The Imperative Tense

 

Sunday, January 25^th, 2009

Epiphany 3B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Mark 1:14-20

Theme: Christ’s call on our lives

 

“¹⁴Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” ¹⁶As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. ¹⁷And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”¹⁸And immediately they left their nets and followed him. ¹⁹As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. ²⁰Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.”

 

The lectionary does some interesting skipping around here in these first few weeks of the year, with the Gospel readings.  We began the year in John’s Gospel, then bounced to Mark, then back to John, and now we are back in Mark, just a couple of verses from where we left off two weeks ago.  The contrast between the two presentations CAN be a little disconcerting, but it can ALSO serve to highlight what each is trying to do.  John’s is focused on the person of Christ; Mark’s is on his message.  Those are, admittedly, gross generalizations, but they give us a kind of thematic peg on which to hang our basic understanding. 

 

As we read into the Gospel according to Mark, the tone and the style of the writing has as much to do with understanding the message as does the content itself.  

 

The transposition of events between Mark and John also give us a sense of what in cinematic and literary terms would be a flashback or a flash-forward, depending on the case.  Our passage this morning is something like a prequel to last week’s passage in John.  You remember we had Jesus coming to Philip and Nathanael and getting them to follow him with just those two words, in Philip’s case – ‘Follow me’ and it was done.  Today’s passage is chronologically just before that event: Jesus’ very first disciple selection. 

 

In Mark’s telling, this scene begins right after Jesus has returned from the wilderness where he has been tempted with worldly power and wealth and glory and has denied his tempter at every turn. 

 

The connecting phrase between the two events is a pretty smooth transition.  If you back up a few verses, to verse 9, Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan.  Then we have the Spirit immediately not just leading or moving, but DRIVING Jesus into the wilderness, and Mark telegraphs the wilderness temptation into a single verse – 13 – and then pops Jesus back to Galilee.  The scene of his baptism is, by Markan standards, an extensively written and descriptive passage – we have Jesus coming up out of the water, and seeing the Spirit descending like a dove, and God’s proclamation of his beloved son coming out of heaven. 

 

And what does the first verse of today’s passage say? 

 

“Now after John was arrested …”   

 

And what are Jesus’ first words of proclamation? 

 

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” 

 

Did you hear it?  Did you hear the baton pass?  Who does he sound like – especially that second imperative?  Repent.  Who said that?  John!  Only he followed it with “and be baptized” … Jesus’ message involves something closer to the heart – “and believe the good news.” 

 

So we get a really clear picture … I have this image of a telephoto shot down a street – the perspective is foreshortened – there’s very little sense of depth, but you kind of know it is there.  From where we are, the telephone poles look like they’re pickets in a fence, when we know that there are dozens of yards between them.  Picture this:  John is walking towards the camera, and he’s got a pitcher of water that he’s carrying (bear with me, this is just for the movie audience …) as he’s walking, he’s preaching – looking a little ragged, and wearing the expected odd outfit, but he is preaching the baptism for the forgiveness of sins.  While he walks, people come up to him from one side or the other appearing in the frame, and he douses them with water from that pitcher, but doesn’t stop moving.  Then a little while into that, Jesus steps into the frame from one side … and John stops and says ‘you should be baptizing ME’ … to which Jesus replies ‘this has got to happen this way …’ and John agrees and douses Jesus … who then promptly steps out of the frame, is gone for a few minutes, and just before he reappears, John is grabbed from one side and pulled off screen, and just then Jesus steps in and starts walking directly towards the camera, just like John was before him, and he starts preaching … .    

 

“The time is fulfilled,

 

And the kingdom of God has come near;

 

Repent,

 

And believe in the good news.” 

 

But Mark doesn’t dwell on the message right here that much.  He mixes it up and adds some action to the story.   

 

Jesus is walking along the Sea of Galilee and runs into Simon Peter and Andrew, his brother, and they’re standing on the shore casting nets into the sea … for some reason Mark chooses to add what would seem to be an unnecessary comment “for they were fishermen” … I suppose there has always been some level of fishing done for recreation as well as sustenance, but I suspect that in first century Palestine, if you fished you fished mainly for trade or for food – in other words, to sell or to eat.  Life may have had its pleasant moments – I’m sure it did, we can find ourselves in the most difficult conditions and still find pleasure in some seemingly insignificant thing – I remember while working my very first job at Opryland – hauling trash – smelly, messy, sticky, nearly nauseating garbage – out of the trash cans and loading the bags into the carts that we then had to haul across the park to the nearest dumpster or compactor – to that point it was the hardest physical work I had ever done, but I remember being able to stop even in the middle of pulling that cart behind me and feeling a cooling breeze blow through the trees and hear the birds chirping or watch the butterflies flutter around and marvel at the pleasure it brought just to watch them – or to feel that breeze cool the sweat on my face and neck – my point is, why would Mark point out that they were fishermen when it would be an automatic assumption made by his readers that that was what Simon Peter and Andrew WERE – by virtue of the fact that they are introduced in the act of fishing. 

Mark’s reason comes in the very next sentence in Jesus’ words: 

 

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”   

 

You see?  There IS a style to Mark’s writing after all – it’s not ‘just the facts, only the facts, and nothing BUT the facts’- he is using metaphors and balancing one phrase against another – fishermen evokes the image in our minds of someone with a rod and reel in their hands.  Fishers OF men … of PEOPLE … well … what kind of an image does that bring up in our minds?  The same rod and reel?  Maybe at first, but then our minds reject it, because we understand the task of pursuing a PERSON is going to be arguably, I think – if we were to ask some of our resident fishermen – quite a bit more challenging than pursuing a fish … so the same tools will not apply. 

 

We are given a hint of just what tools they would be using in the way they answered Jesus.  What did they take with them?         

 

“And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

 

It would seem an unusual thing to do, to abandon one’s livelihood on nothing more than ten words from a total stranger.  And yet, they did. 

 

Most sermons I’ve heard preached on these verses concentrate on the authority with which Jesus spoke – that all he had to do was open his mouth, and the same voice that commanded demons to depart and winds and waves to be still, and Lazarus to come up out of his grave later in his ministry was used to command his disciples to follow him here, at the beginning of it. 

 

While I fully acknowledge the authority with which Christ spoke, I also understand that God endowed us with free will, and does not force us to do something we don’t want to do, but rather invites us to join in the ongoing work of breaking in the Kingdom of God on earth, and will only accept us when WE choose – yes, prompted by the Holy Spirit, but the choice IS ours.  We can sit and discuss the finer points of doctrine regarding how able we might be to resist that invitation, but when it comes down to it, it IS an invitation … though it may SOUND like a command – the imperative tense – there is always going to be another element to consider in how Christ’s call on our lives affects us.  And that is the question of WHEN we receive it. 

 

You remember I mentioned that I’ve gotten set up on Facebook a couple of weeks ago?  And about how through that I’ve been getting reacquainted with friends from childhood and college, people whom I thought I would never see or hear from again?  I reconnected with a friend of mine from Junior High and High School this past week.  His name is Dave Edmondson.  He stands out in my memory as one of the better athletes in our school.  We spent a little time together, but I wasn’t a jock, and though we had some friends in common, we didn’t spend a lot of time getting to know each other. 

 

Part of the facebook page that you set up allows you to put up a picture of yourself as an identifier for people who may want to connect with you or with whom you want to connect, and the picture I have up most of the time is one that was taken last summer, here during worship, wearing the robe, standing behind the communion table, holding the loaf of bread and the cup while serving communion.  After our initial exchange, and giving each other time to review the other’s profile – where you can give an update on your life – your education, work history, show family pictures, talk about your hobbies and interests and things, Dave said that it was neat to see how God has been working in my life, and then went on to say that he became a Christian in 1991; that he went from being an agnostic, completely ignorant of Christ as a historical figure, much less anything spiritual or religious.  After asking about a couple of fellow MK’s – we had all been in school together, he closed by asking how I ended up in vocational ministry.

 

I answered in a pretty extensive summary of the last 29 years of my life.  When I asked him to share his story, he directed me to a recording of his speaking at a Christian Businessman’s luncheon in Colorado in September of last year.  It was him giving his testimony.  He shared about growing up the son of alcoholic parents, who traveled around the world, living in a country for two or three years at a time and then moved on to a new post.  His father worked in embassies with their communications systems. 

 

In listening to his story, I was moved to tears more than once for the experiences that he went through, but as his story went on, I came to realize that I was becoming acutely aware of the fact that, if I had been a little more intentional, a little more mature in sharing MY faith while we were in high school, there may have been an earlier change in Dave’s life.  I was compelled to ask him for forgiveness for failing to do that. 

 

His response was gracious and truthful.  He said that he was enough of a Calvinist to understand that he had to go through what he went through in order to GET to the time when he DID accept Christ as his Lord and Savior.  That it happened at the right time and through the right circumstances.  His answer reassured me, and DID remind me that we can never forget the factor of God’s timing in the events in our lives. 

 

What does all this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, on Baptist Men’s Day, 2009? 

 

First of all, the meaning drawn is NOT simply for the men in our family of faith.  We are all faced with Christ’s call on our lives.  From the time we first begin to understand the fact that we are not simply physical and emotional beings, but spiritual ones as well, I believe God begins to work through the Holy Spirit on our hearts. 

 

Depending on the choices we’ve made in other areas of our lives, we may or may not hear that call clearly.  For some of us, our first exposure to that invitation resonates and draws us in at a relatively early age.  For others, we find that there are so many other things clamoring for our attention that we are initially oblivious to that still small voice. 

 

It is safe to assume that Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John grew up not only tending their nets and setting their boats out on the Sea of Galilee, but that they also, as men who practiced their faith, tended to their spiritual nourishment as well.  I believe that it was through that preparation of their souls that they recognized the voice of the one who called to them that day by the seashore. 

 

My hope is that we here at Jerusalem will provide that same nourishment to our children as they grow, as well as to those who come through our doors who are already grown, but who, like Dave, have never encountered the living Christ.                 

 

Let’s pray.