FOLLOW ME
Matthew 4:18-22
The Reverend Alex Thomas

We read in the Bible that God calls his people to certain tasks, like we had in the Gospel this morning with Jesus calling his disciples. We talk a lot about God calling us but does God really speak to us? Have you heard the voice of God? I think that it is very easy to conclude in our lives and in our time that God does not really speak to us, that God does not really call us in any recognizable way in our world today. God is silent, and what people are saying when they talk about the call of God is really part of an overactive imagination.

But could it be that it is not God that is silent but we cannot hear God call because we are unable to hear for various reasons:

FIRST, we have a great filtering system. We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see because of a filtering system eg. (a) head sets on and in our own world with a private sound. Everything else is an intrusion. How could God break in unless God was on tape? Or on a CD. (b) Cigarette advertizing that paints beautiful scenes but has a message the it can kill you. How can the beauty of life be coupled with a warning of death? Because the advertisers know that we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. We filter it out.

SECOND , it's difficult to hear with the blare of the mass culture around us. It is easy to ignore the voice inside, the voice outside, the voice that speaks out of the events of our lives, when the roaring. Boring. Banal voice of our mass culture keeps blasting in our ears that the only important things are the accumulation of goods and making as much money as possible (which far exceeds our needs but fills our every desire) status, power, and pleasure.

THIRDLY, it is so easy to jump to conclusions as to what we hear. Alexander Pope made the remark that some of us never learn because we understand too soon. There is a logical reasonable explanation for everything and its easily perceived in this reasonable logical world. We come to conclusions too quickly. We hear something in the stillness of our conscience and suppose it was guilt speaking to us. We hear something in a dream and we conclude that is was that second piece of pie that we ate. We sift the evidence, we explain away the unexplainable until there is nothing left for God to say.

*

I believe that God speaks to us and calls us as surely as we see Jesus call the disciples today in the Gospel. We see Jesus coming to Peter, Andrew, James and John while they were mending their fishing nets and he said to them "follow me". I believe that they knew Jesus before, I believe that they had heard him preach, that they had followed him and were taught by him, I believe that they had already caught his dreams. Do you remember in the movie Tucker, about a man who developed and promoted a car named after him, that he remembered what his mother saying to him when he was young, "Be careful that you dont get too close to people, you might catch their germs" but in her accent it sounded like, "Dont get too close to people, you might catch their dreams". Tucker believed that this is what she was saying for years. I think that sometimes when you get close to certain people catching their dreams can just as readily happen as catching their germs. Well, I think in this case, in this scripture story, the disciples had got close to Jesus and they caught his dreams. Something spoke to them deep inside them so they could not forget it or let it go It kept working on them and working on them and working on them. So when he asked them to follow him to become part of this new community that he was forming they didn't hesitate to go. They followed him immediately.

I believe that is the way a lot of calls come. They work on us on the inside and if we are sensitive in the word of God through all our filtering system, it can work on us on the inside-out. It works on us and works on us and keeps working on us until we cannot let it go and we know what we have to do.

Sometimes we emphasize the difficulty of Gods call, the fear connected with going to where we are called to go (It must have been scary for the disciples). I want you to know that I have found that every call to follow Jesus is first and foremost an invitation to joy. Your invitation to follow Jesus is an invitation to Joy. It is also an invitation to all those who have lost the joy in their life. Jesus meets us where we are meaning our nets, going about our daily chores, in the activities of the day, and says, "Come, follow me, and enter into the my joy ." Have you ever thought of that way?

It is not a call to pleasure. It is a call to joy. Pleasure is a response to external stimulus, forinstance, good food produces a pleasant sensation. When it is removed the pleasure ceases. Joy is different than that. When we look at the ocean we can see that the winds and storms can whip up the surface quite significantly but deep below the surface it can be quite calm. Joy is like the undertow, the disposition of a person's spirit , the posture and bearing of the soul. It lies below the level of physical sensation and stimuli, and as the storms, disappointments, discouragements of life pass over it, like the tides in our lives, the undercurrents of joy may still abide.

The picture painted in the New Testament is that kind of joy. Jesus may be the man of sorrows, in which joy is mixed with great sadness. His life may ofttimes be mingled with tears. But you cannot read the story of his life without being conscious that underneath the sadness there is a deep, abiding, reassuring joy like the joy of a child who is at home in his fathers house. Every page of the New Testament either directly of indirectly reflects the radiance of that life. The theme of the New Testament can be summed up in the statement, "Your sorrow shall be turned into joy."

*

The disciples were called to the joy of being with Jesus. I have found joy in the person of Jesus. I enjoy Jesus. I enjoy his stories and the way he is able to put into simple words, such profound truths of life. I love the way Jesus says things like, "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God." I enjoy the way that he could be wakened in the middle of a storm at sea and quietly, rebuke the sea and calm the waves. I enjoy the way he treated people, people who were seen as sinners. I enjoy the compassion with which he dealt with the multitude. I enjoy the quiet decisiveness which he faced the ultimate issue of his life and went straight toward Jerusalem with his face set like a flint. I dont like the fact that he died on the terrible cross, but there is joy in the way that he accepted death, so free, so fine, without quibbling, peevishness, or pettiness, a kind of superb offering of his life for the life of humanity. He died for me and you. I enjoy that. So I enjoy the person of Jesus.

God has called me to that kind of joy

I also feel called to participating in Jesus life and work. I have heard deep in my conscience the call to be with Jesus, and through the power of the Spirit the light of the world and the salt of the earth. Sometimes I think that a Christian is simply communicates life, and the life is the life that was incarnate in Jesus, a person with the will to transmit life to others. I believe that you know people who bring life to others. You just have to be with them and you feel more alive. We are all called to be those kind of people.

Our call to do Gods will is a continuous thing. It is a lifelong project. It is in facing all our "yes" and "no" in our lives. Jesus 'call to me comes in the choices I make, the things to which I say "yes" or the things to which I say "no". Actually there is a book by M.Shawn Copeland called Saying Yes and No in the practice of faith. He says there are questions that we can ask in facing yes and no:

How do things stand between me and God?
To what can I really say yes to in my life?
Are my "nos" life affirming
To what and to whom have I said "yes"or "no" to this day, this week, this month, year?
What kind of person am becoming by my daily choices?

I have found in my "yeses" and "nos" I have always faced an underlying question that I believe that God is always asking of us in every situation: WHERE DOES MY GREATEST GLORY MEET THE WORLDS GREATEST NEED? That is where God is calling me?

What makes our hearts glad? What gives us the deepest satisfaction? What leaves us with the feeling of sailing true north, the greatest sense of peace. That is our GLORY

Where do we see the worlds greatest need? The world is full of needs and one cannot do something about every one of them. Where are the needs revealed within our area of influence? That is the WORLDS GREATEST NEED for us.

So, where does our glory meet the worlds need.

Keep your eyes open, and our ears tuned in, we will surely find the place where God is calling.

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