William H. Willimon - "Fishing with Jesus" (January 24, 1999)
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| - | The gospel lesson comes from | 0:04 |
| the gospel of Saint Matthew, chapter four. | 0:05 | |
| Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested | 0:12 | |
| he withdrew to Galilee. | 0:15 | |
| He left Nazareth and made his home at Capernaum by the sea, | 0:17 | |
| in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, | 0:20 | |
| so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah | 0:23 | |
| might be fulfilled. | 0:26 | |
| Land of Zebulun, Land of Naphtali, | 0:28 | |
| on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, | 0:30 | |
| Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sat in darkness | 0:33 | |
| have seen a great light and for those who sat in the region | 0:37 | |
| and the shadow of death, light has dawned. | 0:41 | |
| From that time, Jesus began to proclaim, | 0:46 | |
| "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." | 0:49 | |
| As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, | 0:54 | |
| Simon, who was called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, | 0:57 | |
| casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen | 1:01 | |
| and Jesus said to them, | 1:05 | |
| "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." | 1:06 | |
| Immediately, they left their nets and followed him. | 1:11 | |
| As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, | 1:16 | |
| James son of Zebedee and his brother John | 1:20 | |
| in the boat with their father, mending their nets, | 1:22 | |
| and he called them. | 1:26 | |
| Immediately they left the boat | 1:28 | |
| and their father and followed him. | 1:30 | |
| Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in their synagogues | 1:35 | |
| and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom | 1:38 | |
| and curing every disease and every sickness | 1:41 | |
| among the people. | 1:44 | |
| This is the gospel of our lord. | 1:46 | |
| - | In today's gospel, Jesus begins his work | 1:56 |
| and how does he begin? | 2:00 | |
| By announcement. | 2:03 | |
| The kingdom of God has come near to you | 2:07 | |
| and then by invitation. | 2:11 | |
| Come, follow me. | 2:15 | |
| Good news begins with God | 2:18 | |
| and God's relentless determination to have us. | 2:23 | |
| You might think of the whole Bible as a long record | 2:28 | |
| of God's determination not to let us be. | 2:30 | |
| God comes to us. | 2:36 | |
| The kingdom of God has come near. | 2:37 | |
| The word good news is used here. | 2:43 | |
| You un galeon evangel. | 2:46 | |
| That's what evangel means, it means good news. | 2:51 | |
| It's news in that it's something that comes to us, | 2:54 | |
| rather than something that arises out of us | 2:59 | |
| and it is good because it's something that God does | 3:02 | |
| before we do anything. | 3:06 | |
| I think right here this is difficult for us, | 3:10 | |
| mainline American, do it yourself, Protestant types. | 3:12 | |
| 'Cause we often think of religion as something that we do. | 3:19 | |
| Church is where we come to get our assignment for the week. | 3:23 | |
| Work on your sexism, work on your racism, | 3:27 | |
| God has no hands but our hands, | 3:30 | |
| and so a lot of Protestant worship, | 3:32 | |
| a kind of suffocating moralism pervades. | 3:34 | |
| Where is the good news there? | 3:38 | |
| No, like those first disciples, | 3:41 | |
| we're here because we've been claimed | 3:47 | |
| because God has intruded into our lives and called us. | 3:48 | |
| It's not that we've reached out to God, | 3:54 | |
| it's that God in Christ reached out to us. | 3:56 | |
| This is Evangelism, enacting the evangel, the good news. | 4:01 | |
| And yet, if you look at our shrinking membership | 4:09 | |
| at most of our churches, | 4:11 | |
| a loss of an entire generation of youth, | 4:12 | |
| you would think that there's not much good news | 4:17 | |
| being done around here, among us. | 4:20 | |
| We've been poor Evangelists. | 4:24 | |
| Or to the point of today's gospel, we've been lousy fishing. | 4:27 | |
| Well we don't want to get lumped | 4:34 | |
| with all those tasteless Evangelicals, | 4:35 | |
| and we're shy and we're introspective. | 4:38 | |
| We're not too pushy, | 4:41 | |
| we're unwilling to say too much about our faith to others. | 4:42 | |
| Religion is a private matter, we say. | 4:49 | |
| But mostly I think we suffer from a kind of limp theology | 4:54 | |
| of good news, which makes us lousy Evangelists. | 4:58 | |
| You notice that Jesus said, | 5:04 | |
| "If you follow me, I'll teach you to catch people." | 5:06 | |
| Obviously catching people is not something | 5:11 | |
| that comes naturally, | 5:13 | |
| it's something that's gotta be taught to us by Jesus. | 5:15 | |
| I want to teach you something about Evangelism this morning. | 5:19 | |
| Luther spoke of the gospel as the external word, | 5:24 | |
| that which comes to us from the outside, | 5:29 | |
| that which comes to us, | 5:32 | |
| rather than something derived from within us. | 5:34 | |
| Jesus. | 5:40 | |
| You can see it in today's gospel. | 5:41 | |
| Intruding, reaching toward these people, | 5:44 | |
| speaking to them, calling to them to follow him. | 5:48 | |
| We all know people who have certain vague inclinations, | 5:53 | |
| which they label as spiritual. | 5:58 | |
| Someone was saying the media today, | 6:01 | |
| "I'm a very, I don't go to church. | 6:02 | |
| "I don't practice any one religion, but I'm very spiritual." | 6:04 | |
| But that isn't the same thing as the good news in Jesus. | 6:10 | |
| Christians are those who believe that in the good news | 6:17 | |
| gospel proclamation of the life and death and words | 6:21 | |
| and work and resurrection of Jesus, | 6:25 | |
| we have seen the normative, distinctive path to God. | 6:29 | |
| Paul says, "Faith, the Christian faith, | 6:36 | |
| "it comes from hearing. | 6:40 | |
| "It comes from preaching Christ." | 6:42 | |
| And maybe some religions that come to you | 6:45 | |
| when you're having a long walk in the woods | 6:49 | |
| or you're pondering your psyche alone in your room | 6:51 | |
| or your lying on your back and staring up into the stars, | 6:54 | |
| but look, Christianity isn't one of those religions. | 7:01 | |
| Here's a faith that comes to us from the outside, | 7:05 | |
| by hearing something we wouldn't have heard, | 7:09 | |
| we wouldn't have known had not somebody come | 7:12 | |
| and spoken it to us. | 7:14 | |
| Theologian Karl Bark says this is the main difference | 7:18 | |
| between a Christian and a non-Christian. | 7:22 | |
| The main difference, Bark said, is a noetic difference, | 7:25 | |
| that is, Christians are not necessarily better people | 7:30 | |
| than non-Christians and we're certainly not smarter, | 7:32 | |
| it's just we're simply those who've heard something, | 7:36 | |
| whereas non-Christians have not heard. | 7:40 | |
| As Isaiah says, "Light has come into our darkness." | 7:44 | |
| It's like a dawn has come into our lives, | 7:48 | |
| light not of our devising and that makes us just see | 7:51 | |
| the whole world differently. | 7:54 | |
| It makes us long to share that light with everybody else | 7:58 | |
| whom we care about. | 8:02 | |
| That's Evangelism. | 8:05 | |
| Just telling somebody what you've heard. | 8:07 | |
| Last summer I was speaking up in Canada and somebody said, | 8:13 | |
| "Do you really think that we Christians ought to try | 8:19 | |
| "to, like, convert people to Christianity?" | 8:21 | |
| And I said, "Sure, go ahead, give it a try. | 8:27 | |
| "You're United Church in Canada so it probably won't work, | 8:31 | |
| "but hey, go ahead, go for it. | 8:34 | |
| "You put your stuff on the table and see what happens." | 8:38 | |
| Well the group clearly didn't like what I said | 8:43 | |
| and they didn't like it. | 8:47 | |
| Of course, I didn't quote today's gospel about fishing | 8:49 | |
| and catching but they said I sounded arrogant. | 8:52 | |
| I sounded culturally imperialist, exclusivistic, | 8:57 | |
| at my suggestion that Christians learn | 9:01 | |
| the business of going out and catching other Christians, | 9:03 | |
| but would you please note the assumption | 9:09 | |
| behind the question. | 9:11 | |
| Ought we try to convert people to Christianity? | 9:13 | |
| Shouldn't we obey Jesus and go out | 9:18 | |
| and try to do some fishing and try to catch some people? | 9:20 | |
| Behind this question I find an assumption and the assumption | 9:24 | |
| is you got these nice, innocent, virginal, untainted, | 9:28 | |
| North Americans wandering around and then you've got these | 9:32 | |
| pushy arm-twisting Christians who always want | 9:35 | |
| to corral and convert everybody, | 9:38 | |
| want to put the squeeze on people with our narrow, | 9:40 | |
| culturally bound, exclusivistic, | 9:44 | |
| culturally conditioned point of view. | 9:47 | |
| Yet truly one thing we've learned around here | 9:51 | |
| with our critical and post-critical studies | 9:52 | |
| is that, hey, everybody's got a point of view, | 9:55 | |
| everybody stands somewhere, | 9:59 | |
| everybody has been, | 10:01 | |
| if you will, | 10:05 | |
| baptized into something. | 10:06 | |
| It may be that culture that we celebrate | 10:10 | |
| and I intend to inculcate here | 10:13 | |
| at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning, | 10:15 | |
| or it may be the more officially, sanctioned, | 10:18 | |
| administratively-approved culture of consumerism, | 10:20 | |
| the culture of the modern state | 10:25 | |
| of whatever lords have their way with us. | 10:28 | |
| But be well assured, | 10:33 | |
| everybody's been converted into something | 10:34 | |
| or in the words of the great theologian Bob Dylan, | 10:38 | |
| "Everybody serves somebody." | 10:41 | |
| So, the issue is not, | 10:44 | |
| will I be converted into some culture, | 10:46 | |
| will I be caught by some point of view, | 10:49 | |
| but rather, the question is, | 10:54 | |
| which pushy, arm-twisting culture | 10:56 | |
| is going to have it's way with my life? | 11:00 | |
| That's the question. | 11:04 | |
| I told my Canadian friends, | 11:07 | |
| I don't know why we should abandon everybody in Canada | 11:10 | |
| to the clutches of late 20th Century, | 11:12 | |
| North American capitalism. | 11:14 | |
| Why should Jesus defer to that? | 11:16 | |
| Let's go ahead, let's put our stuff on the table, | 11:20 | |
| let's argue, demonstrate that Jesus really does have | 11:23 | |
| the capacity to make human beings more interesting | 11:27 | |
| than the Spice Girls. | 11:29 | |
| Let's see. | 11:31 | |
| Let's go ahead and see who's left standing | 11:32 | |
| at the end of the discussion. | 11:35 | |
| See our problem with catching a few more fish for Jesus | 11:38 | |
| is not that we're so respectful of other cultures, | 11:42 | |
| we're so open-minded and pluralistic. | 11:45 | |
| Our real Evangelistic good news problem | 11:49 | |
| is that we find it very difficult to imagine | 11:53 | |
| that any culture is more powerful | 11:56 | |
| than that culture sanctioned by the Pentagon, | 12:00 | |
| the White House, Amway, and Toys"R"Us. | 12:03 | |
| That's a problem. | 12:07 | |
| It isn't claimed that of the Christian faith, | 12:11 | |
| call it arrogant if you will, | 12:13 | |
| it's a claim that all these other cultures | 12:16 | |
| have been conquered, are being overcome in baptism. | 12:18 | |
| The biggest adversary for the Christian gospel | 12:24 | |
| is not that so many people around here | 12:27 | |
| are skeptical, critical, intellectuals. | 12:29 | |
| The biggest problem is that so much of us are rich, | 12:33 | |
| whereas the gospel tends to tilt toward the poor | 12:36 | |
| and the dispossessed. | 12:39 | |
| A lot of us are here because we're either powerful | 12:41 | |
| or we plan one day when we grow up to be powerful, | 12:43 | |
| but the gospel tends to be about the powerless. | 12:48 | |
| I'm just saying the gospel is going to feel a bit abrasive | 12:53 | |
| toward those cultural expressions which have us enslaved | 12:57 | |
| and through which we have vainly tried to find some meaning. | 13:03 | |
| The good news of Jesus has been in conflict | 13:10 | |
| with every culture in which it's found itself, | 13:14 | |
| including the very first culture in which it found itself. | 13:18 | |
| In just about six weeks or so, | 13:23 | |
| we're gonna see where all this open-handed, | 13:25 | |
| invitational fishing got Jesus and his followers | 13:27 | |
| as we go up a place called Golgotha, to a cross. | 13:33 | |
| I remember when I came here to the university, | 13:39 | |
| somebody wanted a rule that nobody | 13:41 | |
| could proselyte anybody else on campus | 13:44 | |
| for his or her religion, | 13:47 | |
| that way we wouldn't have any problem | 13:49 | |
| with all you pushy, conflicted, religious people. | 13:51 | |
| If we could just stop these religious people | 13:55 | |
| and their efforts to put the make on everybody | 13:57 | |
| then, see, no problem with religion on campus. | 13:59 | |
| I remember one of the campus ministries said, | 14:04 | |
| "Hey, this is a university. | 14:07 | |
| "Everybody's in the proselyting business here." | 14:11 | |
| Everybody's trying to put the make on everybody else | 14:15 | |
| and I'm not just talking about zealots and women's studies | 14:18 | |
| or in botany or fu qua. | 14:20 | |
| It's all conversion. | 14:23 | |
| It's all, hey kid, come over here | 14:24 | |
| and let me put the make on you. | 14:27 | |
| Let me have your life. | 14:28 | |
| Let me change it. | 14:29 | |
| Let me tell you about something | 14:30 | |
| they wouldn't tell you about in Des Moines. | 14:31 | |
| Let me change your whole. | 14:32 | |
| Let me get you. | 14:35 | |
| It's biology. | 14:36 | |
| Well, it's all conversion, baptism, | 14:39 | |
| persuasion, enlightenment. | 14:42 | |
| And why should Christians or Muslims be excluded | 14:46 | |
| from all the transformative fun? | 14:50 | |
| It's all metamorphosis here. | 14:53 | |
| It's just not good enough to say, well look, | 14:57 | |
| all religions are saying fairly much the same thing | 15:01 | |
| and they're all just different paths to the same place. | 15:06 | |
| No. | 15:11 | |
| Any religion I've ever heard about | 15:12 | |
| does actually claim to be true. | 15:14 | |
| You can't say something like, well all faiths say fairly | 15:17 | |
| much the same thing and be fair to different faiths. | 15:21 | |
| There's just no way for religions | 15:28 | |
| to avoid bumping up against each other | 15:29 | |
| by denying or suppressing our true differences. | 15:31 | |
| Sure, we Christians ought to repent | 15:37 | |
| of past unfaithful attempts to coerce people | 15:40 | |
| into believing in Jesus. | 15:43 | |
| We're not permitted to coerce people, | 15:46 | |
| not because we believe in some kind of limp tolerance, | 15:50 | |
| but rather because Jesus doesn't permit us | 15:54 | |
| coercion or violence. | 15:56 | |
| The only way Jesus permits us to do our fishing | 15:59 | |
| is through proclamation and persuasion | 16:03 | |
| and argument and witness. | 16:06 | |
| However, it's the nature of any good news you get, | 16:10 | |
| whether it's the good news about the Republican party | 16:14 | |
| or botany or Jesus Christ, | 16:18 | |
| to want to share that news with people that you care about | 16:23 | |
| and it's the nature of this good news to make you care about | 16:27 | |
| people who aren't even your friends or family. | 16:32 | |
| We want to share what we've heard | 16:36 | |
| with anybody who will listen. | 16:39 | |
| As Christians, we ought to be intensely curious | 16:42 | |
| about the fates of others. | 16:45 | |
| We ought to listen, | 16:47 | |
| both in order to understand our neighbors better | 16:49 | |
| and also to understand our faith better. | 16:53 | |
| However, at some point, we do long for the opportunity | 16:56 | |
| to witness, to show in word and in deed | 17:00 | |
| that the truth we have found, | 17:06 | |
| or more proper to today's scripture, | 17:10 | |
| the truth that has found us in Jesus Christ. | 17:13 | |
| I challenge you this week to do a little fishing. | 17:19 | |
| To attempt to share your faith, maybe even using words, | 17:24 | |
| with one person whom you know. | 17:27 | |
| Try to express why you're here. | 17:30 | |
| Invite somebody to come here next Sunday, | 17:34 | |
| when we have a really good sermon. | 17:37 | |
| Do one visible act of Christian charity to somebody in need | 17:40 | |
| and do it in the name of Christ and see what you catch. | 17:46 | |
| In just a few moments, | 17:53 | |
| you're going to assume the proper position of a Christian, | 17:55 | |
| you come to the table and your hands | 18:00 | |
| are empty and outstretched. | 18:02 | |
| You'll be given a gift, | 18:05 | |
| the body and blood of Christ. | 18:08 | |
| You'll receive that and then having received | 18:10 | |
| and having been nourished, | 18:14 | |
| you're to go forth as light to a world in darkness, | 18:15 | |
| as a word to speak amid the world's silence, | 18:21 | |
| that word is Jesus Christ, | 18:27 | |
| that name to us above every other name, | 18:29 | |
| that lord who began his work | 18:36 | |
| by first calling ordinary people like us | 18:41 | |
| to be the vanguard of the good news | 18:47 | |
| that God is among us and is determined | 18:50 | |
| to have his way with us. | 18:54 | |
| Amen. | 18:57 |
