There are many different styles of preaching in the Church.  I tend to lean towards what is known as expository preaching.  I start on Monday by looking at the Lectionary readings for the week and spend the week reading and praying over those readings.  I consult commentaries and see what others have said about them, and I look online.  By mid-week, I have an idea of where I am going and what I am going to say and spend a few days making notes and preparing the text for Sunday.  Throughout the process, I pray that the Holy Spirit guides me and points me in the direction of what I should say.

Then there are times like this week.  I completed the usual tasks, but I woke up this morning with a different message and had to start all over again.  This is a frightening experience, more so for you than me since I do not know where I am going with this sermon this morning so sit back and relax, this might take a while.

Each year on October 31^st, the Protestant world celebrates what is called Reformation Day.  Here in the United States we move this celebration to the closest Sunday, which would be today.  If we know our history than we know that on this date in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the doors of the Cathedral Palace in Wittenberg Germany. This was a revolutionary act, and one that had not been done in the past.  This action and the thesis itself, lite the fuse of what would become the Protestant Reformation in Europe.  With the merger of the Congregational Christian Church with those of the Reformed tradition in 1957, the United Church of Christ inherited this reformed tradition.

I did not grow up in the Reformed tradition, in fact, I grew up in the tradition that was trying to be reformed, and so I had a much different view of these events.  However, I do not believe for a moment, that Martin Luther was hostile to the Church, and by “the Church” I mean the Church of Rome.  Luther loved the Church and was concerned that it had become corrupt, and he sincerely desired that there would be a return to the original message of the church.  Without going into the bloody details of our history, let’s just say Luther’s suggestions of reform were not met in the way that he had intended them to be.  Because of the desire to “always do it the way we have done it” a split occurred in the Church, and not always with the best intentions.

Last week I mentioned that the only people Jesus had harsh words for were the religious leaders of his day.  You see they required the people to do all sorts of things that Scripture and the law, were not forcing them to do.  They had a view of the faith that had come off the rails.  In many ways Jesus was a reformer and one of his aims was to reform the church of the day.  This is what Luther was doing.  The religious leaders of his day had corrupted the Gospel for their ends, and Luther blew the whistle on them.

One of my favorite verses of Scripture is what has become known as the Great Commission and I think this is a verse that is very fitting for today;  “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28:19

This is a statement from Jesus to his Apostles that was a command.  He did not say if you have nothing better to do….  He did not say if you feel like it….  He did not say if you are comfortable with it…  He just said go!  But he also did not say go and make converts…  He did not say go and make church members…  He did not say go and form a committee, talk about it for 35 years…  He said go and make disciples.  A disciple, by definition, is a follower, and that is what we are being commanded to do go and make followers.  But before we can make followers we have to be followers.

Last week I spoke about the radical transformation that must take place in our lives if we are to be faithful followers of Jesus.  The reformation that Jesus started was revolutionary, and sometimes I think we forget that.  Jesus came to set us free!  The religious leaders of the day wanted people to remain slaves so they would retain their positions of authority over the people and Jesus came and broke that chain that held us back.

At the start of his ministry, Jesus gathered twelve to work along with him.  He did not go to Harvard and Yale and find the best minds of his day.  He did not go to the best seminaries and find the most enlightened thinkers, he went to the neighborhood and gathered regular people, he called fisherman, tax collectors, sinners, and yes even someone who would eventually betray him and oh yea his closest friend would deny him when the going got tough.  He called them to follow him and over the next three years he trained them, by his example and by his words, how to be followers.  And when they were ready he sent them out to do them same.

You see for them to go, they first had to come.  They had to come and see, they had to come and learn, they had to be willing to change their way of thinking and leave behind some of their most cherished beliefs to become new creations in the kingdom.  This was not easy; in fact Scripture provides several stories of people who, after they heard what was going to be required of them, rejected the message and walked away.  This life is not for everyone!  We have to have a personal reformation in our lives if we are going to be followers of Jesus Christ.

One of the slogans of the United Church of Christ is that God is still speaking, and the symbol of this is the semicolon.  As a punctuation mark, the semicolon is to join two closely related independent thoughts or sentences, in other words, it is not the end of the story.  The semicolon joins your life and my life together, the semicolon joins our lives with the lives of people that we have not even come into contact with, but we have to be ready, we have to be prepared.  Before we can go, we have to come!

We have to come to the knowledge that our lives need reform.  We have to come to the knowledge that God is still speaking to us as individuals and as a church and that the story is not complete we have to listen to that still small voice that continues to talk to us and direct us.  But all of this requires that we are first open to the process of personal reformation.

Jesus did not teach his followers a set of rules and regulations.  He did not say if you check off all of these boxes you will find eternal life.  Jesus simply told them to love God and love your neighbor.  The life of a Christian is not a life of judgment but a life of love and service, to God and each other.

Martin Luther lite to match that lite the fuse that started a reformation of spirituality and thought and that reformation continues today.  Make the commitment today to a personal reformation, make the commitment today to become a disciple, and then make the commitment to Go and do them same for others.

When reading Scripture, I always have to remind myself that we have the entire picture of what is happening but that the Apostles, and those around them, did not.  For the most part, they were blissfully unaware of what was going on around them and what was going to happen to Jesus.  Sometimes I think we are like that.  We go through life not know, or caring in many cases, about what is going on outside of our little world.  We see what we want to see, and we hear what we want to hear.

We encounter this today in the Gospel passage from Mark.  We have to let our imaginations loose and sort of think about what was going through the minds of the Apostles as they walked along the dusty roads with Jesus.  Even though he has told them, on many occasions, what is going to happen they seem to have either forgotten or they just do not want to remember.  Three times now Jesus has told them, directly, what is going to happen, he is going to die, and each time, they react poorly, and it seems they miss the point entirely.

If we go back a little to chapter eight, we have a scene where Peter rebukes Jesus for talking about his rejection and suffering, and Jesus responds to Peter by calling him Satan. As Jesus walked along he used that time for some in-depth discussions and he one again told them of his betrayal, death, and his rising again.

The disciples responded to a lively discussion about who was going to be the greatest.  And now we see that the long passion narrative in Mark’s Gospel has come to an end, and Jesus tells them one more time that he is going to Jerusalem to face his death.

There seems to be a disconnect between the words of Jesus and what happens next.  So dramatic is this disconnect that we may be thinking that a verse has gone missing, but again I remind myself that the Apostles did not have the entire Gospel before them as we do now.  Jesus has just told them, yet again, that he is going to die, and they are like ya ya, but who is going to be the greatest?

At first glance, it may appear that they are ambitious and seeking position but there is another way of thinking about their reaction.  Perhaps they did understand what Jesus was saying, and they were acting out of fear.  Perhaps the revelation of their Master’s death was too much for them to take, and they retreated to a place of security even if it meant a violation of their beliefs and what they had been taught.  Humans react this way in stressful situations, and we want to make sure that our place and our safety is secure no matter what happens to us.  Jesus assures them, and us that in spite of their fear, they will measure up and all will be well.

Perhaps they are speaking out of faith. The question they ask about who will be the greatest can come from ambition but what if James and John were so sure of the final victory of Christ that they wanted to sign up right away to go with him?  No matter how bad things were looking their faith was so secure that they knew what was going to happen, and they wanted to be a part of it.

Be careful what you ask for

But Jesus asks them a question, and I will suggest that he is asking each of us this question as well. Are they truly able to drink from the same cup that he has to drink from?  They respond right away “we are able.”  This suggests that they did not understand what Jesus was asking of them.

Marcus Borg, the great Biblical commentator, explains something of the meaning of Jesus’ words. Both of these terms, he suggests, “drinking the cup” and “baptism,” were “images of death” (Jesus: A New Vision).  Jesus is speaking here of his death, and we know that most of his earliest disciples are said to have been martyred (along with many other early Christians).

In our own time, there are many examples of those killed for their faith. The last time I was with you I spoke of the shooting in Oregon and how the shooter was asking the faith of his victims before he shot them. They died because of their faithfulness to Jesus. But what about the vast majority of Christians today who long to follow Jesus faithfully, but will most probably not (literally) lose their lives for doing so? Borg speaks of this dying as a metaphor with two meanings, both at the core of Christian faith: “a dying of the self as the center of its concern” and “a dying to the world as the center of security and identity.”

This kind of dying leads to transformation when we lose our self-absorbed insecurities and are reborn. Marcus Borg writes, “the radical recentering brings about a change so sharp that it can be described as dying to an old life and being born into a new life.” This happens to different people in different ways, but it needs to involve a “letting go.” And here we come to the heart of the matter, Jesus caused much trouble by challenging the religious leaders of the day, I will point out that the only people Jesus ever rebuked were the religious leaders.  They found their security in what they knew, in the status quo.  We run that same risk in our lives of faith if we seek legitimization of how we are already living rather than accepting the new life offered by Jesus.

We see here that the Apostles are focused on power and prestige and not on service to others. While they argue amongst themselves about who will be the greatest, Jesus is flipping over the tables and paying far more attention to those around him that are in desperate need both physically and spiritually.  He tells them not to be like the religious leaders who lord over them and he tries to turn their ambition away and on to something else, service to others.

This is a challenging Gospel for us and others to hear.  Jesus is asking us to transform our lives and even turn away from our ambitions to seek after others.  He tells his Apostles that whoever wants to be great must be the servant and whoever wishes to be first must become a slave.  This is certainly not the picture we see painted by the world.  The world wants us to grab all that we can while we can no matter the outcome.  As long as it is good for us it is good the world tells us.

But the path of Jesus is radically different and as we heard earlier requires a radical change in our priorities.  This radical transformation requires a rethinking of many of the ideas that we hold dear.  What Jesus was speaking of in 1^st century Palestine was so revolutionary for those around him to hear that they killed him for it.  So unsettled were the religious elite that they risked it all to keep their power.

Being a follower of Jesus requires us to walk the same road that he did.  We must walk that dusty path, sometimes alone, knowing that in the end, it will cost us our lives.  But by losing our lives we inherit a greater spiritual life a life of service not to ourselves, but to those around us.

Jesus needs us to flip over the tables of our lives and our thoughts and become new creations of love and service to others. The world needs this radical transformation today perhaps more than any other time in our history and as people of faith we are called to make this transformation.

I can just see the exasperation on the face of Jesus as he is having this dialogue with his friends.  He wants to go out fishing with them, but they have been out all night and did not catch a thing.  He tells them to push out into the deep and let down their nets. Peter (who is called Simon in this passage) tells him that they had in fact been out all night and were not able to catch anything.  Based on the response Peter gives, “but at your word I will let down the nets” I can only imagine the look on the face of Jesus.  When they had done this, Scripture tells us, the nets were so full they afraid they were going to break, they had to ask for help to haul in all of the fish and the boats looked like they would sink.  Peter, being Peter, overreacts and tells Jesus to depart from him for he is not worthy, but Jesus tells him not to be afraid that from this point forward he will become a Fisher of Men.

One of the first things I notice is that the Apostles did not give up their day jobs.  Sure they traveled around with Jesus but they also had families to support and they needed to work.  They were usually close to home so they could go back and attend to their businesses.  It is not clear from history, but more than likely they had others working for them, other family members perhaps, that would fish in their absence.

The second thing I notice is that Jesus is a much better fisherman than Peter and the others.  They had been out all night and caught nothing.  Jesus says, “go over there and try again” and the get the biggest haul of their life.  Jesus was tuned into the “fish finder in the sky” and the Apostles were trying to do it on their own.  Let’s stick a pin in that one for a minute and come back to it.

The third thing I notice is that regardless of the state of Peter, he tells Jesus he is a sinner, like Jesus does not already know this, Jesus tells him that it is okay, and he has a job for him but not the same job and certainly not doing it the same way.  Jesus was about to show them a different way to not only do church but be a church.

Pope Francis is completing his tour of the United States today.  During this visit, and his historic speech to Congress, he has challenged us to take back what is great about America.  He challenged us to look again at the words of Abraham Lincoln and his quest for equality of all people.  He invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King who told us to dream of a nation where everyone would get along no matter the color of our skin or where we were from.  He reminded us of the great work of one of my personal heroes Dorothy Day and her foundation of the Catholic Worker Movement and they work with the oppressed and those on the margins of life. And he reminded us of the words of Thomas Merton:

“I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers”

What the Pope was calling us to was not a new way of looking at things or even a new way of doing things but he was and is inviting us to look out more than we look in.  He is calling us to care for one another more than we care for ourselves.  And he reminded us of our responsibility to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

The Pope told us:

“The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us. The Golden Rule also reminds us of our responsibility to protect and defend human life at every stage of its development.”

This includes taking care of the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the hungry, the naked, the sick and those on the margins of life.  We are called to be the hands and feet of Christ in this world and also the voice of those who have no voice in society.  Those who live in the shadows and cannot speak for themselves we have to be their voice because no one else will.  We need to stop using them to score political points and start being Christ to all of them!

Jesus told Peter and the others that he was going to make them fishers of people and that when Peter protested that he was a sinner Jesus told him to be not afraid. Sometimes we are so afraid of the complexity of the issue that we just do not know where to start.  Sometimes we are so afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing that we do nothing instead.  Sometimes we look around and just throw our hands in the air and say it is someone else’s problem, not mine.  Jesus is telling us not to be afraid; sure the task is great and impossible for us but with God all things are possible.

They toiled all night and caught nothing but when they put their trust in Jesus, and thus in God, they caught more than they knew what to do with.  As soon as they stopped trying to run things and “let go and let God” all things were possible, the door was opened to a new and exciting world.

The message of this passage today, and the message of the Pope’s visit, is just that, stop trying to do it on our own and let God in to help, not just in the good times but in the bad.  If we are faithful to our calling to Love God and love our neighbor, and we trust God enough to turn it over to Him, we will have more than we could ever imagine.