Scripture: Mark 1:16-20; Joshua 24:14-15 Series: After Pentecost
Preached October 6, 2024 at Covenant UMC, this sermon on Mark 1:16-20 (with Joshua 24:14-15) reframes discipleship around being a follower rather than a leader. Against a culture of leadership manuals, imperial figures like Augustus, and self-knowledge philosophy, Jesus simply says ‘Follow me’ to ordinary fishermen, offering grace not based on credentials. Following requires humility and surrender of control. Conversion is not a one-time moment but a daily decision; the pastor illustrates this with his own running habit and Matthew McConaughey’s ‘tie your shoes’ advice, and points to John Wesley’s stories of holy lives as models. The call is to start where you are each morning, echoed in the spiritual ‘Give Me Jesus.’
Illustrations: military-leadership-books, augustus-caesar, jesus-of-smallville, elite-business-schools, delphi-know-thyself, palm-sunday-crowd-turning, freezing-brains-supplements, body-of-christ-cells, mcconaughey-tie-your-shoes, pastor-running-habit, wesley-holy-lives, social-media-high-performers, give-me-jesus-spiritual
October 6
Follow Me
Joshua 24:14-15
Mark 1:16-20
“Now, therefore, revere the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” - Joshua 24:14-15
As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of people.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him. - Mark 1:16-20
Up until about the last 50 years, published most leadership books were about the military, about generals or military strategists like Clausewitz or Napoleon and his marshals, Like Sun Tzu, and the book of five rings. This is what leadership consisted of: a set of axioms and ideas, about grabbing the initiative, about how a battle is won in the preparation, leading your men in to victory. There wasn’t one weird trick to victory but plans and strategies and tactics.
Jesus was born under the reign of Augustus Caesar. Augustus was the nephew of Julius Caesar. Augustus had defeated the other claimants to authority in Rome after the death of his uncle. And in that process, he had built up an Imperial image of himself as a leader, as the leader, as the figure around which everything in the empire revolved. The emperor was not a king. Rome didn’t have kings. The emperor was the leader of kings. The emperor ruled. If Augustus Caesar was a leader, who was Jesus of Nazareth?
Nazareth alone makes Jesus radically different than Augustus. It’s Jesus of Nazareth, not Jesus of Jerusalem, not Jesus of Athens or Jesus of Rome, Jesus of Nazareth, a backwater town that has no record outside the Bible before around 200 AD. Jesus, of basically Smallville, comes to this village, this beach with a few houses by the sea of Galilee, also a region of not much importance; a place of small fishing villages, of subsistence life. This is not where leaders are usually found. And Jesus goes to the side of the lake shore and comes across two fishermen, not military geniuses, not guys who scored high on personality tests.They didn’t go to the McCombs school or the booth school or the Wharton school. Jesus doesn’t give them a test. He doesn’t ask for references. He doesn’t offer a probationary period of employment. He simply says, follow me.
Very few leadership books today talk about the importance of being a follower. They are about how to make a name for yourself. How to put yourself out there. Not how to be a follower. Followers aren’t self-starters; they’re sheeple more than people. Jesus doesn’t come to fishermen along the sea of Galilee and say, “be independent. Think for yourself” He doesn’t say, γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself. The words of the Oracle of Delphi, the words that guided Greek philosophy from Heraclitis to Plato, to Aristotle, to the Stoics. Jesus says, “follow me! I will make you fishers of men. I will make you fish for something greater. Right now you’re fishing for fish. You’re fishing to support yourself. You can be a part of something greater. You are worthy of being a part of something greater, but you’ve got to lay down your nets. You’ve got to be willing to listen to someone other than yourself, you gotta be willing to not rest on your laurels.”
Laurels came from crowds and crowds can turn quickly. As we see in the life of Jesus, as we see in holy week, the crowds cheering him on Palm Sunday, were jeering him and crying, “crucify him” on Maundy Thursday. We all like to think of ourselves as separate from the crowds. We are unique. They are the followers. We define ourselves as unique so it is hard to realize when we are the ones jeering the others, crying “crucify him.” Jesus shows us is that our life is not a competition with others, even when we want it to be. Football games fade away, businesses rise and fall, property value rises and falls. We can build our treasure here on earth in a lot of different ways, none of them will last forever. We could freeze our brains or take all the supplements in the world and it won’t matter.
Jesus says something else; he says: Follow me.
The simplicity of the call of Jesus is its greatest challenge. You cannot get around it. Either you drop your nets or you don’t. Jesus doesn’t talk with fancy words or assumptions. He lays it bare before us.
To truly follow someone takes humility. It takes admitting that they may know something you don’t know. Jesus comes to the disciples on the seashore and offers them a new way of life. That is not based on who they have been or what they have done. It is not based on who their parents are or on their career prospects. It is grace all the way down. To receive grace fully means taking a step.
It is that step towards God, hearing the words of God, “follow me,” and admitting to ourselves that that is what we need to do. God is calling us to be sheeple for Jesus.
Now that doesn’t mean that we’re all going to look the exact same or not have any free will. The amazing thing about God’s love and God’s creativity is that we are not called to all act and look and do the same things. The body of Christ is a body of Christ. It’s not all the same kinds of cells and organisms. Some people are called to be hands, some feet, some eyes, some legs. We all need each other to be the body of Christ. God knows how we fit together. The point is not for the church to be a hyper efficient military unit, but to witness to the transformation of this world made evident in Jesus rising from the dead. And that the transformation of this world starts right where we are in our own life. That’s what following Jesus is all about, it is about being willing to be transformed. The call of Jesus to the disciples on the seashore was not just a one-time event. This is how we often think of it. Jesus comes to meet you. You have this moment on Emmaus or a youth event, or later in life or earlier in life, and you realize that God is real and God is true. And God has loved you and forgiven you and then you commit or recommit yourself to following Jesus. Being a follower, that is being someone who relinquishes control over your life, because you realize that God is in control anyway. And whatever control we claim for ourselves is a lie and foolishness.
So if you have had that moment, that is great. And I pray to God that you’ve had that moment. And if you haven’t, I’d love to talk to you about that more if you’re willing to. But if you have had that moment, God is not finished with you yet. We respond to the world in different ways. We relate to the world in different ways. And the transformation of God that occurs on that seashore or on that mountain top is aiming for a total transformation for all of us to be made new. We can’t assume the person we are today is who God has created us to be. We can’t assume that God is finished with us.
If you think God is done with you, you are missing out, because God’s love and God’s call is not a one time thing, but an everyday thing. Waking up in the morning, every day, we decide who we’re going to be. I started running for the first time after college. I started running more because it was just easier to run and I could do it without a fancy gym. You didn’t need any equipment. You didn’t need to make an appointment. You didn’t need to commute anywhere. I could just start running. But I would struggle to find a good time of day to do it. It took me a while to find a good time to do it. I remember visiting a friend’s house and there was a Men’s Health article about Matthew McConaughey, you know ‘All right. All right. All right.’ And his advice about running was to tie your shoes. It still sticks with me. I found the original article online. He says, “It’s that simple. You tie your shoes, man, you know you’re gonna do it.” And it was great for me because I realized that if I could get out the door as soon as physically possible, I would run. But if I make it more challenging, I’m going to find a reason not to do it. I needed to eliminate as many excuses that I could possibly make. To do that, I had to realize that I was probably going to make an excuse, realize that it wasn’t going to be super simple, that I had to struggle against myself, because my human instinct of not trying, of not working, of not doing things, was pretty strong. What also helps me is realizing, even in getting up in the morning, that if I get up as soon as my alarm goes off, it will make the next day easier. Every morning I try to make tomorrow a better day.
For all of you, though, I encourage you to find a pattern with your body and your Bible that lets you start each day with gratefulness. This is one of the reasons we give this book to our kids. And we are going to do that again on October 27 for Children’s Sunday. The words here can change a life. They are old words but they are made fresh every we time we open ourselves up to listening to them. How we choose to respond to God in our day to day life matters. And we can decide to follow Jesus. We can decide to look at our life and see what we are doing in connection to God’s will for us, in connection to God’s love for us, how we have been forgiven and loved and given purpose. We don’t have to do it alone. We don’t have to figure it out alone. We can look to other examples of great lives lived. The early Methodist movement was filled with stories of holy lives. John Wesley would share them again and again and again, not his own life, but other people who had experienced grace and transformation. Not only to show how awesome God was, but to offer models of living a faithful life. Kind of like how social media is filled all the time with the daily routine of high performers like CEOs or Olympic athletes. When John Wesley shared about the lives of holy people, he wasn’t trying to increase the efficiency in English factories but to transform lives. You don’t have to invent the wheel. Learning from others is not weakness. Who is someone you admire here? How do they start their day? Have you asked them? Give it a shot. The one weird trick God offers us this day is follow me. You don’t have to figure it out today. Peter and Andrew did not know where Jesus was going but they knew they had to be there. You don’t have to be a Caesar or an Alexander the great to be a faithful Christian. You don’t have to move mountains on your own. Start right where you are. Start every morning when you wake up. Find a rhythm for you that let’s you say in the words of the old spiritual, In the morning when I rise / In the morning when I rise In the morning when I rise / Give me Jesus Give me Jesus / Give me Jesus You can have all this world / But give me Jesus
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.