Joyful discipleship

Sermon preached at St Alphege Church, Solihull at the 11am Eucharist
27/01/08 – Third Sunday after Epiphany - Year A

Readings: Isaiah 9:1-4 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 Matthew 4:12-23


The DJ Chris Evans has a regular “Drive Time” programme in the early evening on Radio 2. On a recent programme he asked listeners to telephone in with stories along the lines of “I went out to buy a …., but I came back with a …..” One gentleman telephoned in with a story. It went something like this: “I went out one day to sign up to join the Navy, but when I got there the Navy man was on his lunch break, so I joined the RAF instead.” I like this story. It is somehow refreshing to think that something as incidental as a lunch break could make such a big difference to someone’s life.
In our gospel reading today we heard Matthew’s account of Jesus calling the first disciples. In Matthew’s account (and Mark’s account is very similar) it looks as though a rather incidental meeting with a stranger makes a huge difference to the disciples lives. It seems that Jesus walks up to the disciples, calls them and they immediately drop everything and follow him. It is almost as though Simon Peter could telephone up Chris Evans and say, “I went out to catch a few fish, but I ended up an Apostle; a fisher of people.”
What makes Matthew’s account so surprising is that it seems that short and coincidental meeting with Jesus that makes the first four disciples drop everything and follow Jesus. However if we start to read the accounts of this event in the other gospels we do start to realise that the account in Matthew is a very bare bones account.
Our gospel reading last week was John’s account of the calling of Andrew and Simon (John 1:35-42). It suggests that Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist and John the Baptist encouraged him to follow Jesus who he called “the Lamb of God”. The account in Luke’s gospel (Luke 4:38-5:11) suggests that Jesus has actually done a great deal with Simon and Andrew before he asks them to follow him. In Luke’s gospel Jesus has spent time at Simon’s house, has healed his mother-in-law, has borrowed his boat to preach from and has delivered to the first four disciples a miraculous catch of fish, so huge that it filled two boats to sinking point. Only after all this and after Simon has expressed great fear of Jesus’ mighty powers, does Jesus ask them to follow him.
Personally I find that Luke’s rather fuller account makes the story much more believable. Jesus did not appear from nowhere, call out to some fishermen and have them go away with him. Rather Jesus spent some time with Simon and Andrew, built a relationship with them, did some wonderful things for them, showing them the power of his love and only then called them to be disciples.
And discipleship that arises from a relationship with Jesus, from an experience of his love for us, also gives us a much better pattern for our own discipleship. There are, sadly, many people who experience their Christianity as though some powerful and scary headmaster type has appeared to them and said “follow me” and they have not had the courage to do anything different than to follow. And when Christianity is like this, there is the danger that it can be fearful rather than joyful, experienced as a burden rather than a blessing and there can even be a certain envy of people who have not had that call; people who can devote Sunday morning to leisure activities and who seem accountable to no one.
But this is not the way that discipleship is meant to be. Christianity is a blessing, not a burden. It is not based on fear but rather it casts out fear (1John 4:18). It is the pearl of great value, the treasure hidden in the field (Matt 14:44-46). It is the great wedding banquet (Matt22:2ff). We should not feel envy for people who do not have this gift, rather we should feel compassion, and the desire to share the gift with them.
And what is it that makes the difference? What is it that makes Christianity a blessing rather than a burden, a treasure rather than a liability? I believe it is the love of God, the love of Jesus, the experience of being loved, of being forgiven. If we truly feel ourselves to be loved by God, then it is the most natural thing in the world to want to respond to that love, to want to be a disciple. If we feel we should be a disciple, but don’t particularly feel loved by God then we are going to find being a disciple very hard work!
So they key to it is experiencing ourselves as loved by God. This is what makes discipleship desirable, a blessing. It was the love that Jesus had for Andrew and Simon, the miracles he worked for them, that made them want to follow him. But what if we don’t feel loved by God? What if we do feel loved by God, but only a little? What if we do feel loved by God, but we know that we could feel much, much more loved by God? What can we do about it? How can we come to experience and believe in God’s love for us.
Well first of all, it is a very good thing to desire a great gift like this (c.f. 1 Cor 12:31, 14:1) and if we desire it, and pray to God for it then surely it will please God to give it to us.
Secondly we need to re-educate ourselves, reminding ourselves of the great love that God has already shown us. God shows his love for us in his creation of us. And God has not created us in random isolation. Rather he created us in a specific context with people around us who have raised us as children and who helped us to grow. He has created us with a specific path to walk in life and a specific purpose to fulfil. He has created us for a great destiny as children of God (1John3:1), to join in the glorious life of love that the Jesus shares with the Father (1John1:3). Then, beyond our creation, Jesus, in his great love for us, has redeemed us through his passion and death. He has overcome sin and death and reconciled us to the Father. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1John 4:10). And so we can be forgiven. When we turn to Christ, there is no past sin or human frailty or bad experience that can separate us from his love (c.f. Romans 8: 38-39).
A third thing we can do is train ourselves to see God’s love for us in the things that happen to us. Sometimes this is very easy; when people give us presents or do us some good turn. Sometimes it is much harder, when things seem to go wrong for us or we feel hurt by other people. We have to train ourselves to discover the love of God even in these difficult things. Everything is either willed or allowed by God, in his great love for us. They are all part of his plan for us, part of the road down which he calls us as we journey towards heaven. Now this can be hard, and it requires training. We can make a start by learning to thank God, even for the difficult things. We need to grow in love for even the suffering Christ, who loves us in his passion and death. Slowly we can learn that, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom 8:28).
Another thing we can do is to grow in our own love for God by obeying his commandments, especially his commandment to love God and to love our neighbour. Jesus says, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him." (John 14:21). Jesus reveals himself as love to those who love him.
So here are some practical things we can do to help us to understand and to feel the great love that God has for us. We can pray for it. We can thank God for our creation, our great destiny and our salvation. We can learn to thank God for all the things in life that happen to us. We can learn to love God and our neighbour, so that Jesus reveals himself to us and we can know his love. And if we do these things we will become more and more aware of the great love that God has for us, and we will find it more and more natural to respond with a discipleship that is real and full of joy.