(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for A New Administration, originally shared on January 21, 2021. It was the eighty-third video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Our nation has a new administration today. What
does that tell us about evangelism?
Yesterday, we witnessed a peaceful transition
of power. It was a day filled with tension and drama.
Some watched in surprise as their world
changed unexpectedly.
Others saw everything they had hoped for
unfold.
For some, the world they knew had fallen away
and changed forever.
For others, it was a confirmation of their
long-held longings and a restoration of hope.
And all of that. All of that is demonstrated
in a scene from the beginning of Jesus ministry, described at the beginning of
the gospel of Mark, in Galilee.
*Mark 1:14-20
Some watched four sons, two pairs of
brothers, walk away from their jobs and their families, families who would
never be the same.
Others, Simon Peter and Andrew, and James
and John, the two pairs of brothers, saw something in Jesus that was everything
they had hoped for.
For some, the messiah promised for a
thousand years, including 300 years of prophetic silence, might have come to
their neighborhood ready to act, but he sure didn’t look like the military
leader they expected.
Others saw the messiah, now present and
presenting a new possibility for the future. God’s reign. Finally.
The Kingdom of God was at hand, right there
looking at them, and they were suddenly under a new administration.
John the Baptist, the one who prepared the
way, had been arrested by Herod Antipas, an act of violence just before the
arrival of a new administration. Herod Antipas was a regional client ruler governing
Galilee, working for the Romans, a region of northern Israel that included
Nazareth, a region widely regarded as the wrong side of the tracks. Herod
Antipas was subject to the Romans own political king, King Herod who ruled the
nation of Israel from its capital, Jerusalem.
Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good
news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come
near; repent, and believe in the good news”.
That’s a pretty succinct message, but it
contained everything that Jesus was about.
He walked along the Sea of Galilee, 7 miles
wide and 13 miles long, about 20 north east of Nazareth, and saw some fishermen,
Simon and his brother, Andrew. He said to them, “Follow me and I will make you
fish for people.” And immediately (a word Mark uses 40 times in his short
16-chapter gospel), they left their nets and followed him.
Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein once
said, “To achieve
great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough
time." Was there this urgency in Jesus’ voice? Was the spirit of God
moving within the fishermen? Was it a mid-life crisis?
I’ve read that when someone who was born
blind receives their sight, one of the hardest things for them to grasp is the
difference between abstractions and reality, the difference between an apple
and a picture of an apple, for example.
How did these fishermen see in Jesus the
reality of the thing their people had hoped for? Not the idea, but the reality?
Revealing the fullness of that reality was a task that would fill the rest of
Jesus 3-year public ministry, right through his death on the cross for the sin
of the world.
He
walked a little farther and saw two other brothers, also commercial fishermen,
James and John, and immediately (that word again) he extended the same invitation
to them, and they left everybody and everything, and they followed him.
That’s the whole story. So, what’s its
message? Don’t let Jesus find you at work? Be careful what you hope for? Anything
must be better than the life of a commercial fisherman?
Lots of people enjoy fishing as a hobby, for
some peace and quiet, or for some “free” fish.
Because, you know what they say: Give someone
a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach someone to fish…and you can sell them
fishing equipment for the rest of their lives.
A friend of our family joined the Coast
Guard after 9-11. He was stationed in Alaska. He wanted to serve our country,
guard its shores, and protect its citizens. He eventually left the Coast Guard,
disillusioned, after he found that almost all his time spent picking up
commercial fisherman strung out on amphetamines. Commercial fishing is a
demanding job and commercial fisherman can’t afford to sleep when fish have
been found.
Commercial fishing would have given the
disciples a decent and even middle-class life, though. Their product was always
in demand and James and John’s father Zebedee was at least doing well enough
that he could hire employees outside his family. And we know that their
livelihoods weren’t lost when they followed Jesus. What did the disciples do
after Jesus was crucified and died and after three days rose from the dead and
ascended into heaven, and they didn’t know what was going to happen next? They
went back to fishing. Jesus found some of them on the beach, and had breakfast
with them.
Have you ever gone fishing? What’s the most
important thing you have to learn? Be quiet, use the right bait, leave the
dynamite at home? Shure, but what about before you do any of those things? If
you want to catch fish, you have to go to where the fish are. If you want to
catch fish, you have to go to where the fish are.
People used to say, and in fact I’ve said it
in sermons myself, that the church isn’t a museum for saints, it’s a hospital
for sinners. Then, I read a different version of that saying, “The church isn’t
a hospital for sinners, waiting for them to come in through the doors. The
church is more like the paramedics and EMT’s, going to where the sick and
broken people are and bringing them to a place where they can be made whole. If
you want to catch fish, you have to go to where the fish are. If, as evangelist
and ecumenist D.T. Niles said, evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar
where to find bread, we have to go to where our fellow beggars are.
We met a native Alaskan artist in Alaska
after doing a little exploring in an off-the-beaten-track part of a small town
a few years ago. We bought some art from him and talked with him in his shop
for a long time. He said that he had to work lots of jobs to cobble together a
living, but that one job he did not like doing was fishing for crabs. Crabs are
bottom feeders and will eat anything. A buddy of his prevailed on him to help
him fish for crabs one day, though and a storm came up suddenly on the ocean.
He found himself thrown out of the boat and his thick, down-filled coat became
saturated and started to pull him under, down to where the crabs were, his
worst fear. His friend tried throwing him a rope, but the sea was too rough,
and he kept missing. He prayed and begged God to save him. Just then, a huge
swell rose under him and literally threw him back into the boat. He landed on his
feet. That’s a witness.
Why did you become a Christian? Some of us
can’t think of a time when we weren’t Christians. Why do you remain a
Christian? How did your relationship with God support you in a time of loss or
doubt? When has Jesus rescued you? When has he saved you from your worst fear,
when all seemed lost, or from going down a wrong path?
What made you think that it was Jesus
working in your life? That’s your witness. We don’t need dramatic conversion
stories. We just need to tell our stories, particularly with people who are
going through similar things to what we did. Evangelism is just one beggar
telling another beggar where to find bread and, in Martin Luther’s last words,
“We’re all beggars, that’s for sure.”
Pastors can’t do it. Study after study shows
that when a pastor shares his or her faith, people think, well, that's the pastor's job. When a pastor tries to evangelize,
depending on a person’s experience or stereotypes, they’re often seen as having
ulterior motives, someone just wanting more members for more money or more
prestige in the community.
The
testimony of a credible witness, that is a friend or a relative, from someone
who is seen as someone with nothing to gain personally, is responsible for,
depending on the study, 80-85% of all those who come to a living faith in God.
How did you first come to faith in God? It might have been through the
influence of a pastor, or a church program, or a church that was the nearest
Lutheran church in your neighborhood, but someone wanted to share something
good with you and chances are it was the witness of a friend or of a relative.
I’m not passing the buck here, and I know how hard it is. We all want to
be liked, we want to be accepted and not looked upon as being weird or in
school or at work, worse: divisive.
I have a lapel pin that my dad wore. It was
part of a popular evangelism program in the early 60’s. The lapel pin is in the
shape of a fishhook. You can still get them online for less than a couple of
bucks. I think that wearing them was supposed to be a conversation starter, but
I don’t know that it would be very effective today. Any conversations that came
up, I think, would sound like a trick, or that was something your church wanted
you to do. I think that, today, they would be more effective as a message to
the wearer to remember who they are, by remembering who they follow.
I think that there are few enough of us that
the world might be curious. They might be hungry for community and open to an
invitation to meet Jesus at this stage in the pandemic, where we are finally
seeing a decline in cases, hospitalizations and deaths in LA County but saw the
second-highest number of national coronavirus deaths in a single day yesterday.
And that they might be surprised to learn that there are Christians who aren’t
like the ones they see on TV and other media.
Disciples didn’t get invited to follow a
teacher in Jesus day, or in any day in Israel’s history. They made the request
to follow. What does that say to us about the nature of the Kingdom of God that
Jesus invites disciples who are not powerful or learned, but fishermen? That
Jesus is the embodiment of the kingdom, where God reigns, and that we see in
his person and in his actions the way things are supposed to be, a restoration
of the way God created things to be, created us to be?
That is the kingdom. It’s Jesus. It’s the
living, defining relationship with God made possible by Jesus’ death on the
cross.
And what was the message? “The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent; and believe in the
good news.”
What
are we to do in response to the inbreaking, already but not yet Kingdom of God?
Repent, turn away from that which is killing us, and believe, that is, to live
in that living relationship.
The kingdom Jesus spoke of was not a
dictatorship, it was a relationship. Jesus said little about God as king, but lived
a life of a servant. He spoke of God as “Abba”, a Aramaic language term spoken
in love for a father by a child.
In fact, in this regard, Jesus was something
of an embarrassment to his disciples. Remember the tunic that didn’t have a
seam that the soldiers gambled for at the cross. I had thought it was because a
seamless garment was expensive. Apparently, that’s not the case. I read an
article that year called “What Would Jesus Wear?”, or something like that. It
said that the robe Jesus is described as wearing was usually worn by babies
because its seamlessness made it comfortable for them and as an undergarment
beneath an outer tunic as an adult. Jesus only wore the seamless undergarment. He
had nothing to protect him. He was an embarrassment to his disciples.
We are, all of us disciples of Christ. How
do we live that? How do we share our faith and make disciples in a time of
social isolation, during an international pandemic and a time of national crisis?
How do we lift up Jesus in a time of increasing secularization? Has Jesus
become, once again, something of an embarrassment to us?
You may have heard that the Chinese
character for crisis is the same as that for opportunity.
What in our various crises might lead people
to want what we have to offer?
Part of the answer is trinitarian.
Our witness begins with a world view: that
God created everything out of nothing, that he made human beings for a living
relationship with the one true living God, that a real relationship required
the ability to say “no”, and that’s exactly what people did, and that that’s
how evil entered and continues to enter the world. That God tried starting
over, an obvious punishment of many languages, liberation from slavery,
prophets, priests, kings, all to motivate people to return to that
relationship. When human beings did not, he came in human flesh, and suffered
and die to pay the debt of all those “no’s” and heal the separation between God
and human beings through the gift of that relationship, or “faith” to all who
would receive it, sealed by baptism.
Our witness is focused on Jesus death on the
cross, a poor man condemned and executed unjustly, out of God’s love for this
fallen world. That love is what we embody in response to the gift of God in Jesus
Christ and is seen at work in our pioneering development of almost everything
good in this world including orphanages, hospitals, universities, social
service agencies, adoption agencies, foster care agencies, housing for the
homeless and so on.
Our power to live and do these things,
though we are sinners, comes from the Holy Spirit, God’s ongoing personal
presence for good in the world, dwelling within is and thereby making us also
saints.
These are our witness to the world. God is
present and at work seeking people to follow him, in our past, in our present
and in our future. And Jesus, fully God and fully human being, is making this
same invitation to us to follow him every day.
How do we disciples make disciples?
You are probably watching this episode right
now on Facebook, Zoom, or YouTube. Do you know how easy it is to forward these
things to someone anywhere in the world who you know might benefit from a
credible Christian voice, an invitation to faith, or simply a word of
encouragement. OK, maybe not this week. They’ll hear this and might think you’re
just doing this because you were told. But next week. That would be good.
How do we become fishers of people?
Go to where the people are both physically
and in terms of their needs.
Examine our lives and then tell our stories
of need and grace, of guilt and forgiveness, of our pasts and of how God has
given us our future. Share your life
with people as their servant, share your faith in God with them as a friend.
Speak Jesus to them, the Kingdom of God, who
comes to us both as our servant and as our friend, and in everything good.
Invite them to know Him, and to come and live
under a new administration.
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