Following Jesus  Luke 5:1-11

I have a friend named Max. It’s his 82^nd birthday today. He’s a joy-bringer is Max. He loves to bring people together and party. He’s got a squeeze box and a piano accordion which her takes here there and everywhere, including into local retirement homes where he organizes sing-a-longs when he can, mainly Aussie folk songs. 

I was on the phone to Max during the week and he was telling me he still keeps fit and active, doing his stretches each morning, after he has begun the day with his usual prayer which goes like this:

Thank you for my blessed life,

Thank you for my darling wife,

Thank you for my family (brings them to mind)

Thank you Lord that I can….(hear, feel, smell..) see.

I pray for all who need your care (brings them to mind)

May they the love of Jesus share.

Be with me through the coming day.

May I serve you in some small way. Amen.

That’s Max’s standard routine, his daily practice, beginning the day with that prayer, and then his daily exercises, his ‘Tai chi’.

Now, as I was listening to Max, I felt drawn to something good about the way he was going about doing life. There was Max, just talking naturally about how things are, on the whole, going well for him, at the moment, sharing openly things about his family and what he’s up to, and in a low key, appropriate, relaxed, organic manner, he’s also sharing something of his faith and one of his spiritual practices. It’s all seamless. And I’m thinking that’s so often how we are encouraged and the Christian faith is passed on. Not so much taught, Max wasn’t trying to teach me, as caught. As I say I was drawn to what Max was sharing.

Hold onto that thought, and I wonder if it’s been your experience. That the Christian faith is as much caught as taught. 

***

Let’s turn to our Gospel reading which has a lot to do with catching things – catching fish, catching people.

Jesus and Simon are the two at the center of this passage. It’s about their encounter, and like much of the Bible, this passage is short on explanation and long on encounter. 

Although it is focused on these two, Jesus and Simon, there are others in the background. People have been crowding around Jesus, listening to what he had to say. The crowd was getting bigger and bigger and there simply wasn’t enough room. So, Jesus improvised. He borrowed a boat, pushed out a little from the shore, and used – most likely – the steep slopes of the inlet of the lake, which formed a natural amphitheater, to make himself clearly heard. 

So, there’s a crowd, and there’s fishermen. And when Jesus had finished teaching, he gets some of them, Simon amongst them, to push out into deeper water, where they lower the nets and pull in such a haul of fish that a second boat has to be called for in order to bring them all in safely, which they just manage to do.

That’s what happens. But most of the focus and drama is in the interaction that takes place between Jesus and Simon. Simon will later get the nickname ‘Rock’, Cephas, Peter. And he’s blunt and exasperated. 

‘We’ve worked all jolly night and we haven’t caught a thing! But, if you say so.’

And when the nets are lowered, and the fish are hauled in, it is Simon who collapses before Jesus, recognizing some sort of gap, some sort of distance existing between the two of them, he’s out of his league, and says: ‘Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.’ A request which Jesus ignores. He proceeds to do the exact opposite. He invites Simon to follow him, saying: ‘You can stop fishing for fish. From here on out, Simon, people are to be your business.’

So Simon, and his fishing buddies and partners, James and John, leave their boats on shore, leave everything – we are told – and followed him.

***

This story is about the first followers of Jesus. 

And here we have what is probably the oldest and most traditional way of describing what it means to be a Christian, which is being a follower of Jesus.

That’s what Simon, James and John were. So too Paul, who described himself thus: ‘I admit that I worship the God of our Fathers as a follower of the way.’

That’s found in the Book of Acts (24:14), and there are about half a dozen similar references in that book (9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:22) which suggest the preferred self-designation for those early Christians was – being a follower of the Way, a follower of the way of Jesus, a follower of Jesus.

***

There are many ways people describe what it is to be a Christian.

We sometimes speak of ourselves as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, who join in prayer to our heavenly Father, as his ‘sons and daughters.’

When I first became a Christian, we spoke, my people, my church, we spoke a lot about being ‘believers’, and that’s fine too, although I rarely use that term anymore myself, in part because it suggests that my relationship with God is primarily defined by the ideas and doctrines I hold in my head, and there’s so much more to it than that.

The language of ‘follower’ works well for me, and so, the sense in which I am a Christian can be stated precisely like this: ‘I follow Jesus’. That’s what I seek to do as best I can. That’s what I aspire to do, try to do.

To follow him in his way of living, to follow him in his conception of ultimate reality – the God who sends the rain on the just and the unjust, to follow his teaching, his moral vision, his moral seriousness, to follow the One who say from the cross ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’, to follow him who saw others for the wonder they were – even, and especially, the poor, the lame, the sinners, the unclean, the children, I follow him because I realize what I need in the depths of my soul is mercy and grace, I want to follow Jesus who washed his disciples’ feet, who said he had come not to be served but to serve, who said treat others the way you want to be treated, and what does it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their soul, who crafted and then told those stories of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son, who said blessed are the peacemakers and love your enemy.

I want to follow him in his opposition to legalism and hypocrisy, in his emphasis on love and compassion and inclusion.

However imperfectly, that’s what I seek to do. And the Gospel records show that Simon Peter and the earliest followers were far from perfect in their following of Jesus.

I seek to follow the risen Lord, to allude to our second reading, and to do so along with people past and present and people the world over.

***

Now, seeing yourself as a follower of Jesus affects how you learn and how you put into practice that ‘catching people’ we heard in our reading. Or, as I softened it: ‘From now on people will be your business.’

How you learn, as a follower of Jesus, is the way an apprentice learns their trade. By watching their Master at work, by their modelling rather than their lecturing, by learning not just facts and concepts but skills and practices and habits. It’s a way of learning by doing. 

In one modern translation, The Message, Eugene Peterson has Jesus invite people to follow him, saying ‘Walk with me and work with me -watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.’

There is a famous prayer of Teresa, St Teresa of Avila, Spanish, 16thC Carmelite nun, in which we pray that our hands might be Jesus’ hands, our feet Jesus’ feet, that our eyes might look at the world with the compassionate gaze of Jesus’ eyes. It begins ‘Christ has no body but your, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.’ 

And I find that sort of prayer helpful as I seek to play a part in the task that Jesus assigns to his followers, the one he certainly assigned to Simon when he said: ‘ You can stop fishing for fish. From here on out, Simon, people are to be your business.’

I come back to that notion that the Christian faith is so often caught, simply as his followers go about their everyday lives seeking to follow Jesus in real and active ways. It can spark something. The Christian faith can become a ‘live option’ for others when followers of Jesus mirror something of his voice in their voice, his hands and feet in their hands and feet, his character in their character, his compassion and kindness and grace in theirs, however faltering, however imperfectly. It can ignite something and draw out in others a desire to be inducted into the way of Jesus.

Let me bring things to a close by saying that there was a time last year, when I joined you here at St Michael’s, online, on Zoom, and you were working through a series on Acts, and our friend Bruce Kaye encouraged us to simply and openly share what being a Christian means for us in the different circumstances we find ourselves in when we get a chance to do so. He talked about, and I think I’ve got this right, he talked about how there are some things that are common to us all – ‘birth and death, and the great milestones in between’ – and what we can do, is simply to share openly and honestly how we deal with these things – as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus.

I reckon that’s what my friend Max was doing. Happy birthday Max. Unashamedly, openly, naturally, in a low-key way, sharing something of the way he negotiates life, as a follower of Jesus.

And, I’ve already discovered it’s something that many of you, here at St Michaels, do – and – do well. 

May you keep on doing so.

The invitation to be a follower of Jesus.

‘From here on out, people are to be your business.’

May God enable us to be faithful and effective in this calling. Amen.