Sermon thoughts and other musings

Aside from Christmas, Easter, and Adam & Eve, there is probably no Bible story more well-known in the secular world than that of the Good Samaritan. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the term "Good Samaritan" is known, without people knowing the story all that well.

We forget how derisive the term "Samaritan" was to Jews in the time of Jesus. Imagine the worst epithets of modern English, put them all together, and we have the equivalent of "Samaritan." We don't hear the word with the same force today (try yelling "you Samaritan!" at someone who cuts you off in traffic - it won't be very effective) - with the result that we don't understand the story. Samaritans were hated by Jews.

This isn't just a story about compassion. If compassion was the point, then the injured person could have been a Samaritan, and Jesus would have taught the Jewish law expert to care for the person, even if he was a Samaritan. But to put the Samaritan in the position of caregiver, not care-recipient, changes the story.

Imagine seeing a story from the 1850s that went like this: a plantation owner was robbed, beaten, and left for dead. A minister came by, but walked past him. An escaped slave then came upon him, and tended to his wounds.

Would that be a story about compassion? Not really. We would understand that story as being about the humanity of the slave. So likewise, this is a story about the humanity of the Samaritan - and about all Samaritans (the word "good" never appears in the story.)

Who are the Samaritans of our society today? Undocumented immigrants? Homosexuals? The call of Jesus is to understand everyone as fully human, no less than we are.

Okay, so it has been a couple of months since the tragedy of the gunman who murdered those poor Amish girls in their school. I have read so many people - Christians and non-Christians - extol the forgiveness we saw from their community as a true example of what Jesus taught us to do.

But as we enter into the Advent season, a season where we anticipate the child who would teach us to be forgiving, even unto death, a very simple question crossed my mind: do we even really aspire to become that forgiving? Do we have the courage it takes to look someone in the eye who murdered innocent loved ones and say: "I forgive you?" Not only that, but to establish an aid fund for his family? If the answer is 'no', then I wonder if we really have the right to celebrate the coming of the Christ Child.

Sure, we celebrate Jesus as God who chose to become like us. But are we willing to become like Jesus?

You couldn't have a better text for preaching after a week of work in New Orleans than a text about tearing down the Temple. We worked on homes that have been sitting untouched since Katrina hit 14 months ago. To see what has happened to New Orleans is as unthinkable as the predictions of the destruction of the Temple must have seemed to Jesus' followers.

Every house we gutted was a house full of memories. Every owner and family were in tears as they watched us haul their lives to the curb as a moldy heap. One house was particularly memorable: she was a self-confessed "pack-rat" - and wow was that an understatement. As we brought out load after load after load of moldy, mildewed, rotted items that she had collected for decades, she would desperately look for something salvageable. An item here or there could be salvaged in her eyes. Nothing could be saved as far as we were concerned. Finally it was just too much, and she just sat down in front of the heap of debris, a pile taller than she was, and she broke down in tears.

But as the coordinator of our work team, I got to do the final walk-throughs with our on-site coordinator and the owner. I got to be there when the owners walked through their homes, freshly gutted down to the studs. I got to see the looks in their eyes when for the first time in months there was hope. I got to see it in their eyes as they finally saw possibilities again.

Maybe, just maybe, the things that fill our lives blind us to the possibilities God has for us, and what we really need is to gut our lives down to the studs. Just once in a while.

Since this was the day of the Blizzard of 2006, I'll post a little more of the sermon than usual, and include the Scripture text as well.

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, "If you choose, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.

One of the qualities I most admire in people is decisiveness. I admire people who face a difficult situation, evaluate it quickly, and have the confidence to act on their judgment.

Jesus was a decisive person, no more so than in this story, where he is faced with an unexpected decision to make. It's unexpected because lepers are not supposed to approach people. In Leviticus 13, lepers are instructed to leave the people, keep their faces covered, and shout "unclean! unclean!" to warn others away.

But this is one bold leper. He dares Jesus to heal him. And Jesus responds - not by healing him at a distance, but by touching him! Touching a leper makes you "unclean". You do not want to be known as a person who has touched a leper. Jesus doesn't care about that; Jesus just cares about healing people.

Jesus breaks the rules in order to heal. Too often, Christians put obeying the rules first, and helping others second. As Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic, recently said: "The church is more concerned with preventing sin than unleashing the potential in people." And that may be the worst sin of all.

We can't be more concerned with staying clean than with healing others. Have you ever known a person who has a box of gift soaps - you know, the really fancy expensive soaps that are just too good to ever be used? It's silly to protect soap from dirt. If you do, it just isn't doing what soap is supposed to do.

We're called to respond to a hurting world with a bold: "I do choose." Does your life say to the world that you are one who has said, "I do choose"? Does the church manage its resources in such a way that it says to the world, "We do choose"?

Pastor McManus wrote in one of his books, "Even at our worst, we are still only one decision away from good." That decision is simple: it's to say, "I do choose." It's to say, "I choose to help", "I choose to give", "I choose to heal".

The world is hurting. What do you choose?

Exorcism. What do you think of when you see that word? For me, it recalls nauseating scenes from the movie, The Exorcist (nauseating because I don't do horror movies well). For many, if not most, exorcisms are pure fiction, and demonic possession is an ancient explanation for maladies that we would refer to as psychotic mental illness, or epileptic seizures, etc.

But thinking of demons and exorcisms in that way removes those concepts from our everyday lives. And this passage, though it tells the story of an exorcism, is very much about our everyday lives.

We have a concept of demons, though perhaps we mean it metaphorically. Have you followed the controversy around James Frey and his book, "A Million Little Pieces"? He reportedly said that "the demons" that fueled his addictions also caused him to embellish his tales in the book.

I don't know if demons are real as distinct beings, or if demons are just a metaphor for our struggles. But it doesn't matter what demons are - I know what demons do. A demon is anything that leads us toward doing that which we know is wrong.

Where God is, demons flee. So where in your life have you locked God out? It's often not a deliberate decision; it's as simple as believing that God's way of being doesn't apply to a facet of your life. Do you believe that you can't do your job according to God's way of being? If so, you've locked God out of your job. And the problem is that where God is locked out - that's where demons can stay.

It's human nature to want to lock God out of parts of our lives. We want to confine God to Sundays, to church, maybe to our families. And for me, I've found that the toughest place for me to let God in is to give God authority over my hopes, dreams, and ambitions. But where God is excluded, demons can stay. In retrospect, the deepest problems I've had came about because my dreams and goals were not of God. No wonder I found myself in a pit, calling to God for help. If only I had let God rule over my hopes and dreams, I would have stayed off that path.

So let God rule over everything in your life. Everything now and everything future. Because where God is, demons must flee.

We want to believe that the first workers should get paid more. One of the people I went to college with became Microsoft employee number 6. He did very well. :-) We think it's right and just that employee #6 should make more than employee number 6,000.

Jesus turns so much of what we believe on its head. The last workers in the vineyard received as much as the first! And worse, Jesus paid them in full view of the workers who came early! Jesus would have been accused of violating the vineyard's H.R. policies -- don't we all know better than to openly display everyone's salaries?

So the last workers get the same money ... which maybe we can tolerate if they have a good reason for being last. Years ago, I would have made excuses for the last workers - nobody hired them, etc. But what if they were just plain lazy? What if they didn't try to get hired? I've come to realize ... so what?

Over the years, as I've come to grips with my own brokenness and my own failings, I've come to understand that God loves me even when I'm in the midst of a mess of my own making. Even when it's completely my fault, even when it's the result of my own sin - God still loves me, and God will not abandon me.

Remember Jonah? He was so determined that the people of Nineveh should be punished, he arranged to have himself tossed overboard. A "rational" God would have let him drown and sent another prophet. But not our God. Our God provided Jonah with a big fish. Our God rescued Jonah from a mess of his own making. Jonah's rebellion was stark. Jonah's motivation was terrible (he wanted to keep the Ninevites from repenting!) ... and God's love was beyond all of that.

So remember two things:

1. When you're called to show compassion, don't ask whether the other person is in need because it's his/her fault. That doesn't matter. All that matter is that the person is in need.

2. When you're in a mess of your own making, don't think God will abandon you. Even if you've jumped off a boat in the middle of the ocean, know that God will still send you a whale.

"Take up your cross and follow me."

Wow. What a command from Christ! One of the things we thank God for every day is the fact that we live in a society where we don't have to risk our lives in order to worship as we choose. So what do we do when we hear Christ's call to take up our own cross?

First, we have to remember the difference between being called to die and being called to be willing to die. These are really two separate concepts. Everyone knows the difference between someone who risks his/her life and someone who has a death wish. A race car driver risks death willingly, but would never knowingly get into an unsafe car or refuse to wear safety gear.

It's easy to get the two confused. The early Church, which honored martyrs, had to also decree that it was a sin to seek martyrdom. A willingness to be martyred was the epitome of faith. To seek martyrdom was a sin.

We're called to be willing to take up a cross. We aren't called to seek crucifixion. We have to remember that Jesus died on the cross for us, so we don't have to. The power of our sins (the guilt, the shame) - all that also died on the cross with Jesus. It would be an insult to the crucifixion for us to believe that it somehow wasn't enough. So if Jesus was the agnus Dei, the lamb of God, the last sacrifice ... why do we need to take up a cross?

The answer is in passion and purpose. What defines our lives more than anything is what we're willing to die for. Would you die for your family? Would you die for your friends? Would you die for Jesus? Would you die for the people Jesus called us to love? A race car driver risks death because he/she finds meaning and purpose in taking on that risk. Would you risk your life to bring food to the poor?

Are your Christian principles worth dying for? How about worth going to jail for? Or maybe losing your job for? For how many of us (me included!) does that cross we're willing to take up get smaller and smaller ... until it's just the right size to fit on a necklace and no bigger?

Where will this willingness to die lead us? In Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed the question: "Will the church merely gather up those whom the wheel has crushed or will it prevent the wheel from crushing them?" Helping those whom the wheel has crushed is good work. Preventing the wheel from crushing them is good, dangerous work. It puts us into the path of the wheel.

Helping those who are crushed is compassion. But we're called to go even further - to move beyond compassion to passion. Compassion will have us trailing the wheel. Passion will put us into the wheel's path to stop it. Where do you think you'll find Jesus - behind the wheel or in its path?

Reality. I think "reality TV" helps us take a fresh look at the word "reality" because reality TV is so ... unreal. (By the way, Mark Burnett, who started it all with "Survivor" and also created "The Apprentice", uses the phrase "unscripted drama" instead. And I think he's right - these are not reality, these are dramas created in the editing room, based on players who were operating without a script.)

So what is the "real world"? Is the real world one where we are bound by the laws of nature - or one where we are not? After all, God's world is one where walking on water is a normal occurrence. The Hebrew Scriptures understand walking on water to be God's thing: "He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea." (Job 9:8, NIV)

When Jesus beckons Peter onto the water, Jesus is inviting Peter into God's world. Peter, if only for a few steps, gets to live in God's world - a world where the restrictions we've been taught to submit to no longer apply, and where scary storms are no longer to be feared. On the water, the impossible becomes possible, and "can't" becomes "will".

Sure, at one level we probably think it would be cool to live in that world. But remember, God's world - the world where walking on water is normal; in other words, a world where those who would sink will rise above the waves - is also the world where the last are first, the poor and the lame have the best seats at the banquet, and the last workers in the vineyard are paid as much as the first. Are you still ready to get out of the boat? Jesus is calling us!

I remember as a young math student being taught the difference between an axiom and a theorem. A theorem was something that you tested or proved. An axiom was a given, a presumption.

In your faith, what is an axiom, and what is a theorem? What are our real axioms - our truly first principles - and what are things that are derivative from them?

Paul, in this famous passage from Romans, appears to me to be making a distinction that is analogous to the axiom/theorem distinction when he talks about the love of God. For most people, especially of that time, God's love was, at best, a theorem. They wondered, does God love us? How can we make God love us? And maybe some of them even deduced that God loves us.

But for Paul, God's love is an axiom. It comes before everything else. We can only interpret the universe after we have first understood that God loves us. We don't look at creation and deduce that God loves us because creation is so beautiful; we first understand that God loves us, and then understand that God created the universe because God loves us.

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." - Romans 8:38-39

Paul understood this first. That allowed him to understand the rest.

As a kid, I loved ABC television's "Schoolhouse Rock." Do you remember songs like "Conjunction Junction" or "I'm Just A Bill"? One of my favorites was the Preamble to the Constitution. To this day, I know the words to the Preamble because of that song, which still plays in my head.

On this Independence Day weekend, let us remember that the American Revolution was not just about freedom from a monarchy, it was about freedom to create a just society. We didn't obtain freedom so that we would be free of all responsibility - freedom was about freedom from the allegiance to the king so we could have allegiance to one another.

When Jesus says in this passage: "my yoke is easy, my burden is light" - Jesus is telling us that we still have a yoke to wear. Life isn't a choice between a yoke or no yoke, it's between having a yoke put on us by the world, and having a yoke put on us by Christ.

And Christ's yoke ties us to the service of God and one another. But in that mindset, look at the Preamble again:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Look at how much of the Preamble is about forming relationships to one another. It's not about freedom from each other, but freedom to help one another. Let us remember that freedom means freedom to serve our sisters and brothers in our society.

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." - Matthew 10:34

This is tough language, and to hear it from the lips of Jesus is difficult indeed. From a scholarly perspective, it's important to know that the translation incorrectly conveys a sense that Jesus' purpose may have been to create dissension, while the sense of the Greek is more toward suggesting that Jesus was simply saying that dissension was a foreseeable consequence of his ministry.

But in and of itself, that's still bold - bolder than most church people (particularly pastors) are. We're often afraid to upset each other, let alone speak prophetically to the world. All of us tend to shy away from hearing the truth about ourselves. We want to hear about how vibrant our economy is, not about 13 million children living in poverty. We want to hear about the good things we've done, not the ways in which we've exploited others. But we have to face the truth. William Sloane Coffin ("Credo") wrote: "Nobody will love you for being the enemy of their illusions."

We also have to remember that the truth isn't all bad. We get the courage to face the truth because God loves us. The truth is hard to hear: we don't have our priorities straight, we don't love others as ourselves ... but the truth that trumps all other truths is: nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

This passage ends with Jesus saying: "those who lose their life for my sake will find it." The life we have to lose is the life of illusion we valiantly struggle to hang onto. And it's an illusion we hang onto often because we're afraid that what is beneath that illusion isn't worthy. But Jesus tells us that the real "me" is worthy. So we can lose the illusion that masquerades as our life, and in so doing, find the real person beneath. And that is life as God wanted us to be.

I'm sure you've played the game "Rock, Paper, Scissors." That game never quite made sense to me. Rock breaks scissors, okay. Scissors cuts paper, obvious. But paper covers rock? C'mon! Paper can't defeat rock!

But the logic of faith is like the logic of paper covers rock. What the world thinks of as powerful is overcome by what the world thinks of as weak.

In this passage, Jesus does three "unclean" things: he eats with sinners, he is touched by a hemorrhaging woman, and he touches the dead girl's body. The religious authorities of the time would have declared Jesus "unclean" for any of these acts. But instead, Jesus turns all of these situations to the good!

We're taught to believe that what is pure is tainted by anything that isn't pure. A drop of anything put into a bucket of pure water and the water isn't pure anymore. But the world's logic of purity doesn't work with Jesus. When Jesus is touched by anything that isn't pure, it isn't Jesus who is made unclean - instead, the dead live, the sick are healed, and the sinners repent.

Paper does cover rock.

What is "living water"? To us, the phrase is just a euphemism. To persons in Biblical times, living water meant running water - as opposed to stagnant, standing water. In nature, it's pretty obvious that you would prefer to drink fresh running water instead of standing water.

Movement vs. stagnation. That's what the Gospel is all about. The usual Scripture text for Pentecost is Acts 2:1-21. A piece of great advice I heard from a friend about reading that passage is "watch the walls." What he meant by that is that Jesus appears to a group huddled in a room - then suddenly there is a crowd! What happened to the walls? The Spirit calls us to leave our walled existences and get out among the people. Being people of Pentecost - "pentecostal", if you will - means being willing to build bridges to others across every wall that humanity has been able to erect.

Too many churches are content to open their doors, but unwilling to leave their walls. But the willingness to move beyond our own life experience and connect with others in their lives helps us try to understand what their lives are like. Theologian Frederick Buechner says that the capacity to live in someone else’s skin is the definition of compassion. And he went on to say that compassion also means understanding that there cannot truly be joy and peace for me until there is joy and peace for you

True compassion isn't about letting people inside our walls; the compassion we need to show is the compassion of God - the God who came to earth as Jesus Christ, and the God who moves among us in the person of the Holy Spirit.

Do you want to be standing water or living water?

Mother's Day: Being One Family

I've always been opposed to patriarchal language for God, not just because of the sexist implications, but because of my own sexism: I see God as a nurturer, and I associate nurturing with mothers, not fathers. So it's my own gender-stereotyping that sees predominantly feminine qualities in God.

In this passage we see Jesus pray for his disciples, and quite frankly, I hear the voice of a mother praying for her children more than the voice of a father or a friend. And what does Jesus pray for? That God will protect the disciples. And "that they may be one."

"That they may be one." That is every parent's prayer for his/her children, right? Ever see children fight over an estate? What could be more dishonoring to a parent? Can you imagine the pain a parent would feel seeing her/his children fight over what had been left to the children in the hope of making their lives better?

I think any parent would say: if you want to hurt a parent, hurt the children. And parents would probably rather have a child do something mean to them than see their children fight with each other. Now extrapolate that to this world, with God as our parent, and we as God's children. What do you think war does to God? Do you think God sees anything as being worth fighting a war over?

Love first, ask questions later

Do you remember your first day of school? Some kids (maybe even you) were crying, unable to let go of their parents. For many children, this would be their first really extended separation from their parents. Parental love was being redefined at that moment, from a constant hands-on love, to what felt like love in absentia - despite the promise of being picked up at the end of the day.

This passage, a continuation of Jesus' "Farewell Discourse" (John, chapters 13-17) deals with Jesus' attempt to teach the disciples how to deal with his absence, and specifically with teaching them how to continue to have faith when he has gone. I believe that Jesus' answer is simple: love. In loving one another we remember that God is real.

For most people, asking for a sign from God to prove God's existence is about miracles ... but maybe love itself is a miracle. It's easy to dismiss a message about love as simple, but the fact is that love is very hard. To love one another - to love everybody, unconditionally - is the hardest thing God asks us to do. Mother Teresa did it, and we call her a saint.

What does loving one another look like? It means deciding, in advance, that you will love whomever you meet. Before you enter the store, you decide you're going to love the cashier. Before you board a bus, you decide you're going to love the person seated next to you. All because love isn't earned, it is simply given. And remembering that reminds us that God is real, and God's love is constant.

Mapquest and God

Did you know that if you enter "heaven" as the city on a Mapquest search, it responds "Multiple cities found"? Anyway, Mapquest is a symbol for me of the certainty people want from their lives. Enter a precise destination, receive precise directions. Know every turn in advance. And supposedly we'll never be lost again.

The disciples seemed to want to find their way to heaven with Mapquest-like certainty. They want Jesus to show them the way, at which point Jesus gives that most famous response: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." Unfortunately, this statement is generally seized upon by exclusivist Christians to claim that Jesus is excluding others from access to heaven. But if we understand his statement in that way, "I am the way" reduces Jesus to being a mere tool in our desire to get to heaven. Jesus becomes the way to get to where we want to go.

But that isn't what Jesus is about. Jesus, I believe, is saying that he is the destination itself; he is the journey itself. Jesus is the way, period. Christianity is about a way of being, not about getting to heaven or avoiding hell.

Jesus is the way - to claim Jesus is to claim the way of peace, the way of love, the way of harmony. Come to think of it, that does sound like heaven, doesn't it?

The Fear of Easter

We've gotten used to reading about the appearances of angels to humans, which invariably begin with the angel declaring "Do not be afraid!" We imagine that the sudden appearance of an other-worldly being would be a frightening thing, and the angel's first task is to calm us down.

In Matthew's Easter story, the same occurs. The angel appears to the women at the tomb and announces: "Do not be afraid!" The women look at the empty tomb, and flee.

As they flee, they meet the risen Christ. Jesus greets them, and the women take hold of his feet and worship him. This would suggest that they weren't afraid of the risen Christ, yet he says "Do not be afraid."

What is there to be afraid of in the risen Christ? The fear of change. The fear of being compelled to act. The fear of not having fear as an excuse. Once we know the tomb is empty, once we know that Jesus Christ is risen, we no longer have an excuse not to do as Christ commands. We know we have to work for social justice, even if it makes us unpopular. We know we have to befriend the poor, even if we don't want to. We know we can't rest behind our doubts, we know we can't use uncertainty as an excuse anymore. We have to love our enemies because we know Christ is risen.

Knowing that Christ is risen means we have no choice but to fully live as Christians - advocating for the poor and the oppressed. For many of us, that is scary indeed.

Head faith, heart faith

While reading this week's story of the healing of Lazarus, it struck me that what was significant to me were the actions of the characters other than Jesus and Lazarus. Mary, Martha, Thomas - they were the ones who drew my attention.

Thomas, forever immortalized as "doubting" Thomas, makes a significant declaration of faith: he is willing to go with Jesus to Bethany to die. Sure, he isn't exactly an optimist ... but he is willing to go where none of the other disciples want to go.

Martha and Mary are also people of faith, but I hear a different quality of faith in each. When Martha is asked about her faith, she gives a very theological declaration. Yes, she knows that Lazarus will rise again at the end times. But she strikes me as the stoic one - the good worker who did her duty (and resented Mary) in Luke 10:38-42.

Mary, on the other hand, simply kneels at Jesus' feet and weeps. And her emotion causes Jesus to weep. And when Jesus weeps, we see a declaration from God that goes far beyond anything words or logic can tell us. God weeps! God cares! My own journey of faith has been a journey of about 18 inches - the distance from my brain to my heart. It's the most important 18 inches a person's faith can travel. Theological understanding pales in comparison to feeling the love of God and love of others.

Want to know how God relates to humanity? Just remember: Jesus wept.

Truth and Temptation

This is Matthew's version of the temptation of Jesus by Satan. Scripture doesn't really tell us much about the origin of Satan, so various mythologies have developed over the years. One version holds that Satan was not only an angel, but a useful angel - the "tempter", who helped people learn about themselves through temptation. After all, don't we learn a lot about who we are and what we value by looking at what tempts us? Anyway, this legend contends that Satan began to enjoy his job too much (aside: I don't ever use male pronouns for God, but somehow I don't mind using them for Satan ... I wonder why that is?). And thus began Satan's fall.

How does Jesus resist temptation? Not by willpower but by discernment. The first two temptations are about Jesus' identity. Satan begins each with: "If you are the Son of God..." - he challenges Jesus' pride. But Jesus knows who he is, and doesn't need to prove it.

Satan quotes Scripture at Jesus, but all that proves is that just because someone is quoting Scripture, that doesn't mean the person is good.

By the third temptation, Satan no longer challenges Jesus to prove his identity. Instead, he offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world. But are they even Satan's to offer? It's an empty offer. Jesus sees the truth and rejects the offer.

So what do we learn about temptation from this story? The key to resisting isn't willpower, but discernment of the truth. Many of our temptations have illusion at their core. Lottery tickets are a good example. The illusion of winning. The reality of losing.

Fight temptation with truth. Need to resist greed? Discern the truth about the emptiness of material possessions. Need to resist the temptation to be self-destructive? Discern the truth about your own value as a human being.

Satan, whether he is a literal or a metaphorical character, is all about lies. Truth conquers lies. Eternally.

In this passage, we see Jesus learning of John's arrest. John the Baptist had been preparing the way for Jesus, proclaiming a call to repentance and faith in the one who was to come. After hearing the bad news about John, Jesus begins to recruit disciples himself.

"As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." (Matthew 4:18-19)

Simon and Andrew immediately leave their nets and follow Jesus. But why did they go? What did Jesus promise them? Jesus didn't promise them their own reward; Jesus didn't say "Follow me, and I will make you rich" or "Follow me, and I promise you entry to heaven." Instead, Jesus only offers them the chance to do more work: "I will make you fish for people." Jesus calls them with an opportunity to serve.

Are you ready to follow Jesus on those terms? Are you ready to follow Jesus being promised nothing more than the opportunity to work for him? Or do you want something from Jesus, rather than following him so you can give?