“Are You Expecting A Call?”

Matthew 4:12-23

January 23, 2005

St. Paul Church, Little Rock

Rev. John Andrew Fleming

I wonder if there is any way that it could have been that easy. Jesus, fresh from the wilderness, makes his way to Capernaum, and walks by the seashore of Lake Galilee. Fishing boats were all around him. Some of the fishermen were casting their nets, hoping for a last catch of the day. Others had given up on that and had pulled their nets from the waters. These fishermen were mending their nets, preparing them for the next day’s fishing trip. Jesus approached four of those fishermen, but not at the same time. He first approached Peter and his brother Andrew. They were the ones still trying to pull in a last catch of the day. Jesus called out to the two with these words, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Matthew tells us that they dropped their nets, perhaps right there in the water to be swept away by the waves, and they followed Jesus. The now three of them walked a little farther up the shoreline of the Galilean Sea and saw two more fishermen. Maybe Jesus could see their boat from where he was. Perhaps there was a sign where the boat would have docked, freshly painted with these words: Zebedee and Sons Fishing Company. Old Zeb was proud when his boys told of their desire to be in the family business. He never thought that they would want that. They always talked about seeing the world. As Jesus made his way up the shoreline, Zebedee and the boys had given up on the fish that day. They were docked, mending their nets for the next day’s catch as Jesus drew near. The savior, with Andrew and Peter in tow, called out to them. James and John, too, dropped what they were doing and followed Jesus. Matthew uses the words immediately in describing both sets of brothers, all four of the disciples, in their following of Jesus. Well, good for them. Perhaps it was exciting and exhilarating for them. Just like that, in a blink of an eye, they are off and following.

Every time I read that story, I wonder if it could have been that simple. “Immediately they left their nets and their father and they followed Him.” They just left everything behind. They did not ask any questions. They did not ask, “Can I sleep on it, Jesus?” They did not ask, “Can I explain this to dad over there. This is going to put him in a bind?” They did not say, “Can I let you know in the morning, Jesus?” They did not even say, “Well, let me pray about this.” You are supposed to pray about the big decisions in your life, right? I try to do that, don’t you? What happened leaves me wondering about Jesus’ recruiting methods, because, as far as I can tell from what is written, Simon, Andrew, James, and John, were not looking to join up with an itinerant preacher. They were not sitting around, saying, “If only we could get out of town and do something great with our lives.” No, these four had responsibilities, jobs, and, I assume, families. Barbara Brown Taylor has a way with words. She asks this in connection to our story, “Could you do it? If a clear call were to come to you tomorrow afternoon, could you get up from your chair and walk out the door, without taking your keys or turning off the lights?” Could you abandon your grocery cart in front of the frozen food case at Kroger and set off for parts unknown without stopping to call home?” I am not sure that I could. Could you? Could it be that simple?

Well, it is not that simple if you think that following Jesus and being a Christian is a matter of the mind, an intellectual decision. Maybe that is why people who decide to go off to seminary do so at an average age of thirty-six and not twenty-two. In my seminary class, there were only seven of us who had gone straight from college to seminary. Perhaps we did not know any better. Those who went when they were thirty-six or so were called just as much as we were, but they could not get their minds around it. They had many questions like these: “How will I pay for school? How will I support my family while I am there? What about my law practice? Where will my kids go to school in Dallas?” Trying to figure it all out, trying to get your mind around it does not answer questions. Most of the time, doing that causes one to ask more questions. We want to be safe in life. Perhaps Ernest Campbell is on to something when he says, “If I’m following Jesus, why am I such a good insurance risk? If I’m following Jesus why, when I have done my giving, do I have so much more left over for myself? If I am following Jesus, why do my closets bulge when so many do not have clothes? If I am following Jesus, why do I have so many friends among the affluent and so few among the poor? If I am following Jesus, why am I getting along so well in a world that is marked for death?” I would add this one. If I am following Jesus, why do my days seem so comfortable, my routine so cozy? Could following be that simple?

If following Jesus is only a matter of the mind, we might never go. What if the call also comes through the heart? Maybe when Jesus calls us, he is saying something to a deeper part of us, like our hearts. People talk about the soul and the spirit all the time, don’t they? The apostle Paul wrote about it when he penned these words: “The Spirit of God bears witness to our spirits that we are children of God.” I think that it was Pascal who said, “The heart has reasons the mind knows not of.”

A preacher told of a four year old girl in a church day care center. What happened at snack time could have happened here. Her teacher said a prayer, grace over the snacks and when the prayer was over, the four year old asked, “How come I do not hear God talking to me? I listen. I don’t even hear a whisper in my ear.” The teacher answered, “When we pray, God usually speaks to us through our hearts.” The four year old asked, “Teacher, does my heart have ears?” I think that the answer is yes. Our brains cannot grasp God the way that we should. God gave us brains for important things, like knowing how to hook up a VCR, how to make change, or the smarts to get out of the rain. If we are going to hear the gracious call of God in our lives, then we must listen with our heads and our hearts.

Now there is something I need to tell you this morning. The call of God in our lives is not just to seminary and pulpits. Sometimes it is. I will not discount that. I am not quite sure how I feel about what happened last night at the parsonage. It was near Annie Grace’s bedtime. She had three of her stuffed animals sitting next to one another. She was a few feet in front of them, standing behind a small coffee table that she had moved from its usual place. She was waving her hands in the air and talking to the animals. When I asked her what she was doing, she grinned sheepishly at me and said, “Daddy, I’m being the preacher.” For a moment I was proud. Then I thought about the long hours and the restless nights. So I asked her, “Are you going to be a preacher when you grow up, Annie Grace?” To which she said, “No, silly. I’m going to be a princess, remember?” I smiled. I did remember.

The gracious calling of God is not just to churches and pulpits, it is to so many other things, too. Many of you know that I went to the Walk to Emmaus last weekend with two of our church members. I spoke on Friday morning. I talked about prevenient grace and I told of my call to the ministry. Most of you know that my call includes assurance in the form of a shooting star. Andy Adams found me after the evening’s worship service. We sat down together and he asked me this, “How do you know that God is calling you if you don’t see a shooting star?” It was a proud moment. It was a great question. I wish that I had been a little further along in my preparation of this sermon. I would have said two things. First, I would have said that a call is not always to preach. And second, God often uses hearts, gentle nudges, and people to call us to do something.

The story of Jesus calling these disciples reminds us to follow him wherever that may be, to seminary or to a soup kitchen. But my important question for you this morning is this one, “Are you expecting a call of God in your life? What is it that God wants you to do with your days?” I heard of a pastor of a large and important church who did not have an answering machine at his house. He also did not carry a cell phone or a pager on his waist. Somehow he had gotten away with that. His children wanted him to be a part of the twenty-first century, so they decided one year that he had to have an answering machine for Christmas. The argument they used was this one, “Dad, you can listen to the person calling and if you don’t want to talk to them, you don’t have to pick it up. It is called screening your calls.” Hearing this caused the preacher to wonder how many times, when he had called someone, left a message, and asked why they had not returned his call, heard these words, “Our answering machine must be on the blink again.” So this preacher has an answering machine now. I think that he should discover caller identification. Now when this pastor comes home from his office, the blinking red light tells him that someone has been trying to call him.

Do any of you have teenagers at home or remember when you did? If you do or did, the following will sound familiar. There are your teenagers, sprawled on the couch or reclined in a chair. They are comatose. Then the phone rings. When the phone rings, they spring to action. It is a miracle, really. Then run to find the phone, wherever it is, screaming at the top of their lungs, “It’s for me! It’s for me!” You ask him how they know that for sure and they will say something like this, “I’ve been expecting a call.” To be sixteen means to be expecting a call, maybe even several of them on a given night. People are expecting calls these days. We wear pagers and cell phones on our hips. We wear them to church and to restaurants. The most impressive man I ever had lunch with reached for his cell phone when we sat down, and hit the power button to turn it off. In his own way he was saying to me that no one was more important to him than me, at least for that hour. But for the most part, we are expecting calls these days.

I just wonder. Are we expecting the call of God, whatever that call is for and to, in our lives? Maybe the call has come and we have missed it because it came unexpectedly, or in an unexpected way. Maybe it came on a routine day. Maybe it happened like this. There you were, minding your own business, doing your work, putting out your fires, doing honey-do jobs when someone crossed your mind. Out of the blue they crossed your mind. It is a chore to call them, to find them, to talk to them, but there is a voice inside of you that says that you should and so you do. It is in talking with them that you discovered why you felt strong about calling them or praying for them. Maybe what you heard, that voice, was the gracious calling of the Lord to rise up and follow him? Or maybe it happened this way. You and your wife are living busy lives. There is so much to do, so many things on each of your plates that you hardly have the time to talk with one another more than five or ten minutes a day. Maybe something is on the verge of happening. Perhaps there is a tug at your heart and you stop for a night, an evening, put everything else aside, for her. A voice, a thought, or a feeling made you do that. The feeling says that something has changed in your relationship. The feeling says that to reclaim it. The voice says that there is more to life than success and schedules. Could it be that what you hear or feel is the gracious call of God in your life, to take care of your family? Or maybe it happened like this. You have this idea. It is a crazy idea, really. What if you asked your friend, maybe even someone that you work with to go to church with you? The idea just popped into my head. Doing it would take you out of your comfort zone, but you do it. And as it turns out, she was looking for something in her life and she found it in the church, sitting in her pew. Could the idea have been the gracious calling of God in your life? Jesus comes to us as one unknown, unannounced, all of the time. Are you expecting a call? I hope so. Let us pray.

(The quote from Barbara Brown Taylor comes from Home By Another Way, page 38. The quote from Ernest Campbell comes from, Are You Following Jesus or Believing in Christ?” in Seeds Magazine, page 50). My thanks to both of these authors and thinkers for their words).