Left Behind

Left Behind

A Sermon on Mark 1:14-20

by Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On the Second Sunday Following Epiphany

January 21 2018

Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

The first time I went sky-diving I began the jump with several summersaults, this was not intended even if it looked extremely hardcore. It was simple a natural reaction, when one is suddenly flung from a plane that is flying just fine, it makes sense to try and grab onto something to stop the sudden flinging from the plane. So when my tandem partner got my body on the edge of the plane’s opening right before we jumped and I saw the wing and my body’s natural fight or flight response took over and was certain that I needed to try to hold onto the wing to stop what suddenly then seemed more like certain death than a fun little outing.

So he counted to three before we jumped and as soon as we got to three and were out of the plane, I reached my arms to try and grab onto the wing. This resulted in rotating our bodies a bit and the summersault effect out of the plane that we suddenly had to try and balance.

When we landed, my tandem instructor looked at me and said, “What happened up there when we jumped?” I tried my hardest to explain it but he just kept looking at me with this very confused look on his face and then said, “But you signed up to jump right, and then you did not want to jump?” 

I often feel like this is what Jesus is saying to us today, looking around at us and how we are living our lives, as we try our hardest to hold onto things that we were never actually supposed to hold onto and clutching as tight as we can….. to money and possessions, to our old ways of doing things, to certain theologies, to family and friends, to our children, to our bank accounts, to our jobs, even to our very church…. and Jesus is looking, “Tell me what is going on..” and when we try to explain Jesus gets this quizzical look on his face, “But you signed up for this?”

And this is about letting go… in the words of Father Richard Rohr: “all great spirituality is about letting go.”

And letting go of things is not what we humans do very well. Control is somehow rooted in all the stuff that makes us so human: fear, unworthiness, lack of trust and lack of vulnerability. Control is deeply rooted in our being… look at the Garden story… We believe that fruit will make us a bit more like God, to know more and to control more, then yeah we want it, give us some of that fruit.

It’s a place most of us know well, the grasping and clutching… anything but the loss of control and jumping into the unknown, we are okay as long as we are in charge or think we are in charge. In fact if we talk about it long enough we even use the phrase “a sense of control.” We know that we don’t truly control anything, we just love to be in a place where we think we do.

It’s why it can be so frustrating to try and help someone learn to float in the water… you can help them get their body into position, you can teach them everything they need to know about relaxing, you can show them how, you can hold them up and slowly let go… but there is going to come a moment for them when they have to just let go of control and float, to let go.

And this is so the truth of our very lives and all the great things in life: love, parenting, faith, marriage, art, prayer.. at some point we just have to let go of control and float. 

And this letting go is not just a problem we personally have, we do it collectively too… we have all experienced moments of being frustrated with the church for our incredible ability to grab control and hold on for dear life. It’s a natural response here as well, the church is by and large a conservative institution in the best sense of that word, meant to conserve the Gospels, and sometimes we mix that up with conserve and control. 

And again the words of Father Richard Rohr: “all great spirituality is about letting go.”

Our text today is about letting go. Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee and there Simon and Andrew, two brothers. We have no idea if these are brothers that have known Jesus for some time and so naturally they are intrigued by him and his call. Or maybe it’s just this incredibly charismatic voice and the minute they hear it their hearts melt and they follow. Or maybe they have been listening to John the Baptist. We don’t know, what we know is that they are fishing one minute, called to follow Jesus, so they drop their nets and suddenly have a new calling. 

And Jesus keeps walking and there are some other fishermen, another pair of brothers, a bit wealthier than the last pair of brothers… Simon and Andrew had a net, James and John have a net and a boat, they have people working with them… But once again the same thing, one minute they are fishing and the next they are dropping their nets and have a new calling.

And we know the rest of the story. Right?

Or we know the rest of their story…. there is another character in this text who we often miss. Verse 19: “As he went a little farther he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending their nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed Jesus.”

And poor Zebedee is left behind. My initial read was how tragic, how sad. It almost seemed unfair of Jesus, “I choose you and you… not you.” I could picture poor Zebedee going home to his wife, the mother of James and John, tradition tells us her name is Salome. At first I saw them sitting in their home, suddenly empty nesters at a time when empty nesters was not a thing, left behind and without a future and missing their boys. Weeping and lamenting this huge loss.

But as I saw this scene in my mind, the words of Christ transformed things and their weeping turned to laughter.

I realized Zebedee is not sad, Zebedee is celebrating because his sons are doing exactly what he taught them to do… to strike out into uncharted waters, to sail into the unpredictable sea, to go their own way and do their own thing.  Zebedee and Salome are celebrating, this is the moment they have been waiting for.

In fact maybe Zebedee is finally joyous, maybe Zebedee has been sitting in the boat day in and day out looking at his sons thinking, “I taught you better than this, so why are you here doing the same thing I did all my life? It’s time for you to do your own thing, to chart your own course.” Zebedee must have been the type of parent who taught his children to read Scripture through their own eyes and not his eyes, and welcomed the new truths they shared. It’s a way of Scripture reading we might all need to embrace, reading the text no longer through our parent’s eyes- you see the world has already experienced their truth, but what about your truth.

Zebedee is the parent who wants their child to have their own adventure. He is the father who does not care that his children do things exactly as he did them. He is the father who understands legacy is not so much about carrying something on exactly as previously done as it is understanding the spirit of things and doing them in new ways. He is the one who understands that all things are being made new. 

And Zebedee is just as much a disciple as his two sons.

Zebedee is who we need to be studying because he is the perfect example of letting go. 

Certainly this was not the easiest of choices for him, his sons were his future and staying in the family fishing business probably would have had the very least provided him stability. If something happened to him, he knew his wife was taken care of. If he could not work, he had the boys to take care of him. Fishing might not have been the most lucrative of business opportunities but it certainly was not the worst. 

But his security, his future, the world that he knew so well did not matter to him nearly as much as letting his sons go, letting the next chapter of the story be written without his having to control it, letting his boys follow, letting them take the lead. 

Imagine if he had not been able to let go… the Gospel story looks very different. Two less disciples. No John, whom we believe is the youngest of the disciples, the beloved. The two who with Peter witness the raising of Jairus daughter, the two who with Peter experience the Transfiguration,  who are with Jesus during the toughest part of the night in the Garden praying, John who takes Mary into his house following the crucifixion… all of that would be lost if Zebedee can’t let go. 

So thank God for Zebedee’s faith that already understood that which Meister Eckahrt so simply wrote years later: “God is not found in the soul by any kind of addition, but by a process of subtraction.” That Zebedee is willing and not willful.

I think there is a lot that we can learn from Zebedee. 

It starts by knowing the things we are holding onto…. to name that which we need to release. Close your eyes this morning and answer these questions, what is the first response to these: Where do you feel the need to be in control? 

Where do you find yourself feeling maybe a bit too right or the need to be right? 

In what places are you driven simply to be effective? 

Where do you find yourself wanting the old way to never change?  

What cultural biases have you bought into too much? 

In what areas for you is it all about power and control and safety and security?  

Because that’s it, that is the dance where you need to learn to follow and not lead. This is your place of surrender. That is where you need to let go, that is what you need to surrender. 

Because there is more waiting. 

I struggle with control, it’s my demon of choice. A few years ago I was interviewing at a church that I truly believed was perfect for me, a church where my ego got really involved and just took over, and I just knew it was going to happen and I planned everything and I let control drive. And then it didn’t happen and I was devastated, totally lost for some time.

I found a quote that saved me in those days, it’s from Walter Bruegemann: “The world for which you have been so carefully preparing is being taken away from you by the grace of God.”

There is such salvation in those words.

It was exactly what I needed. For Lent that year I gave up control, which is not easy. Every time I found myself trying to control something or get into life’s driver’s seat, I stopped and paused and said a quick prayer: “Lord have mercy on me, a planner and controller” and then I kept that quote in my pocket and I would pull it out and read it. 

To let go, to surrender….

To be a Zebedee and to see that my following might look like letting go, that my role in the Christ story might be to hand it off to someone else, that by holding onto the old I was not only stopping the new but not experiencing the new. As long as I was clinging I was bound, I was stuck. 

May we refuse to be those people, because that is not what God wants or what God needs.

Hear the words of our Epistle reading once again: “the present form of the world is passing away.”

God needs followers. God needs folks who hear the call and toss nets and boats aside and go. God needs us to be people who are willing to give up that which matters the very most, our very future. God needs folks who hear the call and look at what they are holding so tightly onto and offer it up, “God what could you do with this?” God needs folks with open palms not clinched fists. 

We need to follow the words of Sir Francis Drake an adventurer who as he was departing for a voyage wore the following prayer, seeing his sailing into unchartered waters as an important spiritual lesson:

Disturb us, Lord, when

We are too pleased with ourselves,

When our dreams have come true

Because we dreamed too little,

When we arrived safely

Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when

with the abundance of things we possess

We have lost our thirst

For the waters of life;

Having fallen in love with life,

We have ceased to dream of eternity

And in our efforts to build a new earth,

We have allowed our vision

Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,

To venture on wilder seas

Where storms will show Your mastery;

Where losing sight of land,

We shall find the stars.

We ask you to push back

The horizons of our hopes;

And to push back the future

In strength, courage, hope, and love.

This we ask in the name of our Captain,

Who is Jesus Christ.

Don’t forget we signed up to jump…. and God is waiting for us to do so…. so let go.

Amen and Amen. 

*artwork: Calling Disciples, Painting by He Qi, heqiart.com