Mark 1:14-20 - "Who Are You Following?"
/“Who Are You Following?”
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for 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.
Sometimes the best stories are the ones told in reverse—the ones where you learn how the story ends before it has even begun. Movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, and many a Christopher Nolan film have utilized this technique. My personal favorite is the Broadway musical turned film, The Last Five Years. The story follows the arc of a couple's relationship through falling in love, marriage, and divorce. Except that while Jamie's songs start at the beginning of their relationship, Cathy's songs start at the end of their relationship. The show opens with a song called "Still hurting." You watch the story play out, wishing that the ending wouldn't be what you know it's going to be. The inevitability is part of the storytelling magic.
Reading the Bible can be like that sometimes. Most of us already know what comes next. We know what will happen on Good Friday and Easter Morning. And yet we live into each moment anyway. We let the words and music wash over us in the hope that we may experience it afresh each day. So I thought that today, we might go through our lectionary in reverse. Let’s start at the ending and work our back.
Immediately, Jesus sees James and John calls them, and they drop everything and leave everything behind, including their father, Zebedee. What would make you drop everything and go? Is there anything? Or anyone? It almost seems a fairytale—a larger than life exaggeration of what must have happened. Can you imagine what that day must have been like for them? They started the day on the water with their dad, working hard at the family trade, doing the same thing they thought they'd spend the rest of their lives doing. And then, out of nowhere, Jesus walks by and says, "follow me." And so they do. They leave behind the security of a predictable future and trade it for a life without any guarantees. Is there anyone you would do that for? Have you ever found yourself in a moment where you realized that following Jesus would mean stepping out on a different path than the one you are currently on?
James and John, Simon Peter and Andrew, dropped everything because Jesus said, “follow me and I will make you fish for people.” Jesus is saying, “I will take these skills you have spent your life learning, and I will show you how to them for God’s glory.” There’s no job and occupation that God can’t use. But to do so, they must follow him.
So who are you following? While that once was a purely metaphorical question, now it’s quite literal. Who do you follow on social media? What news stories do you follow? Whose voices have power in your life? For example, is there a person in the family whose opinion might technically be “equal” to everyone else’s, but you know when they speak, the rest of the family will follow? Are there newscasters or politicians whose opinions you hear as facts? As someone who uses social media frequently, I often think about who I follow and what power they have in my life. Do I follow so-called 'influencers' whose main job is to make me feel like I need more expensive things to have a good life? Do I follow pundits on Twitter who just make me angrier at the people I disagree with? Do I follow news outlets that only reinforce what I already believe?
It's not wrong to follow people on social media or follow the news or follow what family members say is right, but we must carefully discern who we follow. There are people out there who will lead us to hate and division, to greed and consumerism, or to deny what is true. It’s been said that you are a combination of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Especially during this long year of isolation, who we listen to and follow has an enormous impact on who we are. Have you spent time recently reflecting on who you follow? Who are the people you know, either personally or from a distance, that impact what you think and do? Are they leading you closer to loving God and neighbor or further away? It takes regular check-ins to evaluate who you’re following. Just because someone once led you in the right direction doesn’t mean they are still leading you that way.
What does it mean for you to follow Jesus? It’s such a simple phrase that the church has used for so long that it can be hard to focus on what it actually means. What does it mean to follow Jesus, who is alive but not walking among us today? Are you reading Christ’s words so they settle deep in your soul, ready to be drawn upon when you need them most? Are you talking to Christ regularly? Does Christ's witness in Scripture challenge you? Are you in relationships with other followers of Christ, who show you his love and encourage you to be faithful? To follow Christ is a great joy, but it is also a big commitment.
You see, before Jesus calls the disciples to follow him, he calls them to have a complete reorientation of their life. Author Donald McKim says that “biblically and theologically, repentance relates to confession of sin and the ongoing movement of one's life and love away from self-interest and self-centeredness, toward the life called for by the new realities of believing in the "good news"—the Christian gospel, the message of salvation in Jesus Christ. This is the direction of the New Testament teachings and in a sense the whole rhythm of the Christian life itself: repent and believe; believe and repent.”
Repentance is a necessary part of the Christian life. It is why we have a call to confession in each worship service we hold. Before we go any further in worship together, we must take a minute to be honest with ourselves and with our Creator about "what we have done and what we have left undone," as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. You see, if we don't repent, we bring our sin and our complicitness in the ways of hatred in this world into the community. We bring our shame that manifests itself as anger, self-righteousness, bigotry, defensiveness, and self-preservation. Until we have repented of the wrongs we have done, we risk bringing harm to members of our community, and so there cannot be unity without accountability.
Accountability is essential in the kingdom of God. It's necessary for the most important relationships in our lives. On my worst days, when I start a fight and lash out at my husband, I cannot turn around tell him, "it's time to move and put the past behind us. Let's work together now." No. What I need is to be held accountable. For us to be united again, I have to repent and ask for his forgiveness, or else I deny his pain. In marriage, we cannot be united unless we are willing to be accountable to one another. This is true not only in marriages, but it is true for The Church and for nations. For all people to live in unity, including those who have been marginalized and oppressed, there must be an apology and effort to make things right by those who were the oppressors.
This what South Africa attempted to do in the wake of Apartheid. They formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to seek restorative justice on behalf of Black South Africans who had been discriminated against. The commission sought to bring the truth to light and reparations to those who were hurt. The Belhar Confession that we will read later today was another response to the evils of Apartheid.
Churches have also practiced corporate repentance. The United Church of Canada has particularly willing to repent of its sins on a national scale. In 1986, the United Church of Canada formally apologized to the First Nations people of Canada for the horrific practices of child separation, boarding schools, and cultural genocide. They said, "We tried to make you like us, and in doing so, we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you are." In 2012, The United Methodist Church engaged in a formal "Act of Repentance" over the Methodist role in the horrific Sand Creek Massacre that killed over 200 Indigenous people. And our denomination, the PCUSA, made a statement in 2016 expressing “deep regret for the ways that LGBTQ people have been made to feel by the church that they are outside of God’s grace” because of who they love.
Those apologies were hard to make. Not everyone agreed they should have been made, but the leaders who courageously and humbly led the people of their denominations or country to repent did so because they knew that the hard choice now leads to true peace in the future. The easy choice is to sweep things under the rug and call for unity, but that will never lead to real peace.
Do you want to know what unity without accountability looks like? Look at our country. Look at the deep division, polarization, and inability to even agree on what is true. This is because we have practiced unity without accountability for centuries. When the Civil War ended, President Lincoln didn't give reparations to the enslaved people who had been brutalized for centuries. He gave reparation payments to the enslavers for their lost income. After Reconstruction, the segregationists went straight back to Congress to build the Jim Crow South. That was unity without accountability. There has never been a formal apology and reparations for Indigenous people, whose land was stolen and whose children were taken away to Christian boarding schools under the horrific slogan, “save the man. Kill the Indian.” That is unity without accountability. There are countless more instances in which the powerful in this country have told the oppressed, “Holding us accountable will only divide us further. You don’t want that do you do? C’mon, forget the hard past! Can't we all just get along?" But all that does is drive the divisions and hurt deeper. There will never be peace and unity when part of the population is thriving because their ancestors profited off another’s suffering.
Repentance is essential if we want to follow Jesus in our lives—in our relationships, our church, our community, and our country. Before we can truly follow Christ, we have to seek forgiveness for the wrongs we have done. On behalf of our own actions and the institutions we are a part of that have caused harm. In 2016, our denomination formally apologized to Native Americans, Alaska natives, and Hawaiian natives for the stolen generations subjugated to boarding schools. We didn't apologize because anyone living today was personally responsible for those horrible acts. We didn't apologize because we are still intentionally harming Native Americans. We apologized because Indigenous people are still feeling the effects of the harm our spiritual ancestors did. Their families have lost the irreplicable—their language, their traditions, their homeland. And so, for us to have unity, which we long for with our Native brothers and sisters, we knew we must formally apologize.
Repentance is the way forward, even in the midst of difficult times. You see, the last part of today’s lectionary passage, or really the very first part, is that there is a painful, terrible event that overshadows all of it—the arrest of John the Baptist. John was the main character in Mark's gospel until now. He was the one who brought the good news of the coming Messiah. He was the one who first gave the people hope. And now, he is powerless in prison. Later in Mark, we’ll find out that he was soon to be beheaded by King Herod. This horrible event casts a shadow on what comes next. Perhaps it is the catalyst for Jesus’ urgent cry for repentance. “Look how fleeting life is! You don’t know what comes next, so don't waste a minute of it unrepentant and isolated from others. Repent and believe!”
We know what it is like to witness a sad and terrible event that overshadows all that comes next. The siege of the Capitol on January 6th cast a shadow over the weeks that followed. But we have a choice of how we will respond. Will we dig in our heels and demand that our side is right? Will we walk around in a daze or plug our ears and try not to pay attention? Or, in the wake of death, violence, betrayal, will we do the hard work of accountability. The hard of looking in our own hearts and asking God to convict us of our sins so that we may repent. The hard work of holding our friends and family accountable for the harm they have done. That can be the hardest work of all, but it is necessary if there is to be true unity in our families, in the Body of Christ, and in our nation.
Friends, the Jesus of Nazareth that called fishermen to follow him, calls you by name and says, "repent and believe. Believe and repent." You are called to be fishers of people. To follow Jesus every day. Following Jesus will come at a price. It might mean allowing new voices to speak into your life. It might mean leaving behind a life you know for a future you can’t imagine yet. His way can be hard, but it is good. He is the way, the truth, and the life. So repent and believe.
Amen.
