Leaving the Nets

Mark 1:16-20

May 15, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

You may or may not realize it, but May is an important month for the people called Methodist. It was in May that our founder, John Wesley, had a heart-warming experience that led to a revival all over England and, eventually, in America as well. You may know the story, how Wesley was the son of a preacher, how he didn’t really want to become a clergy person but felt like he had to go into “the family business.” What he really wanted to do was teach, but after being ordained, he and his brother Charles went to be missionaries in Georgia—like, the state Georgia, not the country. So they set sail to America and on the way, Wesley found himself filled with fears and a lack of assurance that he had any faith at all. Once in America, those fears did not subside. Near the end of his time in America, he wrote in his journal, “I went to America, to convert the Indians; but O! who shall convert me?” (January 24, 1738).

Wesley was not well received by the colonists in Georgia and due to a series of bad decisions (one involving a romantic entanglement), he left on a ship back to England under cover of night. He continued to struggle in making a connection between his head and his heart, between what he believed and what he felt. He longed for some kind of assurance of God’s love, and he tried to find it through almost constant conversations with others. Four months to the day after he had written that question about his own faith in his journal, he found what he was looking for. That night, he went “very unwillingly” to a religious meeting on Aldersgate Street where the preacher was reading out loud Martin Luther’s commentary on the book of Romans. You may have heard it before, but here is how Wesley himself described what happened that night: “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death” (May 24, 1738). Just three days before, on Pentecost Sunday, his brother Charles had a similar experience, and people still debate whether those moments were their “conversions” or an experience of the Holy Spirit or a renewal of their faith. The Wesleys never felt compelled to really define it, but we know from history, from the evidence, that whatever it was, their lives were radically changed and they went on to be catalysts for change in England and around the world. The “holy heartburn” John Wesley experienced changed his life and compelled him to preach that heart-warming experience for the rest of his life. What came to be known as the Wesleyan revival started in the heart, in the changed lives of two brothers.

That revival changed the face of England. That revival spread to America and changed this country. That revival spread out and changed the world, and the question I want to ask for the next few weeks here is the same question asked in the video: could it happen again? Not the particulars, but could revival come in our time? When I was a kid, every year we had “revival services;” maybe you did here, too. And a traveling preacher would come, not know anything about the community, preach some hellfire and brimstone services (usually at least one on the end times), collect his check and move on. We called them “revivals” but nothing really changed. A true revival not only changes people, it changes the culture, the world. That’s what happened in Wesley’s day. That’s what has happened several times in the church’s history. Could it happen again? Could it happen today? So for the next four weeks, we’re going to look at four ingredients that were a part of the Wesleyan revival and have been a part of revivals throughout history. This is not a four-step plan for revival, however; it’s more like a recipe, which is why I’m calling these things “ingredients.” These are things that, historically, seem to open up the possibilities and prepare God’s people for God to do something new. So over the next few weeks, we will look at how things like a contagious faith, intentional discipleship and the power of the Holy Spirit set us up for revival, but today we begin with what should be obvious but is not. To experience revival, we need to see changed lives.

Centuries before John and Charles, there was another set of brothers—actually two sets of brothers—who had their lives turned upside down in a moment. They were not academics like the Wesleys; they were fishermen, blue collar workers, in the northern part of Israel known as Galilee. Galilee is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been privileged to visit; there is something that does indeed warm your heart when you see the sun rising on the harp-shaped lake that gives the area its name. (Here comes the shameless plug: come with me next January and you can see it for yourself.) The area of Galilee isn’t large; it’s roughly twenty-five miles wide and fifty miles long, with the lake on the eastern edge. The lake itself is about fourteen miles long and seven miles wide. You can easily stand on the shore in Tiberias (where we will be staying in January, just sayin’) and see the whole of the lake. (Did I also mention we’ll take a boat ride on the lake?) In Jesus’ day, this small province was the most densely populated area in the Middle East, with little towns and villages all along the coast, so it was a strategic place not only for Jesus to launch his ministry, but also for him to find followers. This day, that’s exactly what he’s doing as he walks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee (Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pgs. 33-34; Wessel, “Mark,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 625).

So, as Mark tells it, there are two brothers who were fishermen, Simon and Andrew, and when Jesus sees them, he gives them this command: “Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people” (1:17). I think we usually hear that as an invitation or an offer, sort of like a new job offer. But the language Jesus uses is actually a command which should be met with either obedience or disobedience (Card 34; Kernaghan, Mark [IVPNTC], pg. 44). These brothers choose immediate obedience; Mark says “at once” they followed Jesus. So do the next brothers Jesus finds. James and John, who were apparently working with or for their father Zebedee, apparently receive the same call and they leave their father and fishing “without delay” (1:20). Zebedee, by the way, is never mentioned in the Gospels again, which makes you wonder if this also may have been the last time they saw their father (cf. Card 35).

It was a simple command, and yet it’s also a life-changing command. When we hear a command like this, “Follow Jesus,” we think of something like, “Give up your sins and become a Christian” (Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 9). But the word Jesus uses literally means to get behind someone, to go where they go, and it’s implied that you don’t look back. Jesus later describes it this way: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). For these two sets of brothers, following means that they will leave their family behind and everything else they’ve ever known—their jobs, their security—for an uncertain future (cf. Wright 8). I mean, can you imagine someone walking along the shore of the Wabash River this afternoon and inviting people to “follow me”? I’m not entirely sure what would happen, but I’m wiling to bet he’d get few if any followers and the police department would probably get more than a few calls about a crazy guy at Fairbanks Park. But something in the way Jesus issues this command to the fishermen compels them to do what he says. And so they follow because, in that moment at the lakeside, they have an encounter with the living Christ and after that, nothing else matters.

The first ingredient we need to see revival in our day is just that: an experience with the living Christ that results in people who are passionate about Jesus in every aspect of their lives. That’s what we’re praying for these children whose parents dedicated them to God today. And we’re praying that for you who are their parents and their friends. In fact, that’s what we’re praying for all of us. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the church. For a generation or more, most people seem to understand the church as a collective of like-minded “nice” people. There are a lot of people who see the church as simply another social service agency, handing out aid to those in need, and keeping quiet the rest of the time. And I believe we should help those who are genuinely in need, but not because we’re nice people. Or not just because we’re nice people. The world has a lot of nice people. More “nice” people is not what the world needs. I have come to the crazy conclusion that the church ought to be about following Jesus, and if helping someone in need will further the cause of Christ then we ought to do it. But we do it because of Jesus, not because we’re “nice.” Following Jesus is not about being “nice.” Following Jesus is about being Christian, about being “little Christs,” about becoming like him. He didn’t go to the cross so we could be “nice.” He went to the cross so that our lives would be genuinely changed, made like his.

Just before the passage we read this morning, Jesus preached his very first sermon in the Gospel of Mark. It’s a short one; I bet you wish I would be more like Jesus in that area! It’s possible or even likely that Simon, Andrew, James and John might have heard this sermon; here’s the whole thing: “The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” (1:15). In that first-century context, the word “repent” means more than just “confess your sins and feel sorry for them.” Certainly Jesus wanted people to stop sinning, to turn their backs on the things that separated them from God, but that included more than just the moral failings we tend to associate with “sin.” Repentance is much larger, especially for these fishermen he’s about to call to follow him (cf. Kernaghan 45). If they were going to fully follow him, it would involve giving up their allegiances to everything else—including their political and social agendas. No, political agendas in the church are not a 21st-century invention, nor are they exclusively a 21st-century problem. A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the Jewish faith was divided into various groups. So was Jewish culture. Some were supportive of the government and may have even liked the emperor. Some favored violent revolution against the government. Some opposed some policies, like the heavy taxation, but they were willing mostly to “go along to get along.” To repent means to turn around, to think differently, in every area of your life. They could not fully follow Jesus if their allegiance was still given to a particular Jewish or Roman political movement. Repenting meant turning away from other loyalties and turning back toward full allegiance to God as experienced in Jesus Christ (cf. Wright 9).

And if that was true then, it’s still true today. A whole lot of us today have our allegiances messed up; we need refocusing. Our hope is not in government or in political parties or in social movements or even in science. Our hope is in Jesus and our only hope as a people is being turned upside down by him—like what happened to John and Charles Wesley in London, and what happened to Simon, Andrew, James and John on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. There’s an important detail here that, I think, is key to remember. Mark specifically says Simon and Andrew “left their nets” (1:18), and he also tells us that James and John were “preparing their nets” when Jesus called them (1:19), when tells us they, too, left nets behind. Simon, of course, is eventually renamed Peter by Jesus, and most scholars agree that Mark’s Gospel is really Peter’s memoir, written down by Mark after Peter’s death. I can't help but think that, for Simon Peter, this was a powerful moment, one that remained in his memory all of his life. He was a fisherman; that’s who he had always been. The nets represented everything he was; they were a symbol of his entire life. To let them go was a huge thing for him. To let them go was to let go of everything he had been and to embrace everything Jesus wanted him to be.

Simon, as we know, didn’t become entirely a new person in that moment. He struggled, just like a caterpillar has to struggle to break out of a chrysalis, and sometimes he took two steps back for every three steps forward. So did John Wesley. When he returned home from the meeting on Aldersgate Street, in a less-quoted passage from his journal, he found himself surrounded by temptations and doubts. “They returned again and again,” he writes. “I as often lifted up my eyes, and He ‘sent me help from his holy place’” (Jackson, ed., Wesley’s Works, Vol. 1, pg. 103). And then he comments that now he handled the temptations differently. Before, he had battled them on his own strength. Now, he found God’s help was there as quickly as he asked for it. And John Wesley plus God made an unbeatable pair.

We hear a lot today about how Jesus is all about love. And that is true; it was Jesus who said that the greatest commandment is to love God and love others (cf. Matthew 22:37-40). Today, however, “love” is interpreted to mean approving of everyone and everything and if you happen to disagree with me, then you hate me. But for Jesus, love looked like a cross. Love looks like this: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). “Taking up a cross” is not having a burden to bear or a hard time in life. A cross, to first century hearers, was not a piece of jewelry. A cross meant death. Deny yourself. Die to self. Follow Jesus. Love looks like that, and that’s the life Jesus is inviting Simon, Andrew, James, John, the Wesley brothers and you and me to. World War II German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die” (qtd. in Bevins, Marks of a Movement, pg. 58). “The call to follow Christ, first and foremost, is a call to total self-surrender” (Bevins 58).

Church planter Winfield Bevins puts it this way: “If we are to have any hope of a revival movement in our day, it will begin with ordinary believers having a fresh encounter with the living Christ” (59). That “fresh encounter” will involve us “leaving the nets” behind, leaving behind the things that hold onto us, the things that represent our self-dependence and self-reliance. What is that for you?

Eric Huffman grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt, a son and grandson of Methodist pastors, and he says his whole early life revolved around the church. It was pretty much expected he, like John Wesley, would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a pastor too. So he went to college, married “the cutest Christian girl” he could find, and accepted the first ministry job he was offered. At 21 years of age, he began serving as a pastor and for the next thirteen years, he did and said what he had to do to play the part of a pastor. Because he didn’t believe any of it. Two persuasive professors had convinced him that this faith he had grown up in was all made up, that it was “designed to fool gullible peasants into submission by playing on their fears.” So Huffman became an activist, hiding behind all the “love one another” passages without preaching about holiness, repentance and Jesus’ command to make disciples of all nations. And, he says, he never stopped to consider his own hypocrisy.

When he was 34, a friend asked if he had ever been to the Holy Land. His friend saw it as a chance to see first-hand the injustices of the land, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, so Huffman agreed to go. And when he got to Capernaum, he stood beside the first-century house that most people believe belonged to Simon Peter. There he saw engravings calling Jesus “God” that have been dated to the first century, and Huffman says he died. He died to himself and all his presuppositions. All of his cleverness and all his own skill and all his own energy died that day. He had believed later Christians had made it all up, but here was evidence in front of his eyes that Jesus was worshipped as God in the first century. Jesus was who he said he was. And Huffman, that day in Capernaum, had to leave the nets. All of his self-dependence and self-reliance fell to the ground in Israel. And I’m trying to imagine what his church did with the new pastor who came home from that trip, fresh from a real encounter with Jesus (Huffman, Scripture and the Skeptic, pgs. 11-15).

Because a fresh encounter with Jesus will change you. It will kill your self-dependence and self-reliance, and it will change you. But that’s what we need if we’re going to see revival in our own time, in our city. We need to leave the nets, the things we depend on, and learn to depend on Jesus and him alone. On the way in this morning, you received a piece of a fishing net. I want to ask you to pick that up and hold onto it right now and I want you to get in your mind what that thing or those things are that lead to your self-dependence and self-reliance. What keeps you from fully trusting, fully following Jesus? As you hold onto the net, we’re going to pray about those things. Then I’m going to ask John to play a little bit of music after the prayer and as he plays, you’re invited to come up and drop your net into this bucket. Just like those first disciples centuries ago, we’re invited to “leave the nets,” to symbolically leave behind everything that stands in the way so we can follow Jesus. Because the first ingredient of a revival is changed lives—yours and mine. Let’s leave the nets and follow Jesus. Will you pray with me?