January 27, 2008    Matthew 4:12-23

    Jesus may have been born at night - at least that is what the gospels imply - but he now appears to us in broad daylight.  Jesus has come to the Jordan and been baptized by John in the light of day.   Having faced the temptations of the devil in the desert in the dark of forty nights and in the light of forty days, he comes through with a new understanding of who he is and who he is called to be.  He leaves his hometown of Nazareth, making a new home for himself in the town of Capernaum on the northern shores of the Sea of Galilee.   The messianic age has begun, and the light of Christ has risen high, high in the sky.  He may have been born in the night, but he now appears to us in broad daylight.  As he begins his public ministry in Galilee, there are three things Matthew tells us right off the bat that this may mean for us.

First, Matthew tells us that Jesus’ ministry is not exclusive.   Now this no doubt came as a surprise to many.  Among other expectations the Messiah was expected to deliver Israel from its enemies who will then be conquered and subdued.   Now the ministry of Jesus is certainly to the Jews, to be sure.  The people of Zebulun and Naphtali are used as representatives of the Hebrew people.  Zebulun, you will recall, was the tenth son of Jacob whose tribe settled the rich, forested land west of the Sea of Galilee.  And Naphtali was the sixth son of Jacob whose tribe settled the broad strip of land that runs parallel to the Jordan from Lake Huleh in the north to the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee.  There Jesus settled, and there he began his earthly ministry.  Yes, his ministry was to the Jews, but, says Matthew, his ministry was not exclusively for the Jews.  It is also for all the peoples of the earth, to those who live across the Jordan and beyond, Galilee of the Gentiles.   Time and time again Jesus makes this clear - exhorting the people to do to others, no matter who they are, as they would want others to do to them . . . healing lepers, the untouchables of that day . . . taking the Good News to places outside Israel, to the country of the Gadarenes, to the region of  Tyre and Sidon . . . healing Gentiles and acknowledging their faith.  His ministry was not exclusive.  There is a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that ran an advertisement in the Tulsa World, inviting people to return to church.  In the ad a special welcome was extended to the following:   “single, twice divorced, under 30, gay, filthy rich, black and proud, poor as dirt, can’t sing, no habla Ingles, bad spellers, screaming babies, three times divorced, passive aggressive, obsessive compulsive, doubters, married with pets, older than God, more Catholic than the Pope, workaholic, bleeding hearts . . . oh, and you.”  I think Jesus would approve.   The messianic age, Matthew says, has indeed begun, and that means the ministry of Jesus, the Good News he is bringing is meant for all.

    The second thing Matthew tells us is that Jesus went about these diverse communities, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  If we respond to this proclamation, our first instinct may be to bow our head or drop to our knees and confess all the things we feel we have done wrong.  But Jesus does not say anything about sins.  The clue to what he really means is in the response of Peter and Andrew and James and John.  He invites them to follow him, and they drop everything and seem to abandon work, family, friends, and all responsibilities to heed the call of this rabbi whom we have no indication they knew at all.   Now these are hard working fishermen.  This is no serene early morning by the banks of a trout stream with a fly rod.  These fishermen would spend their days hard at work, casting nets, hauling in fish, salting it, selling it at market, mending nets, and repairing sails.   If we imagine this scene, it’s kind of like imagining a stock broker frantically going about his business on the New York Stock Exchange or a lawyer in private conference with a client or a teacher in the middle of a lecture or a student in the middle of an exam . . . and then having a stranger come up, someone who maybe you have heard some rumors about but aren’t really sure who he is . . . having him come up, ask you to follow him and become part of a new community, and you do . . . probably in spite of yourself.   “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” is as radical as this!   But this is too radical, you may say.  And I would agree.  But this is the picture Matthew draws for us because repentance for Jesus is not about guilt or remorse.  It’s not about confessing sins.  It’s about changing lives, changing priorities, changing what is ultimate in our lives.   The messianic age has begun, and the light of Christ has risen high, high in the sky.  And we hear, “Repent, turn, come, follow me.”

    The third thing Matthew tells us is that Jesus comes a-calling, and he more often than not does so when we are just going about our daily lives, minding our own business, and probably least expect it.   Peter and Andrew and James and John are going about their daily business, doing the hard work of fishermen.  Then Jesus comes a-calling, and I doubt they were expecting him.  Jesus does this all the time.  The other night at our deacons’ meeting we shared with one another ways in which God has surprised us and called us to do things we did not expect to do, maybe didn’t even really want to do, how God has come a-calling inour lives in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways.  One deacon shared a story which he has given me permission to share with you today.  It’s a great illustration of the way God comes a-calling, even when it may be the furthest thing from our mind.

    This deacon had carved out a few minutes in his day to go to his favorite corner of the house and read the newspaper.  It was to be a respite from the activity and responsibility of family and children and job.  It was to be a half hour of peace.  It didn’t matter that the paper was yesterday’s.   This was his time.  His habit is to read the newspaper from the back page to the front because it’s easy to miss some significant articles that are buried deep in the paper.  He turned to the back and began to flip the pages which quickly became the obituaries.  Immediately a familiar name caught his eye.  It was the father of someone who had been a dear, dear friend, but he and his friend had become estranged and had not seen each other for quite a long time.  He still cared about his friend, though, and greatly admired the father who had died.  He read the obituary and saw that visiting hours were taking place at the funeral home at the very moment he was reading the paper, finding his half hour of relaxation before the world’s responsibilities descended upon him again.  He reflected, put the paper down, went upstairs, took a shower, put on a suit and tie, and went to the funeral home.  He had a healing reunion with his friend and paid his respects to his father.  Jesus had come a-calling, and said, “Come and follow,” and he was compelled to do just that.

    Many of us at that deacon meeting the other night were able to share similar times when we have experienced God’s intrusiveness in our lives, often when we least expect it, and we are called out of our comfort zones and invited to expand the kingdom of God which is grounded in love of neighbor and the Golden Rule.  Continuing to think about this, I’d like to share with you another story recorded by Frederick Buechner in his autobiography The Sacred Journey.  This is what he writes about how Christ intruded upon his life and called.

    “One evening toward the end of my five years of teaching . . . what I thought was coming was just dinner with my mother.  She was living by herself in New York at the time, and it must have been some sort of occasion, I think, because the apartment looked unusually nice, and there were candles on the table, the best silver.  It was to be just the two of us, and we had both looked forward to it, not simply as mother and son but as two old friends who no longer got to see each other all that much.  Then, just as we were about to sit down to eat, the telephone rang, and it was for me.  It was a friend I taught with at Lawrenceville, and he had not spoken more than a word or two when his voice broke and I realized to my horror that he was weeping.  His mother and father and a pregnant sister had been in an automobile accident on the West Coast, and it was uncertain whether any of them would live.  He was at the airport waiting for a flight to take him out to them.  Could I come down, he asked, and wait with him till the plane left?

    “There are many people in this world . . . who in face of such a cry for help as that would have seen right away that, humanly speaking, there was no alternative but to say that they would be at the airport as soon as a taxi would take them there . . . My instinct, on the other hand, was to be nothing so much as afraid.  I was afraid of my friend’s fear and of his tears.  I was afraid of his faith that I could somehow be a comfort and help to him and afraid that I was not friend enough to be able to be . . . So although I knew as well as anybody that I had no choice but to say that I would come, what I said instead, Heaven help me, was that I would come if I possibly could but there were things I had to take care of first and would he phone me back in about ten minutes.

    “In the other room dinner was on the table and my mother was waiting, and on that placid stage there was played out a preposterous little scene that was nonetheless one of the watersheds of my life.  Because when I told my mother what had happened and that I was probably going to have to leave and skip supper, her reaction caught me completely off guard.  The whole thing was absurd, she said.  My friend was a grown man. He had no business carrying on like an hysterical child.  What earthly good could I do anyway?  It was outrageous to think of spoiling an evening together that we had both been looking forward to for days.  Everything she said was precisely what at some level of my being I had already been saying to myself, and that was of course what made it so appalling.  It was only when I heard it on someone else’s lips that I heard it for what it was, and as much out of revulsion at myself as out of pity for my friend, I resolved that as soon as he called again, I would tell him that I would come immediately.

    “Then, as the final absurdity, when he did call again, he said that he had gotten hold of himself and there was really no longer any need for me to come at all, and the consequence was that I did not go . . . and such as it was my mother and I had our evening together after all . . . My mother’s apartment by candlelight was haven and home and shelter from everything in the world that seemed dangerous and a threat to my peace.  And my friend’s broken voice on the phone was a voice calling me out into that dangerous world not simply for his sake, as I suddenly saw it, but also for my sake.  The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle.  To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive . . . God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling.”

    The messianic age has begun.  The sun has risen high, high in the sky.  Jesus is out and about, calling, calling, calling us when we are minding our own business and often least expect it . . . calling us to turn, turn, turn when we maybe would rather not . . . and follow, follow, follow maybe to places we would rather not go. 

    May God continue to push and prod us, to surprise us and call us out of our apathy and into the light, for it is the only road worth traveling.  Amen.