A Sudden Realization

Sermon-3 Epiphany Year A-Jan. 23, 2011
The Cloud of Unknowing, "O God, our great companion, lead us ever more deeply into the mystery of your life and ours, that we may be faithful interpreters of that Life to each other, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

Do you ever listen to this reading and think, “I could never do that”? Drop everything and run to Jesus? Every time I’ve ever done this reading in a Bible study this is the pattern of conversation:“oh, those fishermen, they had so much faith! I could never leave everything and (fill in the blank-be a missionary, go door to door, be a professional Christian”). That’s the fist response. Then someone asks me, “do you really think they responded that quickly (like I would know).” Then someone says, “I don’t think snap decisions like that are a good idea (and then they will tell some terrible story about someone who made an snap decision and wound up losing all their money to a Nigerian con man). And the Bible study kind of goes downhill from there-about whether these fishermen really were right to act so impulsively.
This is the season of Epiphany, the season of : “a sudden realization: a sudden intuitive leap of understanding, especially through an ordinary but striking occurrence.”
This is the season when one day we’re walking along and we realize something new-even though we’ve seen it a million times before. One of my favorite stories is about Anna Power Scheffer. She grew up here, attended church here almost every Sunday until she became an adult. One day she was back visiting and she said, “you know, I have been here for hundreds of your sermons-but I never listened to one. I listened to the one today- you know what, it wasn’t bad!”
This is from Alyce MacKenzie, a professor of preaching in Texas:
“In all four gospels, people made what looks like a snap decision to become disciples of Jesus. But things look a little different when we look at their decisions in the flow of that particular gospel's story. Then it looks like the snap decision may have been one step in an ongoing process. It seems likely that the disciples had been thinking about Jesus for a while and about what the impact of following him might be.
Each gospel has a different definition of what it means to be a disciple, to follow Jesus. In John it means to believe. In Luke, to be a disciple means to have compassion on the poor and the sick. In Mark, to be a disciple means to be willing to suffer,
[And in each of the gospels the story right before the call, and right after always explain what it means to be a disciple]
And in Matthew, to be a disciple of Jesus means to be willing to follow his teaching and to do God's will. The call of the first disciples in Matthew comes right after Jesus' brief teaching about the purpose of his ministry (Mt. 4:12-17) and right before the Sermon on the Mount. So the disciples make (what sounds like) a "snap" decision to spend their lives as salt and light for the world by living by Jesus' teachings. These teachings fulfill, the heart of the Law: to love God with one's whole being and one's neighbor as oneself. ….The life of the disciple, which begins with what may look like a sudden decision, becomes a series of recommitments to that decision, day in and day out, every day of our lives.”
We don’t just make one time only snap decisions to follow Jesus, to become fishers of people. We usually have to make the decision every day. What may look like a snap decision to someone else, has usually been building up in us for a long time. You want your life to mean something. You want your life to matter. You want to be part of something bigger than just you. You want to make a commitment that draws every part of you. No one ever became a Christian because they wanted to remain exactly the same. Amen.