Taking the Message on the Move
Epiphany + 3 – January 22, 2012
Why are you here this morning? Really, I'd love to know what made you get up out of your warm, cozy bed on this cold winter day and decide to come to church? What is it about this place that caused you to get dressed and leave your house and the morning newspaper or the Sunday morning TV shows or that extra cup of coffee or whatever you love about lazy days at home and come to worship? What is it that you find here – or that you hope to find here – that you can't find anywhere else?
I ask this question honestly, because there's been a lot of talk around St. John's lately about our congregation and where God is leading us and our desire to grow, to reach out to our community and welcome new people in to this community of faith. And we talk, in committees, and in council, and in various small groups, about the ways that we can spread the word about what is going on in this place. We have lots of tools that we use – we send mini press releases to the Herald and to Newsday and the hyper-local news site, the Patch. We're on Facebook and on Twitter, sporadically, anyway. We have a frequently updated website, and a brand-new sign out in the triangle. We've talked about other ways of “advertising” - whether it's actual ads in the papers or direct mail campaigns or whatever other tools might be out there.
We've worked on some internal things too. A few years back we put up signs all throughout the church building to direct people to worship or Sunday School or the offices or the bathrooms. We try to make our worship experience user-friendly & less confusing with all of our page turns, so that when people are brave enough to come here for the first time, they feel welcome, at ease, at home.
But what all of these things have in common is that they assume that people will come here on their own, that they'll all of a sudden wake-up on a Sunday morning and break from their routine, overcome their anxiety about going to church for the first time in a long time or ever, and come to worship with us. We assume that church is the place people will come when they have questions about God or want to encounter God. The burden of the first step is on them.
We act like John the Baptizer did. We've heard his story a few times since Advent, about his ministry of repentance and baptism out in the wilderness. And what John did was stay in one place and wait for people to come to him. And for a while that worked. People did come flocking to see him, but today we pick up that story a little bit further down the road, and we see that John's time is ended. “The present form of this world is passing away,” as Paul puts it in 1st Corinthians. The old ways don't work anymore.
And so Jesus burst on the scene with a similar message, but a new method. Jesus takes his message on the move. These next few weeks in church, we'll follow Jesus through the first chapter of Mark, and what we'll find is that Jesus never sits still for very long. Jesus takes his show on the road, first here, as he is passing along the sea of Galilee and sees first Simon Peter and Andrew and then James and John fishing and calls them to follow him and fish for people, and then the story will continue with Jesus coming and going, cleansing lepers, healing people, all the while preaching and teaching and living what it looks like when God's kingdom, God's reign, God's rule is on the loose in our world. And it's true that people come to seek him out wherever he is, but Jesus never stays in one place for very long. He comes to worship at the synagogue every week, and then he's right back out there in the world, meeting people where they are, seeing what they need, inviting them to repent, to reverse the way their lives are going and re-orient themselves to what God is doing in the world, calling them to be a part of something new, something the world has never seen before.
That's what this call to Simon and Andrew and James and John is all about... a chance to learn from Jesus and then to partner with him in spreading this good news about what God is up to in the world – a call to share this experience of Jesus with everyone they meet. And in typical Mark fashion, the gospel doesn't tell us what their motivation was for following Jesus. He doesn't give us any back story as to why they would literally drop everything and immediately follow Jesus. I don't think that's because he was running out of paper or trying to meet a deadline. It's his very clever way of getting his audience – US – to put ourselves into the story. To get us wondering what about Jesus would make them do that – and then to answer that question for ourselves.
Which brings us back to where I started this morning. Why are you here? You probably didn't have to leave everything behind to follow Jesus, but somewhere along the line, you heard him say, “Follow me,” and in ways big and small, that's what you've been trying to do ever since, in fits and spurts, with times of great progress and your fair share of setbacks too. I'll let you in on a little secret – the disciples did the exact same thing, especially the way Mark's gospel tells the story! But even with all of their missteps and misunderstandings, the important thing is, they jumped into this movement with both feet. They followed Jesus, learning how to take his message on the move.
And that what Jesus is calling us to do – to stop waiting around, expecting people to come to us, safe inside our beautiful little building – and instead to get out there, beyond these walls, into our homes and at our jobs and with our neighbors and friends, to be willing and able to say, “God's at work in the world and in my life and this is how – and God wants to be a part of your life too!” Not in a pushy, obnoxious way, but as an invitation to reorient their lives to God's life, to find meaning in God's way of being in the world, to let them in on whatever it is that has changed your life and made you want to follow Jesus. Because that's what Jesus calls us to do – and all of the newspaper articles and websites and signs in the world can't replace the personal invitation that can only come from you. I know it's not easy. I know it makes us nervous. But Jesus calls us to be fishers for people, and we can't do that if we never get out on the water. May Jesus open our eyes to the people all around us who are hungry to know God's love – and then make us bold to share the good news!
Amen.
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