www.wonershchurch.com

 

Sermon 113

 

Sermon by James Cooke at Wonersh on Sunday 20th January 2008

 

Matthew Series 3 – Fishers of Men

 

Reading  :-  Colossians 1  and Matthew 4:18-25;

 

 

 

You may not have realised this but our sermons at 10 o’clock in January are all based on the first few chapters of Matthew’s gospel.  Liz spoke from chapter 2 about the wise men 2 weeks.  Last week, Ian led us through some of chapter 3 with its focus on John the Baptist.  Today as you’ll have realised from our gospel reading we’re in chapter 4 and next week we’ll be looking at the Beatitudes in chapter 5.  If there’s one verse in today’s reading that sums up all that I want to say it’s verse 19:  Come, follow me, Jesus said, and I will make you fishers of men.

 

I don’t know if any of you have ever visited the Holy Land – I was fortunate enough to go with a friend many years ago – but if you have, I’m sure you’ll have seen some of the archaeological finds that date right back to the days of Christ.  I remember going to Capernaum and seeing an enormous mill-stone just outside the ruins of the town – a graphic reminder of what those who led little ones astray were fit for.  One of the most remarkable finds of all is also in Galilee - and it’s a boat.  There was a summer a few years ago which was particularly dry and the water level in the Sea of Galilee dropped dramatically.  A boat was found sticking out of the mud and they carefully lifted it off the sea bottom, cleaned it up and now it’s on display in a special exhibit.  They carbon-dated it and found it went right back to the time of Jesus, so the visitors – and there are thousands of them – can see just the sort of boat that his disciples used when they went fishing.  Simon Peter and his brother, Andrew, were probably in a boat just like this when Jesus called them.  We tend to think, don’t we, that they would have eked out a living from their fishing with great difficulty, but that may not have been the case.  It was a cosmopolitan area with soldiers, pilgrims and peddlers coming and going all the time, as well as there being quite a large local population, supported by the fertile land in Galilee.  There’s even a reference in Pliny (the Roman historian) where he mentions some fish which had been pickled at a town called Tarichaea in Galilee - showing that fish from this region was being exported all over the Mediterranean;   the equivalent, I like to think, of the tuna fish I bought in Tesco’s the other day that no doubt came from somewhere on the other side of the world.  It suggests anyway that Peter and Andrew’s family, and James & John’s family, were small businessmen who made tidy profits.  They would have had to work hard but should have had a moderately secure livelihood. 

 

[Come] And then a wandering preacher comes up to them and says, Come, follow me.  Why would they just give it all up and follow this unusual man?  The same question faces people today.  Why did a friend of mine give up his promising legal career as a barrister, and become a church minister on less than ¼ of the salary he might have been earning?  And, why do Christians in thousands of other walks of life seek to put God first - ahead of their careers and their reputations, giving up time and money for the cause of Christ?  Let’s focus for a moment on our 4 fishermen;  I hope you’ll allow me to speculate a little on why Peter & Andrew, James & John just left their fishing, their secure way of life, and started following Jesus wherever he went.  There are probably several factors.  Historians today are agreed that the only explanation for the crowds that travelled 100s of miles to seek him out was his healings.  People whose lives had been blighted by illness and disease (and there must have been huge numbers of them in those days - before modern medicine) realised that they could be healed if they came to this extraordinary man.  This would certainly have attracted the attention of Peter and the others – but there’s no indication in the gospels that they had any form of illness and therefore had an urgent physical need.  Looking at Matthew’s account on its own we might be forgiven for thinking they had never met Jesus before, but Luke tells us that just before he called them he took them out on a fishing trip and they caught the biggest catch of fish in their lives.  We know that made a huge impression on Peter because he fell on his knees and said to Jesus, Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.  Even so, it’s still remarkable that they leave everything and follow a relative stranger just because he tells them to.  If after church while we were having coffee, someone – even someone we knew well - told us to drop everything and come and follow him we would probably think he’d gone mad.  But did you notice what Matthew said?  At once, they left their nets and followed him.  No hesitation, no saying well I’ll think about it and let you know – they simply followed Jesus.  It was similar for James and John, though makes the point even more strongly by adding that they left behind both their boat and their father.  No, I guess the reason wasn’t just the miracles they’d seen him do, but the astonishing magnetism of his presence and personality.

 

In our reading from Colossians we heard some extraordinary things about him.  He’s called the image of the invisible God – the one who shows us what the Father is like.  And he’s the creator of the universe – by him all things were created.  He’s the one who has passed through death – the firstborn from among the dead, he’s described as.  And he is God in human form – God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.  No wonder that the disciples, when he called them, left everything and followed him.  And part of the attraction about following Jesus lies in the wonderful promises he gives to his followers.  For those burdened by the demands of this life he said, Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.  For those feeling spiritually dry he said, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.  What a welcoming word, ‘come’ is.  His invitation is to a life full of joy, forgiveness and fulfilment.  I wonder if there are any here to whom Jesus is saying ‘come’ ?  Why not – even today – renew your commitment to following him?

 

[Follow] I have to tell you, though, that responding to the call of Christ brings more than just the comfort he brings.  The two words Come and Follow are really one word in the original and mean literally ‘come behind me’, or come after me.  ‘Come after me’.  I wonder if those words remind you of something else Jesus said?  If anyone would come after me he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. I wonder if Peter and Andrew knew what following Jesus was going to involve?  I doubt it.  Did they have any inkling that both of them would end up being crucified as their master would be?  Did James have the slightest idea that within a few years he would be dead, killed on the orders of Herod?  I don’t think so.  God, in his mercy, revealed things to them little by little and he will do the same for us.  They followed him because of the magnetism of his presence and personality, because of who he is.  They could scarcely help themselves.  We know that Peter (and the others, too, I suspect) had great difficulty in being faithful disciples when the going got really tough but they got through that patch and were able to live for him   We all have times when following him is difficult – I wonder how we will respond the next time we find the going hard.

 

I find the remarkable story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer an inspiration and a challenge.  Bonhoeffer was Professor of theology at the University of Berlin in Germany in the 1930’s, at a time when German Christians were divided over Hitler. One group allied themselves with Hitler and worked for a "pure" German nation. They formed an official German church which supported Hitler and banned Jews from holding official positions in the Church.  Bonhoeffer was part of the other group, and they set up an underground church which was opposed  to Hitler’s vision for the Third Reich. This was a dangerous thing to do.  In 1937 he was sacked from his position at the university and fled to London, but two years later he was presented with a difficult choice.  Either he could take up the offer of one of the most prestigious theology appointments in the world - lecturing at Union Seminary in New York.  Or he could turn that offer down and return to Germany to head up an illegal, underground theological college for the churches that refused to go along with Hitler.  He decided that his faith would be meaningless if he took the easy option and he returned to Germany.  But when he got back, he found things had become so bad that he abandoned his commitment to non violence and became part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.  The plot failed and in 1943 Bonhoeffer was arrested;  2 years later he was executed by the Nazis, just a month before the end of the war.  If ever someone knew what it meant to lay down his life for Christ it was Bonhoeffer.  Through all this there was one thing that really upset him more than anything else:  how could so many Christians embrace Hitler’s views?  How could they worship in a church which banned Jews from holding office?  They prayed and sang hymns on Sundays but for Bonhoeffer the measure of true discipleship, true devotion to Jesus, was not about what we say in church on a Sunday, but how we are in the whole of our life.  One of his most famous statements sums up his life. “When Christ calls a man or woman, he calls them to come and die.”  Christ demands everything.  And Bonhoeffer certainly lived that out, even though it meant dying.

 

Now of course our situation is very different;  we are most unlikely to have to put our life on the line because we belong to Christ.  But the point for us, as it was for Bonhoeffer and as it was for those first disciples, is that nothing else comes before Jesus.  To be a true follower can at times be very tough indeed.

 

[I will make you] Come, follow me – our verse continues and I will make you.  We’ve seen already that life for Peter and his friends was never the same again, and from that day Christ started to make them into something different - increasingly into his likeness.  How will it be for us?   Are we content with our level of discipleship?  Or is he calling us to something deeper, something that lifts us out of our comfort zone into something where we really discover what it means to trust him?  I sincerely hope that he hasn’t finished his re-making work in my life – there are so many areas that need his touch.  It’s worth spending some time quietly letting him speak to us about which parts need his special touch – perhaps we could do that at the start of our prayer time in a minute, Keith.

 

[Fishers of men] The verse continues by explaining how Jesus was going to remake them - that famous phrase I will make you fishers of men.  The fishermen left their nets, their old way of life, and exchanged it for one where they would be fishing for people.  So it is, that our walk with Christ will affect how we live – whether it’s how we act as parents, how we drive on the roads, how we fill in our tax return, how we conduct ourselves at work.  Whenever I read this passage I feel a nagging guilt – I haven’t been very good at fishing for people – helping others to discover Christ and all that he offers.  But, guilt is a very destructive emotion and anyway there are clearly some who are better equipped for this than others, those first disciples for a start.  But, to say just that and no more is a bit of a cop-out.  You may have heard of Matthew Parris, the journalist and ex-politician.  He’s not a Christian and yet he once wrote this: “If I believed the Christian message . . . I would drop my job, sell my house, throw away my possessions and set out into the world with a burning desire to know more, and when I had found out more to act upon it and to tell others.  How is it possible to be indifferent [to this message]?”  A friend of mine is always asking her non-Christian friends this question, “Is God doing anything in your life?”  Well worth having a question like that worked out in you mind and ready for a moment when someone seems open to talking about deeper things.  And let’s develop a thick skin, so the odd rebuff doesn’t stop us fishing.

 

At the end of the radio programme Desert Island Discs the presenter always asks the guest, if there was only one record you could take with you on the desert island which one would it be?  Today, we’ve looked at the one who calls us, we’ve considered what it means to follow him.  Sometimes he brings comfort – sometimes the hardship of the cross.  And we’ve thought about our role as fishers of men.  Each one of these things might have been a sermon in its own right.  But if there’s one which is more important than all the others, which would it be?  Surely the most important, the one we should be focusing on as we go into a new week, is not so much the fishing or the following, but Christ - the one who calls us to follow him.  Knowing him, experiencing his hand at work in our lives, drawing us into a closer walk with him – these are the things that make us want to come and follow him.  Without this inner knowledge of Christ why would we want to be fishers of men?. I’m sure you know these words that Jesus spoke:  I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me will never go hungry.  Let’s come to him and feed on him.

 

 

 

www.wonershchurch.com