"Net Losses, Net Gains"
January 29, 2012

Jonah 3:1-10

The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.


Mark 1:14-20

Now after John was arrested, 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.” As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

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One thing that I think we should do, as Christians, is to read the Bible a bit more like it was just any other ordinary book. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the Bible isn’t the unique, authoritative word of God. What I mean is that a lot of times, we’ll read something in the Bible, and we place the Bible on such a high pedestal that we don’t question what read. Things that we’d read in pretty much any other kind of book, things that would just jump right off the page and catch our attention, things we’d immediately say “Wait a minute – did I just read that? What’s going on there? – we’ll read in the scriptures and our minds will just gloss over a lot of it. We’ll give some of those unusual things a critical pass, just because, well, it’s the Bible. I think that’s a mistake. I think that it’s often those oddities, those irregularities that God intends us to catch, and to think about. It’s the oddities that help to really draw out much of the message that God wants us to get from the scriptures themselves.

This story from Mark is a case in point. We heard how Jesus had been going about Galilee proclaiming the gospel, and one day he was just walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and he calls out to some random fishermen, “Follow me!” - and they just drop their nets and follow along after him, leaving everything behind them and becoming the first of Jesus’ disciples.

The passage says they did it “immediately.” That’s a fascinating thing. That’s one of those things that sticks out and begs us to think about. Why would these men have done that – just drop everything, walk away from their current life and set off on a completely new and different one? It doesn’t seem to make sense. If you were writing a fictional story, you’d have to add a whole lot more detail to explain why these men were willing to just go like that. In the gospels, though, we don’t get any of that kind of detail to make it easier for us to process it; we’re just told that they did it. Did Jesus come across four fishermen along the lakeshore who just happened to be so absolutely disgusted with their lives as fishermen that they’d just on anything to leave it behind for something else? Had they heard Jesus before, teaching in the synagogue or the marketplace in town, and this was just the result of longer consideration about becoming disciples of his? We just don’t know. What we do know is that there was apparently something different, something special that they saw in Jesus that made them willing to make that drastic, life-changing decision and go off in a completely different path.

Another part of the story that we tend to miss is the repercussions of their up and leaving like that. What about old Zebedee, the father of James and John? How was this going to affect him? Had he been counting on his two sons to take over the family fishing business, so he could take things at least a little easier in his old age? Even if he were impressed with Jesus himself, he still must have had mixed emotions about this, torn with questions and doubts about the wisdom of his sons’ decision.

Were these four fishermen leaving behind serious commitments to family and friends, business commitments, community commitments? How could they make such a major decision, so quickly, just like that? Clearly, based on the rest of scriptures, they weren’t sure that Jesus was truly the Messiah until much later. They were making a decision on faith here, a hunch. How could they be sure what they were doing was right? We have the benefit of two thousand years of history and tradition confirming that they did indeed make the right decision, but to imagine them and their thoughts, in the moment, before everything else unfolded – things had to seem a lot less clear. Still, they heard Jesus’ call, and something apparently deep inside them spoke to their hearts, their souls, and they couldn’t deny it or ignore it. They simply had to go. They left their nets behind, and they went.

Pastors can understand something about hearing that inescapable inner voice, calling us to follow Christ. That’s especially true for us “second call” people entering the ministry. There are very clear questions in your mind and heart about whether you’re hearing a legitimate call. And there are deep, soul-searching questions about changing or leaving earlier commitments. But even that situation is different from what those first disciples faced. There was no call process, no denominational minimum salary requirements, no health insurance, no pension. There was just Jesus, and the road, and the unknown future. That’s a scary place to be.

Actually, we all know someone who’s in that same scary place right now. You probably remember Noah M____, who visited us recently to talk about his mission experience in Thailand; our congregation helped finance his trip. Last Sunday, during the passing of the peace, Connie M____ told me that after a lot of serious discernment and prayer, and no small amount of tears, Noah has sensed a call to leave graduate school, to leave his scholarship and his plans behind, and to return to Thailand to serve God in mission – continuing studies there, but primarily being there in-country to respond to God’s call to him to work in mission to the people of the country. Noah’s got to be feeling a lot of the same things that the first disciples felt, when they left their nets behind – truly, their “safety nets” – and they went into the unknown where God was calling them. And I’m sure that Noah’s parents, and his grandparents, are feeling the same kind of mixed emotions about Noah dropping his nets – his safety nets – and following where he believes he hears God leading him, just as Zebedee must have when his sons dropped their nets and did the same thing.

What would be compelling enough to make you do the same sort of thing – to drop everything and go off in a completely different direction that you sensed God calling you toward? What would it take? Some big, splashy miracle? A sign in the sky, another star in the east? We know that God can speak to us with a quiet, small voice, or with all the subtlety of a 2x4 smacking the backside of our heads - but even in its boldest of ways, it doesn’t come with those kinds of things, or a signed Certificate of Authenticity; a guarantee that you’re doing the right thing. I mean, one of the potentially troubling aspects of this story from Mark for us, is that while we can admire the disciples accepting Jesus’ call, very few of us would likely do the same thing. Even if we were very sure that what we were feeling was a legitimate call from God to do something very different, most of us still hesitate. Our physical stuff, our own best-laid plans, our own chosen priorities – all those things that we see as our safety nets, often actually just end up becoming nets that entangle us. Nets that keep us from obeying God when we hear him calling us to something new and different, or that keep us from hearing God at all. It’s very difficult to get untangled from those nets, but that’s what God asks us to do often enough. To lay them down, in order to find, and enjoy, that truly new, and transformed, and joyful life that God wants us to live. To suffer a “net loss,” if you will, in order to achieve a “net gain.”

And don’t think that God’s voice is always calling us to drop everything and run off to Outer Mongolia to build a school for orphans. Sometimes, Christ is calling us to drop our safety net of pride, to follow him toward reconciling some longstanding hurt and disagreement with a family member or a friend. Or to drop our safety net of dollars, to follow him toward financially supporting the mission of our congregation more than in the past. Or to drop our safety net of comfort, to follow him in reaching out and accepting other people in Christ who are very different from us, and serving them in Christ’s name. To accept a net loss of “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” or “that’s the way we’ve always thought before;” to accept a net gain of “this is the way we need to do it” and “this is the way we need to think about it now.” Because whether we like sitting on the edge of the lake tending to our current familiar old nets or not, Christ’s message to us to be part of his mission to the world today is “Give up your old, right now. Change, or die.”

Dropping our safety nets – accepting a net loss – can be scary, even when we know that what Jesus promises us is so much better. But the good news for us is that that sometimes scary, no-safety-net life that Christ is calling us to really is so much better – and not just later on, in heaven, but today. This afternoon. Right now.


Thanks be to God.