’t fret about your life—what you’re going to eat or drink—or your body—what you’re going to wear . . . Take a look at the birds of the sky: they don’t . . . gather into barns . . . You are to seek God’s domain, and . . . justice first, and all these things will come to you as a bonus” (Matt. 5:13, 14; 6:25, 26, 33). This makes no sense to those of us who see the worse calamity to overcome a dip in the stock market indices. 

Fisher folk. That is what we are called to do and fish for those who fear that the good news is no where to be found. But you cannot fish if you do not see that our faith is more than a first class ticket to the hereafter. Unless we understand that focusing on heaven has made to many people to be so heavenly minded that they are not earthly good.

We live in a world that has made the most radical proclamation a rather tepid formula for the hereafter. I have been guilty of that and I suspect I am not alone. You see unless we risk identifying with the have nots, the rejected and despised, then we’ll just go fishing, not for people but just for the latest catch of red snapper, paired to the sweetest of wines, in a candle-lit bistro reserved only for those who have cushion in their money market accounts. But is that really the way to live? If only we could take ourselves out of the middle of our own self-created universe and see those who God abides with: the rejected; the sad and lonely; those who have lost track of the number of times they have simply been ignored.

Drink deeply this morning. Hear Jesus say “this is my body, this is my blood,” and then leave this place renewed, refreshed and committed to do more than rest on the hope of a future with God. Because unless we recognize God in the rejected and despised, we will never recognize him on a throne.