Sermon - Matthew 4:12-23

Grace to you and peace from God and Jesus, our advocate, Lord, and Savior. Amen. Please pray with me. Lord, we are called to be advocates for all your children especially those who are vulnerable in society. Open our minds and hearts so that your word may be made clearer to us. Help us to hear the message of love, peace, and unity, so that we may be strong advocates for your kin-dom of wholeness on Earth. Amen.

 

Imagine for a moment that you are at your daily job. Just sitting or standing doing your daily work - teaching, working on a computer, driving around, whatever it is you do on a daily basis. Then, out of the blue comes this strange man, maybe a little rough looking, someone you haven’t seen before. He stops you in what you are doing and tells you to follow him and he’ll give you a new job of working to make people’s lives better. He wants you to drop everything, your job, your family, your friends, your whole life and just follow him to do something strange and new. Do you? Do you suddenly upset your whole life simply because a stranger asks you to? If you are anything like me, I’m sure you are thinking - “No way! I’d never do that!”

 

This is apparently what happens in the second part of today’s Gospel reading. A story that is well known to most people. Where Jesus starts calling his disciples to follow him to be fishers of people. The story clearly states “immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Matthew 4:20) and “Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.” (Matthew 4:22).

 

For many people and many interpretations, this is clear cut for people. If we truly want to be followers of Christ we must give up our lives and completely devote them to following Christ and God. Even if it means leaving everything we know and love and changing our lives completely. I don’t know about you, but this seems quite hard for me to believe, that we would be expected to uproot our lives like that for the sake of the Gospel. I mean, why would God give us our lives we already have if we are just supposed to push them aside and leave everything to devote ourselves solely for God? I’ll get back to this later.

 

Now, let’s take a look at why Jesus was calling them in the first place. In verse 23 of the reading, we hear that “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” At a quick glance, it sounds like he did three things: taught, proclaimed, and cured people. But are they really three separate things? Or are they really just one? Could it be that they are all forms of advocacy?

 

The Oxford dictionary defines an advocate as “a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy”. Well Jesus certainly did things publicly and encouraged others to do so as well. His particular cause or policy? Simply that the good news of God’s love, is for all. All of Jesus’s actions were around this. He wanted to bring the wholeness, the completeness, that only is fully realized when we know that God’s love is here and now and for all people, that everyone gets to experience a full and complete life. Without people being able to have a full and complete life, then God’s kin-dom isn’t fully realized.

 

In the Old Testament there is the focus on God’s chosen people and a lot of laws that were set down for these people. At the time, these laws made perfect sense to ensure that people could lead full and complete lives. Over time these laws became so ingrained in the faith that people believed that the only way to be saved and be right in God’s eyes was to follow these laws (created for a certain time and place) to the exact letter. One might even say they worshiped the laws more than God, since in their eyes one could only get to God through the laws. Often times these laws were even changed or given more detailed rules and rituals that had to be followed to be considered meeting the letter of the law. This left people not being able to “access” God anymore because this access was being controlled by the church and all their laws and rituals. Jesus came to advocate for these people to show them that there is a different way. A way that allows “access” to God for all.

 

How does advocacy tie into when Matthew says that Jesus taught, proclaimed, and healed? First, Jesus’s teachings. He knew that the way to reach some of the people is

 

to meet them where they were most comfortable. With the old testament, the history and the laws. He met them in the synagogues where they were comfortable. However, he then took their readings they were so used to hearing and challenged them to think about them in new ways. Ways that would help them see there is a new way that God is working, a way that opens up God’s love and wholeness to all by looking at the laws in a new way and understanding the reason the laws were created in the first place. Next, Jesus proclaimed the good news. He did this in his everyday life with everyday people around him. Making sure that everyone would hear his message of a new way of life with God. A way that is open to all. For example, in several cases Jesus was accused of working on the Sabbath which people viewed as being against the commandments. He healed several times on the Sabbath and also allowed his disciples to pick corn on the Sabbath. According to the strict interpretations of the laws that the religious leaders created, Jesus was sinning. From a commentary by David Pratte: “The Pharisees criticized the act, not as stealing, but as a violation of the Sabbath. This was the first of a whole series of conflicts between Jesus and the Pharisees about the Sabbath. Two things must be remembered. (1) The Pharisees, as they had done with other things (Matthew 15:1-14), had added a whole complex system of traditions about Sabbath observance. Much of this was intricate and detailed; but above all it was based on their own ideas, not on what God's law really said. (2) They were motivated in their criticisms, not by sincere concern for the Sabbath, but by a desire to trap Jesus (v10).” ( https://www.gospelway.com/topics/bible/jesus_sabbath.php )

 

So Jesus is working to show people that our actions must be done in a way that shows forth God’s kin-dom, not by other motivations or human made laws and customs. Jesus’s whole life was about proclaiming this Good News that our connection with God, is just that - a connection with God, not one that has to be made through laws and sacrifices and that if we don’t do something “just right” that connection is gone, but instead that connection is made by God and is permanent and unbreakable.

 

Now the third activity that Matthew says Jesus did - healing people. The biggest part of this isn’t that Jesus healed, but who he healed. As Matthew says in verse 23, Jesus was “curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” Nothing about “the deserving people” or “people who go to synagogue every Sabbath” or “people who have followed every law perfectly” or “people who have been deemed by society to be male” or “people who have a certain skin tone” or “people from certain countries”. Nope, none of this - he healed everyone who needed it. And most of the time these people that needed healing were the lowest of the people in society at the time. The people who were lacking food or money or status or were shunned by society once they became ill.  None of this mattered to Jesus - he healed all.

 

Wow - he was a busy person! And - he is asking us, as individuals and as the church body, to follow him and do all this? To be advocates for everyone in society? To publicly support this cause? To make sure that God’s love and fullness of his kin-dom are available and accessible to all? Those are some big sandals to fill.

 

Yes, it is a lot to do, but that is what we are called to be, to be advocates for all of society, especially those most vulnerable, those fleeing persecution, those who are shunned from society, including members of the LBGTQIA+ community, those who are hungry or poor. Anyone who does not have the means to live their lives fully and freely to experience the true wholeness and love of God. It is hard work. But yet, we are called.

 

Many times, people say church and politics shouldn’t be mixed, but that simply can’t be, if we are to fully live into our call to be advocates. Just like Jesus challenged the religious and governmental system of his time, we need to challenge our system. If that means teaching others so they better understand the minorities in society by holding community forums and movie screenings, do that. If it means spreading the good news of God’s love for all at Pride events, do that. If it means healing or helping people in need by providing shelter in our parish house and taking care of all their needs, do that. Writing letters to elected officials, protesting, signing petitions to amend state law so that people can’t get fired for simply being gay, do that. And, hopefully we don’t need to, but if it calls for some rage and throwing over some tables and demanding change, as Jesus did in the temple with the money changers, then maybe we do that.

 

No matter what form our advocacy takes, we are called and cannot sit silently in our chairs inside these walls and do nothing. We must publicly support God’s call for us to share his kin-dom of love and wholeness for all. How can we fully feel God’s love in us knowing that others are prevented from living fully into their lives? To share the Gospel, the Good News of God’s love for all, we must be strong advocates for all.

 

Now, back to panicking that to do all this we must drop everything, leave our jobs and families, and follow Jesus immediately and uproot our lives, as we heard in today’s Gospel. Well, here is the Good News - that isn’t what the Gospel says. Without getting into too much detail (more info at https://www.answers.com/Q/Did_disciples_know_Jesus_before_being_called), remember that in Jesus’s time, the world population was a lot smaller, and that the disciples had certainly heard about Jesus before he came up to him, in fact many were most likely related to him. So it wasn’t a complete stranger, it was someone they knew and most likely already had a personal connection to. It would be like asking your friends and family to join you in a project of yours that you find valuable, to sign a petition, to march in a parade or rally, to build a house, and more.

 

Also, again without getting into detail (more info at http://blog.michaelhalcomb.com/2007/07/did-disciples-know-jesus-before-he-them.html ) the disciples didn’t drop everything and never return to their lives they were living. There are stories in the bible where they still met with their families and they still had their boats, etc.

 

So instead of a stranger asking people to completely drop everything in their current lives and do new work, this story is about advocacy. About hearing God’s call to be an advocate for ensuring that God’s kin-dom is available for all, and then using your skills and talents God has given you, so that you can do the needed work, and then get your friends and family, and maybe a stranger or two, to do the work with you.

 

Wow! This is so much better - and much easier to say “Yes!” to. Yes! I can work with you to create some cards to make a senior’s life a bit better. Yes! I can work to take some actions at home to reduce my carbon footprint or release some butterflies. Yes! I can go march in the pride parade this summer. Yes! I can donate to help provide for the needs of the young people living in our parish house.

 

And since God’s grace, love, and forgiveness is freely given to all, we don’t have to focus on how to “win God over” and be right with God, since Jesus ensured this is already done for all of us, we can focus on doing the advocacy needed to bring God’s kin-dom to fruition.

 

We, as individuals and as a community of Faith, are currently doing advocacy all the time. Is there more we can do - certainly, but we need to celebrate what we have and currently do, learn from it, and then work to do even more in this broken world that for many fall way short of being whole and complete, so that God’s love, hope, and dream for all may be made fully known, so that His kin-dom can truly come to us and God’s will be done on Earth. Amen.