Matthew 4:12-23
Picture this…eight days, four people, stuffed into a small rental car, traveling on narrow, winding roads through the foothills to the Alps.
I start today with this story. In the fall of 1992, I took a trip with my parents to Switzerland. Our lives were in this unsettled, liminal kind of time. We had just lost my sister after a long and tragic illness. My father had recently retired. My parents had sold their home in New Jersey and returned to my mother’s childhood home, Vermont. I had ended a brief and unfortunate marriage. We were a bit of a mess…devastated, exhausted, grieving, relieved, all of the above. There’s a technical term for this…I believe it’s called “hot mess.” We were a “hot mess.”
And I said to my parents…let’s just get out of town. Let’s get on a plane and visit our dear friend, Anne Marie, in Switzerland. Anne Marie and my mother had been pen pals as young girls…my mother in Vermont, Anne Marie in Switzerland. They had remained friends their whole lives and I had grown up with the presence of this Swiss family…exchanging gifts at Christmas, remembering each other’s birthdays.
Mom and Anne Marie had finally met face to face in 1971 when Dad took Mom with him on one of his business trips to Europe. Then I spent a summer with Anne Marie’s family when I was 16, which inspired me to major in German in college. Then during my junior year abroad, I spent holidays with Anne Marie’s family. She was like a second mother to me.
So anyway, that’s the backstory. What I really wanted to tell you about is the way my father drove our rental car in Switzerland on that trip, and about the way Anne Marie, always sitting in the back seat and giving us directions, would drive me absolutely nuts. As much as I loved them both, they both made me nuts.
My dad drove through Switzerland on that trip like a crazy man. He didn’t speak German, so he depended on me to be the navigator with street signs and speed limits and that sort of thing. Anne Marie, of course, always knew the short cuts and back roads. And she was sort of cranky about the speed limits, mumbling the speed limit under her breath if Dad was driving too fast (funf und fiersig, funf und fiersig, 55, 55, 55). Driving, the four us—Mom and Anne Marie in the back seat, Dad and I in the front, in this tiny little rental car, zooming around Switzerland, it was a crazy, wonderful, hysterical time. But what I’ll always remember most are her words. Instead of saying, “go straight here,” she’d always say, “Follow, follow, follow…!”
“Follow, follow, follow…”
I spent some time this week thinking about the word “follow,” and our understanding of the scripture text we read this morning from the Gospel of Matthew. In one of the first chapters of Jesus’ ministry, we hear about the moment when he began to call those who would walk with him, the four fishermen, two sets of brothers, from the shores of the Sea of Galilee. And we learn that at his call, they dropped everything—left their work and their families and their homes—to become his disciples and follow him. They must have known their following would come at a cost.
What does it mean to “follow” in that way? It always seems rather breathtaking to me. I mean, the dropping everything to follow. I always wonder about the conversations with their loved ones, about the fishing business they were running…what happened to all of those things? What did their loved ones say? What did they think? How hard was that, do you think?
So this notion of “following,” clearly it was something more than just frantically getting directions on a trip through the countryside. Or even, “do what I say,” like children playing a game of Simon Says. The Greek word used here has more of sense of urgency, more like… “Hey, come on!”
Jesus didn’t want people to just listen and believe in him from a distance. He was inviting people to come close, to join him, to get involved and actively help him with his mission. He wanted people to be vitally engaged with him in both learning and doing the work of the gospel. Jesus is still inviting people to be his disciples and to personally join him, learn from him, and help him in gospel ministry. There is nothing passive about being a true follower of Jesus Christ.”[1]
Most of us would say we consider ourselves to be followers of Jesus Christ and, together, we all strive to be good disciples, listening for God’s call in and responding in faithful ways. Speaking for myself, anyway, I like to think that I’ve done a reasonably good job of living my life as a faithful person. In other words, many of us I suspect feel that we do a good job of following Christ. We’re not perfect, but we try. Most of us would even say we do it because we want to…we genuinely want to follow in the steps of Jesus.
How are we following, I wonder? Are we just “tagging along,” listening to the voice in the backseat on this crazy journey through life? That’s good, that’s helpful, we all need directions, that’s for sure!
But that doesn’t seem to be the kind of inspirational “following” that would lead someone to drop what they are doing and leave their comfortable lives, do you think? The kind of invitation that Jesus extended to his disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee was not a call to have an intellectual experience, or be a bystander, engaging only at arm’s length, or beckoning them to “discipleship at a distance”.
No…”Hey! Come on!” was a call to Folloa full-body experience! Following and spreading the Gospel message involves not just taking a turn on the road ahead, but making a radical change in your life’s direction and your actions. It involves commitment, putting something down in order that your hands and heart be free to take up something new. It means making a change in the very shape of your heart and soul that shapes your words and actions in a radically different way.
So what does “following” look like for folks like us? I think there are as many ways as there are followers…
It could mean a radical change in your life, like the disciples by the Sea of Galilee who dropped their nets and committed to a new vocation.
Or it might be seeing an unmet need and reaching out to help. It could be doing a tedious job as best we can to support others. It might be finding new ways to be generous with our time and our treasures.
It might be pausing in the midst of our busy lives to listen to those around us in order to respond with encouragement and compassion. It could be caring for an aging parent, or a child with special needs, or a stranger who is in need.
“Following” means acknowledging and embracing that discipleship comes at a cost to our comfortable selves as we dig into our hearts to find tenacity, empathy, patience, courage, selflessness.
As a congregation, it might mean journeying into radically uncharted territory, having the courage to look outside our walls, and our comfortable familiar ways, to find new ways of being “church” together. The disciples dropped their nets to join Jesus in his ministry, not knowing what lay ahead, but faithfully following, accompanying, assisting him into the unknown.
In this book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, theologian and physician Albert Schweitzer wrestles with separating the “real” or “historical” Jesus from the “Christ of faith.” He comes to understand that we can come to know Christ Jesus fully, authentically, actively only by following him.
As he writes, “(Jesus) comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.
“He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”
Or, as my dear Swiss friend, Anne Marie
once said, “Follow, follow, follow.” May it be so for all of us. Amen.
[1] http://margmowczko.com/a-look-at-the-word-follow-akoloutheo/