University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

LIFE COMES AT YOU FAST

Matthew 4:12-23

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time January 27, 2008

            The folks at Nationwide Insurance have had a clever advertising campaign running over the last year or so.  Their ads have featured different characters and different contexts, but they all have ended with a single punch line: “Life comes at you fast”… the implication being that it’s good to be prepared… and to buy their coverage.

            One of last year’s ads focused on a man driving a car and following the instructions of the automated voice on his car’s GPS system. It’s a pleasant drive and gives the impression that it is an ad for such a global positioning aids… until the man hears the prompt to “Turn right now” and does… and ends up driving right through the front window of a local bakery. “Life comes at you fast,” says the ad.

            Or a new one that made me laugh out loud: a young couple watching a basketball game on television, a warm fire in the fireplace behind them. Except for the game, it’s a pretty romantic setting.  The phone rings and the young man gets up to answer it. Taking advantage of his absence to try to change the channel, the young woman picks up the remote… but she picks up the wrong remote. She points it toward the TV and presses it several times, but nothing seems to happen, at least nothing seems to happen to the TV, so she shrugs her shoulders and puts it down; but the viewer realizes that she has picked up the remote for the gas logs in the fireplace behind her, and with each press of the remote, the fire increases in size, until it finally engulfs the wall and the painting above the mantle, as the voice says again, “Life comes at you fast.”

What makes the ads effective, I suppose, is the nod of assent all of us give to the premise. Life does come at us fast sometimes. It comes at us fast in the normal course of events, but especially so in times when the unexpected happens… accidents... sudden illnesses… hard choices.   We all know, too, that while insurance may help some with the financial implications of such surprises, all the insurance in the world cannot ease the pain, slow the course, or help us to make the most difficult choices.  Life comes at you fast, indeed.  Sometimes we’re left simply stunned in the face of it all.

            I think of how stunned Zebedee must have been on that particular day in his otherwise monotonous and slow-paced life, a life in which the only things that ever came at him fast in his little fishing business were summer squalls on the Sea of Galilee.  In today’s scripture reading from Matthew’s Gospel, though, the storm that arrives has nothing to do with the weather.

Each day Andrew and Simon, James and John wake before dawn, walk down to the sea, unroll their fishing nets and try their luck. This was their routine. Yet when Jesus calls, their lives are changed in an instant. “Follow me,” Jesus says, “and I will make you fishers of people.” With [only] a few words they are his. Then Jesus sets his sights on [Zebedee’s boys,] James and John, and they leave their boat, and everything that goes with it, behind them. In the blink of an eye, they are by Jesus’ side, wide-eyed and dripping wet from the Sea of Galilee. G. K. Chesterton may have had such moments in mind when he wrote, “An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose.” Perhaps this is why everything happens so fast in this passage. [Those boys can hardly] wait for the adventure to begin.[1]

Jesus comes with an announcement – “the kingdom of heaven has come near” – and with a demand – “follow me.” The kind of discipleship to which Jesus called these fishermen was not like any other master-disciple relationships of the time. One scholar notes that in those days a disciple chose his own master, and his first commitment was to the Torah, the Law. Consequently, the disciple could shift from one master to another to acquire more knowledge of the law.

By contrast, Jesus does not wait for volunteers but selects his own disciples and confronts them with an unconditional demand. He requires absolute allegiance to himself, not merely respectful service. He does not call them to be his apprentices in the intellectual probing of Torah or to rehearse venerable religious traditions. He calls fishermen to a new kind of fishing: they are “to fish for people….”[2] 

Here Jesus comes with a word that is more than invitation, more than the offer of a choice. In our age saturated with consumer choice, Jesus’ words seem strange to us, indeed, for he speaks not an invitation, but a command. They didn’t choose him; he chose them. “Follow me,” he says. And at his word, they did.

            Sometimes, life really does come at you fast. Before Zebedee can so much as say a word, his sons are hooked and his little fishing business is forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after his two sons drop everything – including the family business and life as they have known it – to follow Jesus.

“Repent,” says Jesus, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” “Follow me,” he says. Life… and life’s choices… come at you fast.  Repent, he said. Follow me.

Looking at those two commands, Tom Long argues that Jesus is not so much asking for a change of direction in this case as he is a change of citizenship.  If you belong to the kingdom of heaven, you simply will not act in the same way, simply will not cling to all the securities the world clings to, simply will not buy into all the popular assumptions. If you belong to the kingdom of heaven, life takes on a new urgency and a new clarity… and a whole new frame of mind.  Jesus commands us to follow, says Long, to change our loyalties, to realign our citizenship.[3]  

Does this mean that Jesus calls into question our family ties and creates conflicts with our occupations? In a sense, yes. The kingdom of heaven doesn’t exist to serve the family; the family exists to serve the kingdom of heaven. The goal of the kingdom is not to serve us in being more effective and productive in our jobs. Our work is truly effective when [through it we demonstrate the gracious] will of God. The patterns of our lives are not made secure by the kingdom of heaven; the kingdom of heaven rearranges [those patterns] into a new design of God’s own making.

In these stories of the calling of the [fishermen], then, Jesus disrupts family structures and disturbs patterns of working and living. He does so, however, not to destroy but to renew. Peter and Andrew do not cease being brothers; they are now brothers [with Christ]. James and John do not cease being sons; they are now not only the children of Zebedee but also the children of God.[4]

Do you remember what we say when we baptize a child in the life of University Church?  Among all the other words we always include in some way the reminder that the child is no longer simply his/her parents’ child, but is now our child… and, of course,  a child of God. “See what love God has given us,” we say, “that we should become children of God.”

The good news for the parents of such children (which ultimately was the good news for Zebedee as well) is that we don’t lose our children… rather we gain a community.  We gain the church.  We gain an extended family bound together by a remarkable love and graciousness.  This is the reality to which we point, about which we testify. But the baptism of a child is also a radical claim and a bold promise that parents and the congregation make, for the claim of Christ is a claim of priority, of loyalty, of citizenship, as we are invited… indeed commanded … to live life in service of the realm of heaven. And it puts all other claims on us in their proper place. It forces us to assess what is truly most important.

            Fred Craddock tells the story of a former classmate and missionary, Glenn Adsit, who tried to live such claims during his service in China. But the Chinese authorities did not take his work lightly or appreciatively. He and his family felt the force of the Chinese authorities, who make it hard for him to work, hard to share the faith he had been called to share.

He was under house arrest in China when the soldiers came one day and said, “You can return to America.”

They were celebrating, and the soldiers said, “You can take two hundred pounds with you.”

Well, they’d been there for years. Two hundred pounds. They got the scales and started the family arguments: [Four of them] Must have this vase. Well, this is a new typewriter. What about my books? What about this? And they weighed everything and took it off and weighed this and, finally, right on the dot, two hundred pounds.

The soldier asked, “Ready to go?”

“Yes.”

“Did you weigh everything?”

“Yes.”

“You weighed the kids?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Weigh the kids.”

And in a moment, typewriter and vase and all became trash. Trash. It happens.[5]

Sometimes choices have to be made in a hurry regarding matters of ultimate consequence.  I’m not suggesting that the call of Jesus to drop everything and follow is comparable to the forcible downsizing demanded by the Chinese army, though his call is surely more command than invitation. No, what strikes me in this morning’s story from Matthew’s Gospel is the way everything these fishermen had and were could be cast aside like so much trash in the face of something truly essential and unequivocal. The call of Jesus is intrusive and disruptive, and to all appearances calls them away from life as they had known it, away from all to which they clung. And yet they left it all behind at Jesus’ word. In a moment, all became trash.  Trash.  It happens.

Life comes at you fast. Indeed, it does. And so it pays to plan ahead. I’m not talking about insurance here; that’s another matter altogether.  I’m talking about discerning what’s essential to you… what’s most important… and what can be set aside or cast off.  You never know when the call is going to come… when Jesus is going to choose you. You never know when Jesus is going to call on you to make a decision about your citizenship.  You never know. And sometimes, as ol’ Zebedee learned (and as you and I know well), life comes at you fast.