Cosmic Career Change

Mark 1:14-20; Jonah 3:1-5, 10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Mark begins like an alarm clock, persistently declaring the time and demanding a response.(1) “The beginning of the good news,” Mark declares: Jesus fulfills the prophecy. Then there is the new Elijah – John the Baptist – announcing not himself but the one who was coming. Like Elijah castigating Ahab, Jezebel, and their minions, John calls out everyone in Judea and Jerusalem to confess their sins and be baptized, not just into repentance but also into the hope of the one who was coming.

Then there is the time when heaven is split open and the Spirit descends on Jesus, who hears the voice of divine affirmation: “You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness.” That is followed with the forty-day time in the wilderness as the Spirit and the Adversary spar over Jesus.

We are thrust forward to a time after John had been arrested. The preparation he announced was over before it was scarcely understood. The Spirit-anointed, Adversary-tested Jesus comes out of the shadows: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom!” Jesus doesn’t just announce the time, he fulfills it in person, in word, in deed.

It’s no wonder that as the days passed neighbors, family members, and religious professionals were transfixed and aghast that so common a man, so ordinary an individual whom many of them had known since toddlerhood, could speak truth with a story-teller’s skillful use of familiar images, and do it with mind-stretching authority.

His announcement wasn’t a question of going somewhere and doing something, an exercise which could be fended off with excuses galore, like the neighbors did when invited to the banquet in one of Jesus’ parables. Jesus was literally “in your face,” demanding an immediate response. When I was a child we used to suddenly snap our fingers or clap our hands in someone’s face, while saying, “Think fast.” Jesus’ encountering of anyone was a “think fast” moment.

“Repent,” “believe,” “follow,” “fish” – these aren’t timeless ethical imperatives. Repenting, believing, following, fishing are “think fast” responses to the fullness of God’s time intersecting the emptiness of human time.

There is a set order to what Jesus announces. Yet so often congregations and individuals reverse the order. Congregations are often more interested in filling the empty seats, so they blindly and erratically fish. Too often the baited hooks come back empty.

Then when they actually get someone to follow, they lay out the method: We’ve always done it this way so don’t rock the boat. And they so drum that ideology into their catch that finally the newbies believe it and repent of having had any wild and crazy ideas that church could be done in any other way. It doesn’t make much sense, but then again, we’ve always done it that way.

But that’s not the way that Jesus laid out ministry. He said: Repent, believe, follow, fish. We can’t fish unless we know the one we are following. We can’t follow unless we believe the purpose for which he was sent and the one who sent him. We can’t believe unless we repent of every belief, every system, every self-deluding idea that we are the centers of our universes.

We do not repent in order to usher in the time of redemption, because that time is already here. We do not become fishers in order to meet some monthly quota as if we were salespeople on commission, as if meeting that quota will unlock the reign of God. The reign of God is already here. We do not follow Jesus in hopes that one day we might find him, because he has already come and found us. God takes the initiative. The reign of God is not the product of discipleship, it’s the precondition for it.(2)

Repent, believe, follow, fish. That’s the sequence. Whether you realized it or not, that’s the sequence we follow every week. When the prelude starts, when the call to worship is spoken, that is the announcement that God’s reign has already arrived, that it is in our midst and that we are in the middle of it in this time and space.

After recognizing the kingdom’s presence, we repent. Our confession sweeps over a wide variety of sins – corporate and personal, deeds committed and words spoken, deeds and words omitted. We recognize that when we assuage our consciences with some minuscule response to another’s overt or ignorant sin, we affirm and enlarge, not mitigate, our complicity in such wrongful personal and societal behavior. Repentance is something that needs constant renewal. We do it every week.

Repentance is like spring cleaning. It is moving out the old and worthless (no matter how much worth we have accorded it) and making room for the new. Repentance is jettisoning unbelief and mis-directed belief to make room for true belief. Following repentance, pardon, and thanksgiving for God’s grace lavished on us, we turn to belief as it is nurtured in scripture and exposition.

The purpose of sermons is not to confirm narrow belief and to comfort us in small belief. The Word is read and proclaimed to stretch and expand and enlarge belief, to inspire us in our following, to fit us for the hard work of being God’s people in a culture for which God is either a under-inflated concept or a “four-letter” word.

Repenting, believing, following. We follow in prayer, in serving each other, in providing for the needs of Christ in the world far away, the world near at hand – our community, and the world of God’s people gathered in this place. We follow Jesus as he roamed through neighborhoods of immigrants and foreigners, as he walked the back alleys of his own native settlements, as he ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, people in broken relationships, people neglected, ostracized, segregated, and debased by supposedly God-fearing people. We follow Jesus by walking where Jesus walked.

And finally we fish. “Go out into the world in peace; be courageous; hold on to what is good; return no one evil for evil; strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak, and help the suffering; honor all people; love and serve the Lord, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.”

When Jesus called the first disciples, when he called any disciples, the call came out of the announcement of the in-breaking of God’s reign. Discipleship was not another task to burden already overworked people. Jesus called them to new ways of being.

When Simon and Andrew left their nets, they left a way of life. James and John not only left their nets, but also their father. These four, and the ones who would come after them, left behind a whole complex matrix of work, family, and place into order to take up a new identity.(3)

The words seem simple: “I will show you how to fish for people.” Notice the subtlety of the language. Not “make you fish for people” – another activity to enter into the date book (“How about the every third Thursday? Does that fit everyone’s schedule?”) Jesus will show us how to fish for people. It is a new identity, a new career, a whole new life a cosmic career change.

The irony is that Jesus doesn’t ask us to bait hooks in order to catch unsuspecting people and reel them into the church. The new identity, the new career is really one of being the bait. By living a life in the here and now of God’s reign, of repenting any and every aspect of our thinking and living that denies God, by believing the good news of salvation made alive in the flesh and blood of Christ and confirmed in his resurrection, and by going into the same kinds of neighborhoods, life situations, and relationships that Jesus did, we become living examples of life that people are hungering for. “Tell me about what makes you tick.” “Why do you respond to all that life throws at you the way you do?” “Why are you so hope-filled when there is nothing around you to support it?” These kinds of questions open us ways of speaking from the heart about Christ’s presence and power in our lives.

The disciples experienced a cosmic career change. They could no longer fish for fish. They had forgotten how. In one post-resurrection appearance, Jesus had to tell the disciples which side of the boat to fish out of (John 21:5-6).

Friends, Now is the time. The reign of God is here. Repent, believe, follow, fish. It’s a cosmic career change that will change your life forever.

(1) Ted A. Smith “Mark 1:14-20 – Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), Year B, vol. 1, p. 285.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com. 
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.