About a month ago, I attended the Opening Convocation ceremony at Georgetown University, where my son Liam has begun his first year, and which was the last moment to which parents were welcome as part of the First-Year Orientation. Most universities have an Opening Convocation of some kind to welcome new students into the school with some kind of ritual act. At Georgetown the students were permitted to put on academic gowns, ritually signifying they were now part of the higher learning community.
And then the speeches began. They were quite good, actually:
the university president, in particular, was very inspiring about the long and lofty history of service to this country that Georgetown embodies. He talked about the values that Georgetown cultivates and expects in its students as an institution of Jesuit education. And, of course, he talked about how the students gathered there that day are the “followers of tomorrow,” the people who will do what they are told by others to combat the challenges of our day and build a better world for tomorrow.
No, I’m just kidding, he didn’t say that. Can you imagine? At a Convocation of students who have spent years toiling to stand out academically, studying to excel on standardized tests, devoting themselves to choosing sports and clubs and activities through which to showcase their leadership skills, all to be able to go to a school of their choice that will help make them into leaders of tomorrow, only to be told that they came somewhere that’s going to help them be the best follower they can be? We value leaders, not followers. Nobody wants to be a follower after all that. Nobody wants to pay the kind of money that colleges charge these days in order to have their kid shaped into a follower.
Which is why it’s so important for us to accept and deal with the fact that Jesus does not call his disciples to be leaders, but followers. “Follow me, and I shall make you fish for people,” he says. Many Christians, especially in recent centuries, have reduced the power of that invitation down to a transactional and even manipulative understanding of evangelism: “follow me, and I will teach you how to catch others in the nets of the Gospel and we can add them to our great haul of souls being saved.” Now first, that’s a terrible (not to mention un-Biblical) metaphor for evangelism.
After all, if it’s good news, which is what the word “gospel” literally means, you don’t need to trick people with bait to get them to swallow it, or snatch them in nets to make them a part of it when they were just swimming along minding their own business. But second, that impoverished reading of this passage misses what Jesus is really inviting them to do.
Yes, they are fishermen, but that doesn’t mean they love doing it. More than a few of us right here have stayed longer than we should have in jobs that we didn’t like or were even actively problematic for us. Why? Because we felt like we didn’t have other immediate better options. Maybe the risk of leaving was too great. Maybe we couldn’t imagine being able to do much else and we might as well stick with what we know. Maybe we were just so beaten down that we couldn’t summon the energy for a change. Maybe our commitments to our family overrode our personal desires.
All those things could and would have been in play for these first-century fishermen, as well. But on top of all that, the Sea of Galilee was claimed by the Empire, which means that it, and everything in it, belonged to the Emperor. So while fishing was never a lucrative profession, it was almost impossible to stay economically afloat under the Roman occupation, after you paid all the taxes and fees on your boat and your catch. But it was equally as difficult to switch to something else, and just as likely that, in the end, it’s the Romans walking away with most of the rewards.
So when Jesus comes along saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of God has come near,” and “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people,” they drop their nets immediately and go not out of great faith nor blind obedience but out of great hope that maybe all this, all of this, was about to change, that Jesus was at the center of that change and was pulling a movement of people together to accomplish it, and that they would get to play some part in it, too. The change is not a sacrifice for them; it is a gift: a gift with the possibility of changing the world for the better, to feel the freedom and hope of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus is not simply proclaiming, but inaugurating: the kingdom of heaven is not simply “coming,” but has already “come near.” That is what drives the urgency of both repentance and following him.
“Repent” is one the words I always feel like we need to de-mystify. It is one of the churchiest words I can think of, but the word simply means “to change one’s mind or purpose.” I don’t know about you, but I have been urged to repent by Google Maps or Waze because I turned in the wrong direction to start my trip. “Repent!” it screamed once, “and believe the good news: go left onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike South, and D’Alessandro’s Cheesesteaks is 58.2 miles away.” (It did not offer an opinion on whether they sell the best cheesesteaks in Philadelphia, so if you’re sticking around for the sermon response after worship, try not to get drawn into that debate, because we do have to close the building at some point today.) I mean, they don’t literally say “repent,” but that’s what they mean: to change your purpose, to turn away from the direction in which you’ve been going and aim for something new.
The question is: what new purpose or direction should we pursue once we agree to repent? Repentance is no easy thing, even without all the layers of churchy baggage, there’s a lot of inertia holding us to our existing purpose and direction, so if we’re going to change, we want to know what we’re changing to and what the benefits are of changing, right? Which brings us back to Jesus’ invitation to these disciples comes in: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” The disciples are invited to follow, not lead, which is a letdown, a threat, and a promise all in one when you think about it.
It’s a letdown because we are so conditioned to value the act of leading. Jesus’ disciples, including you and I, are not called to lead; we are called to follow Jesus where he goes, and why he goes, and how he goes as he gets there. And following inevitably means leaving the familiar, which is a challenge even when we’re not particularly excited about the familiar, because at least it’s familiar; we know how to manage it. But you can’t follow and stay put, much less go back; you have to choose.
And that is both a threat and a promise because even though it requires us to move forward and leave behind what is familiar, it also frees us from the burdens of the familiar without requiring us to figure out where we’re going all on our own. That in itself can feel like a threat: we’re supposed to go forward without knowing which way to choose, or how long it will take? Well… yes. Because the promise is that good.
When Jesus says, “follow me,” the disciples have no idea where he’s leading them; they only know that he’s offering them a chance to do something that really matters: not fishing to eke out a subsistence living every day under the control of the Empire, but to fish for people, to pull people out from the clutches of the Empire and a life of meaningless toil and free them for something new: life in the kingdom of heaven that is not awaiting them with pie in the sky, by and by, but has come near and is even now tearing into the fabric of this world to plant itself and supplant everything that opposes it. If ever there was a chance to change one’s purpose, to be part of something transformative and extraordinary, this is it.
In the now-classic film, Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays Will, a working class young man from South Boston who spends his days toiling as a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his nights carousing with his friends. He also happens to be an unmitigated genius who solves an “unsolvable” mathematical problem that one of the MIT professors puts up for his students, which puts him on a course to make a huge decision: whether to leave behind his friends and all he has known to pursue a life that harnesses his unique gifts, or stay in the comfortable familiarity of his current circumstances.
Late in the film, Will is talking to Chuckie, his lifelong best friend, over a couple of beers in the midst of a building demolition job that Chuckie is working. Chuckie asks him about the jobs that have been thrown Will’s way by those who have recognized his unique talents, but Will dismisses them as boring. Chuckie says that he could probably make good money with them, and that it’s at least a way out of here, gesturing at the demolished building site around them. Will responds, and I’m not going to attempt a Boston accent, which would offend anybody here from Boston, nor use the exact Boston “vocabulary” from the film, which would probably offend everybody else. But more or less, the conversation goes like this. “What do I want a way out of here for?” Will asks. “I’m going to live here the rest of my life. You know, be neighbors, have little kids, take ‘em to Little League together…”
Chuckie considers that for a moment and says, “Look, you’re my best friend, so don’t take this the wrong way, but if in twenty years you’re still living here, coming over to my house to watch the Patriots, still working places like this, I’ll kill you.” Will begins to protest, complaining how everyone tells him he owes it to himself to do this, and what if he doesn’t want to?
Chuckie interrupts. “You don’t owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. Because tomorrow I’m going to wake up and I’ll be 50, and I’ll still be doing this. And that’s all right, that’s fine; but you’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket, and you’re too scared to cash it in. Because I’d do anything to have what you got. And so would any of these guys. It’d be an insult if you’re still here in 20 years. Hanging around here is a waste of your time.” “You don’t know that,” Will counters, but for the first time you can see fear and doubt in his eyes. “Oh, I don’t know that?”
Chuckie responds. “Let me tell you what I know. Every day I come by my house and I pick you up. We go out, we have a few drinks, a few laughs, and it’s great. You know what the best part of my day is? For about ten seconds, from when I pull up to the curb to when I get to your door. ‘Cause I think maybe I’ll get up there and knock on your door, and you won’t be there. No goodbye, no see you later, no nothin’. You just left.” Chuckie takes a swig of his beer and looks at Will. “I don’t know much; but I know that.”
That is what Jesus is offering these fishermen when he invites them to turn and follow, to follow him and learn to fish for people. That’s what Jesus is offering you and I as individuals. And that’s certainly what Jesus is offering us as a congregation of Jesus’ disciples: a chance to be both disrupted and disruptive, to have our lives changed and our purpose reoriented, not for the sake of that disruption itself but because that is necessary if we are to turn and be part of building the kingdom of heaven that has already come near, which always requires us to get up and move away from what we have known and move towards what God intends for there to be. And the good news is that we don’t have to find the way, because the way has already found us: “I am the Way,” Jesus says elsewhere, and he means it. What we have to do is listen, and watch, and perceive where Jesus is already going, and follow him as he goes.
That’s hardly easy in itself. Partially because we always have to fight the temptation of supplanting Jesus as the leader and making our own decisions about what is good or right or effective for us to do, which often leads us in very different directions from the one that Jesus takes, and using very different paths than the ones Jesus uses. But also because we have to accept that we are not always going to know where Jesus is leading us, and that’s both unfamiliar and therefore frightening for so many of us who are used to thinking we know exactly where we’re going and how and when we will get there.
And yet, if we are willing to follow, we will always find signs, if not signposts, that we’re going the right way: glimpses of God’s kingdom breaking into the world around us, and opportunities to help more to flower and bear fruit as we go: planting seeds here, pulling weeds there, harvesting fruit here, transplanting saplings there, as the fullness of God’s kingdom continues to take root, and grow, and flourish.
As we continue to consider what it means to have an “Off-Road Faith” in the coming weeks, we’ll explore ways in which we can be attentive and responsive to those signs and opportunities as we go. But for now, I want to leave you with this. I am convinced that we are in a unique season of opportunity, and discernment, and decision as a congregation right now. I am convinced that Jesus is inviting us to follow him in a new direction, one that involves change and yes, disruption, but also extraordinary possibilities and opportunities to draw ever more closely to Christ’s presence and purpose and to be a blessing in this city and in this world.
So: where are you seeing signs of those possibilities and opportunities, even if they are just small green buds pushing through the soil? What gives you pause about turning and following, and what gives you hope? And most importantly: what first steps do you think Jesus may be calling you, calling us, to take as we turn and follow him anew? Our answers to those questions will not tell us everything, but they will tell us enough, enough to take the next steps forward where Jesus is going, which is all that following is in the end.