"Who Do You Trust?" - Epiphany 3A

Saint Matthew 4:12-22

A strange confluence of events occurred as I sat in my television room last Monday night watching the Minnesota Wild/Florida Panthers game on my NHL Center Ice satellite package the cost of which I can now take off on my taxes because I mentioned it in a sermon.

Over the weekend I had begun reading Theodore Rex the massive biography of President Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.
 

Earlier in the evening I had watched a television special on the life of Dr.  Martin Luther King, Jr.  on the day the nation set aside to honor the enormous contribution he made to our national life and when it was over I turned on the hockey game.
 

The game was good but the commercials were interesting.  Almost everyone was for a candidate running for president.  All of them making a pitch to hockey fans in front of the March 3rd primary vote in Minnesota.   I watched with interest at first but by the third period I was almost longing for obnoxious and ubiquitous Xfininity commercials with the  detestable character who supposedly was the personification of inefficient AT&T internet service.
 

All of the candidate’s commercials messages could be summed up in two words: trust me.  Trust me.  I’ve built a business.  Trust me.  I’ve been in the senate forever.  Trust me.  I can write all the wrongs of capitalism.  Trust me.  Trust me.  Trust me.
 

I hope you hear any claim by any candidate imploring you to trust him or her with  a one word question front and center in your head: “Why?” 
 

It’s a good question because in the beginning of his life not everybody trusted Dr.  King. 
 

In 1963 six leaders of  liberal churches in Birmingham and one rabbi wrote him a letter called “An Appeal to Law and Order and Common Sense” in which they acknowledged  the existence of “various problems that cause racial friction and unrest.” But they objected staunchly to the way in which Dr. King and the civil-rights movement had confronted Jim Crow laws, demanding change through nonviolent direct action. Such demands, these religious leaders insist, should be “pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets.”1

I was only ten but I would guess that most of my neighbors and even the liberals in my family agreed with them because crowds, even well-intentioned crowds, could turn violent too quickly.
 

But none of us here, I hope, would now maintain that the laws Dr.  King and the marches were protesting against - Jim Crow laws that mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks - were morally acceptable.
 

The change is proof that for many Dr.  King was right: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” We honor him now but many wondered about him then.
 

So too they wondered about Theodore Roosevelt when he ascended to the presidency at 43 upon the assassination of President William McKinley.  Even though he was a voracious reader and Harvard graduate Washington insiders called him brash, bombastic, “the cowboy president.”  His opposition to discrimination was so great he invited Booker T. Washington to a White House state dinner.  He was the first African American ever to be extended such an invitation prompting and an outcry from newspapers north and south and death threats against Roosevelt's life. 2
 

Like Dr.  King, President Roosevelt was not trusted in the beginning but now his face stares out from Mount Rushmore with three other heroic presidents.  A place where every presidential candidate dreams of having their likeness enshrined if we would but “trust them.”
 

Most leaders who claim they are trustworthy by making promises at the beginning tend to be disappointments.  Few presidents upon leaving office are as popular as they were at the beginning of their term because eventually many of their campaign promises have to be broken.
 

That is what is so ingenious about Jesus’ call to the first disciples.  He didn’t promise them anything all he asked them to do was follow him.

One of the things that fascinates me about Saint Matthew’s account  . . .  is that there is no hint of any prior encounters, with Jesus.   He hasn’t been doing any advertizing.  He hasn’t been making any promises.  He hasn’t had any rallies in which he pandered to people’s lesser or better angels.
 

Neither were the disciples “searching for something.”  They were not on some sort of journey of self-discovery.  They weren’t traipsing across mountains and valleys in some far off land looking for a spiritual guru.  They were simply at work, as fisherman, doing what they had always done.

It was hard work but also a very good way to make a living.  This was a family business that allowed them to feed themselves and their clans but make a good profit as well.  We would have called them “middle-class” with houses and families making enough money to not thrive but more than survive. 
 
They also had job security.  As long as their health and strength held out living in the cosmopolitan area that they did with soldiers, pilgrims, and all kinds of people coming and going there would always be a market for what they were selling.  So great was their job security that there was little doubt that when the time came for him to hang up his nets their father Zebedee would pass the business along to them.
 
Then Jesus shows up and he calls them.  “Hey!  You!  You!  You!  Follow me and I will make you fishers of men and women.”  Sometimes in popular American Christianity we get this wrong.  We say, “Since I took Jesus into my heart . . . ”  or “Since I gave my life to Jesus . . . ” or “Since I decided to follow Christ . . . ”

That’s not the story.  The story is that you don’t take Jesus anywhere.  He’s the one who takes you and then takes you places.  You can’t “give your life to Christ.”  He takes it.

Everyone is here because you got put here.  For some of you, it was a life-changing, for others it was a lifetime of leading and coaxing.  For every one of you, God reached in, grabbed you. 3

 And so we are here, called by Jesus, the same way those boys in the boat were. 

 And for most of us we didn’t know how it happened.  Maybe our parents or a neighbor invited us or dragged us and then something hooked us.  

 For me it wasn’t the scripture lessons in Sunday School and certainly not the sermons in church that got me, (They were often 30 minutes long!  Count yourselves lucky!) it was the booming sound of our the new pipe organ.  

 I’d come into church, look at the bulletin, look up the hymns and say to myself, “Great tunes today!” And then I would sit back and twiddle my thumbs and think about a million other things until we got to sing them.

 For all you know I may still be doing that! I may be doing it right now.  I may be the one who is waiting for me to “bring it home” and finish up so that we can get onto something important like singing the sermon hymn.

(That is also, by-the-way, why we almost always sing all the verses.  It’s one of the few personal prerogatives pastors have.  We usually get to pick the hymns and if I’m picking them we’re singing them all the way through from the first note of the first verse to the last note of the fifth!

 In our time together I’ve heard your stories.  

 Those who starting coming to this church when it was meeting down the street in the funeral parlor.  

 Those of you whose journey includes worship experiences that included tents, fire and brimstone preaching, and people “walking the sawdust trail” during an altar call.

 Those who somehow got exposed to “smooth jazz,” WLIT 95.5 kind of worship with projection screens and worship leaders singing the same words over and over again in close, perfect harmony, while the congregation stood and swayed gently or just sat in their seats and smiled.

 Don’t knock any of those, men and women, for those are the places were Jesus found you and grabbed you.  This place, those places are where Jesus called you, summoned you and asked you to follow.

 And over time you discovered you could trust him.  

 He didn’t try to convince you to trust him through a thirty-second commercial that interrupted your hockey game.  He didn’t try to promise you things that you knew he could never produce.  He didn’t even act like a candidate and promise that if you trusted him he would fight for you to have more money, pay fewer taxes, and have a more peaceful life.

 Jesus reached in and took you and me on an adventure.  

We make a mistake to make this into some sort of mystery. Jesus did not demand that we swallow a dozen philosophical absurdities in order to be with him. He asked us to follow him. Faith in Jesus is not first of all a matter of having felt something, or having had an experience; it is a simple willingness to stumble along behind Jesus, a willingness to be behind him. The faith is in the following

 We are to follow, to do what he did, to live in the world as he lived. It is more important to be a disciple, a follower of Jesus, even than to be a Christian. Christianity is not a set of beliefs, first principles, propositions. It is a matter of discipleship, following. Faith in Jesus is not belief about Jesus. It's a willingness to follow Jesus. The faith is in the following.

 We follow him because he is a faithful leader.

In our age to have a faithful leader is really something to proclaim.  

 We who have had potential leaders promise so much to us in order to gain our support only to drop us as soon as our ballots were dropped into the bottom of the ballot box.  

 We who have been promised so much, used, even lied to.  To proclaim that we have a leader who is faithful is really something to say.

 That is what we have and that is what the world needs.  

 We have a leader who cared enough to give his life for us.

 Now think about that: How many leaders do you know who would do that for you? No guilt here, just a thought, a question.  How many of those people on the campaign trail, begging to be your leaders, would give their life for you?

 Probably you can’t think of one.  Nothing.  Nadda.  No one. 

 We have one who did and that makes him a leader who is well worth following.  Don’t you think?

__________

1.  William J. Barber, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. “MLK Warned Us of the Well-Intentioned Liberal.” The Nation, January 18, 2019. https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-king-trump-wall-jim-crow/.

2.  Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex.  (New York: Random House, 2010.)

3.  William, Willimon. “Guess Where You're Going.” Pulpit Resource 36, no. 1.  January, February, March, 2008.

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