Immediately...they followed (Matthew 4:12-23)

3rd Sunday after Epiphany - A
Matthew 4:12-23
January 23, 2011

Immediately...they followed

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

This is story that is familiar to the point of being a cliché. Maybe it was our Sunday School days and the songs we sang about being “fishers of men.” (This was in the days before we gained some appreciation for the power of gendered language, and rightly so.)

I remember that it was certainly expected that I, like Simon, Andrew, James and John, would want to engage in this “fishing for people.” At first I was looking for something literal and wondered what size hook and what sort of bait I was supposed to use. Later when I learned that my teachers had not meant this literally, I still wondered what it meant. If it meant finding people and bringing them into the church, I didn’t see a lot of that.

And in fact there hasn’t been a lot of that. The United Methodist Church and its forerunners have relied on birthrates to grow and sustain the church. We haven’t made any converts in significant numbers since the mid-1880’s. Birthrates aren’t what they used to be, either. I suspect that people would look askance if I were to answer the question, “How can we get more members?” by saying, “Have more children!” But that, in fact, is how we’ve been doing it for the last one hundred and twenty-five years.

We’ve come to assume that this story is about what my Sunday School teachers and the preachers I’ve heard during my lifetime have said it is about: getting more church members. But that is not what sticks out for me when I read it. What sticks out for me is some funny stuff going on with time.

A story gives us signals about time. When a story begins, “once upon a time in a far away kingdom,” or more recently, “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” we know that we are being invited into an imaginary time. Strange things can happen in that time, things we don’t expect to happen in ordinary life. When we hear the words, “and they all lived happily ever after,” we know for a certainty that this story is set in that imaginary time. We also know that the story’s end brings us back into regular time, the sort of time you can put on a time line. These words confine dragons and castles, heroes and princesses, within that imaginary time.

Matthew sets us up for his playing with time by the way he quotes Isaiah. The words he quotes are:
Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea,
across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned."

This is, more or less, Isaiah 9:1-2. Now Isaiah wrote this to announce the end of Assyrian rule and a renewal of the kingdom of Judah. Although he has something historical in mind, his language is vibrant enough that he tends to slip into the world of poetry and metaphor. As Isaiah’s words were treasured and pondered through the centuries these and others like them were thought to refer to the judgment of God on the nations and the good things that would happen to Judah when history was over. Now, of course, we’re playing with time. If history is made of stuff that happens in time, can it have an “after”? Is there an “after” outside of history?

What Matthew does with this text is to say that when Jesus found a place to stay in Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee, “light dawned on those who sat in the shadows of death.” An event that supposedly belonged to the “after” of history became in event in history. Confused? Well, in the words of the prophet of Mammon, “But wait, there’s more!”

Jesus begins to preach in the district of Galilee. Here is his message: “Repent [that is, reorient your life] for the kingdom [or empire] of the heavens [an indirect way of referring to God] has come near.”

“Has come near.” Now there is an odd phrase. The original word means “to approach or come near.” That’s not so hard. What puzzles is that the verb is in the perfect tense.

The perfect tense describes actions that are complete, done, finished.
—Have you done your reading assignment?
—I read the assignment.

That sounds like the assignment is done, but there is still some wiggle room. Let’s say the student in question had done some of the reading, but not all of it. Then it would still be true to say:
—I read the assignment.

The past tense by itself is not quite enough to answer the question without leaving some doubt. For that we need the perfect tense:
—I have read the assignment.

There. That’s a clear statement with no wiggle room. Of course, it may still be false, but that’s another matter.

So, here we have an event, an action in the perfect tense. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” So it has approached. That should be a completed action. But the action itself is not clear. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” So, is it here, has it arrived? The statement doesn’t say that exactly. Okay, so is it not here? No, the statement doesn’t say that, either. So is the kingdom of heaven here or not? Yes. Frustrated? “But wait, there’s even more!”

Jesus walks along the lake shore and sees two fishermen, Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the water. And Jesus says to them, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” And Simon and Andrew left their nets immediately and followed Jesus.

A little further along the shore, the three of them met Zebedee and his sons James and John. They were sitting in their boat mending their nets, something that needed to be done on a daily basis. Jesus summoned James and John who immediately left their boat and their father and followed Jesus.

Now, we know that Simon had a household to support, or at very least a mother-in-law. We know that James and John were part of the family business and that Zebedee would eventually need them for his support. We don’t know what all of Andrew’s obligations might have been, but as part of Simon’s extended family, he owed something to him. We don’t know either if this is the first time that these four had seen Jesus. Maybe they had met before. Maybe they had known each other for a long time. What we do know for certain is that they would not have been prepared for Jesus’ summons to them. And yet, they not only didn’t have to think it over or consult with their relations, but they respond immediately. Their decision took no time at all; there was no time between hearing Jesus’ summons and following him. Again, with the time thing! This time we have events in the ordinary world and in ordinary time that are affected by decisions that are made outside of time.

So where are we now? We have Isaiah’s poetic world that lies in the future after the future made present as Jesus signs a lease in Capernaum. We have the kingdom of heaven, God’s empire, which is both present and not present in such a way as to demand that we reorient our lives. Finally, we have fisherfolk deciding to become Jesus’ disciples and making the decision immediately, that is, in a way that is outside of time.

Well, now, how are we going to make sense of this? There are probably other ways, but here is one way. The world that we live in, the one where the ordinary stuff in our lives, is not as secure or stable as we usually think it is. Our world is porous and leaky. There are holes in it, cracks that let in something else. In Matthew, Jesus calls that something else “the kingdom of heaven.” It’s real, too, but the problem is that we have only the words from the ordinary world to describe this something else and the words don’t really fit. So we have to talk about the kingdom of heaven in metaphors and poetry instead. Every time we try to say something about it in plain ordinary language, we end up speaking against ourselves, one word crossing the next. Again, that our speech should become a series of crosses shouldn’t be too surprising.

We live in this world and cannot change that. But that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that “something else” keeps leaking into our world. And the most important things that happen to us and the most important things that we do are things that happen because of those “something else” leaks.

We decide to leave our nets and the family business to follow Jesus, just because he asks us to. A life-altering decision and it takes no time at all. When Simon, Andrew, James and John did it that even changed our lives. That’s because our world is leaky right around Jesus and something else leaks in.

A little water is poured on our foreheads and a few words are spoken. We don’t even remember them because we were too young to remember anything. But our lives were changed forever. That’s because our world is leaky right around the baptismal font and something else leaks in.
So the journey with Jesus begins with hearing a voice that resonates with “something else.” It goes on from there, Matthew tells us, to those who were suffering from “every disease and every sickness.” Now we are no longer surprised that this should be so, for it is through the broken places in our ordinary world that something else leaks in and God speaks. And this, in turn, is why Jesus wants us to stay close to the sick, to the hungry and thirsty, to prisoners and strangers. It is through the broken places of our reality that the reality of the kingdom of heaven comes pouring into our world.

Our world is leaky. “Something else” is leaking in. May it leak on us!

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.