1/17/65

Scripture: Mark 1: 1-20.

When I was a boy living on the prairies of South Dakota, I developed a sense of direction. Life on those prairies was laid out neatly by the surveyors, in section lines that ran due North and South, East and West. The township’s schoolhouse was one and one-half miles due east. The village where we got supplies and went to church, was three and one-half miles due west and one mile north. An uncle and his family lived one-half mile east and one-half mile south. When I traveled with our family, I was usually confident as to direction. Once in a long while I might get mixed up in this sense of direction when we traveled by train without watching for the junction points or the mild curves in the line. Then I was miserable until I could recover the right sense of direction.

Later in life I lost much of this sense for direction -- or at least the vividness of it. For a dozen years I lived in an island community in the Pacific ocean, first on Maui, and then in Honolulu, where roads and trails paid very little heed to direction. They wound along shorelines or through mountain valleys and gulches. They went toward the hills or toward the sea. But no one thought much of those lines that had given me a sense of direction; and I lost much of the feeling for it.

Of course the sun rose in a generally easterly direction, and set somewhere in the west -- it still does! A Boy Scout should be learning enough about his compass to ascertain which way is north. And civil engineers should know something about the directions. But not the ordinary person, who comes and goes in the directions made possible to us by the slope of land or the line of the sea shore.

Here in Wisconsin Rapids, some of us have a difficult time describing direction until we get away from those streets that follow the course of the river and get out on section lines again.

The sense of direction is not just a physical sense-phenomenon. We can well speak of a spiritual sense of direction. Just as the inexperienced hiker may become lost in deep woods on a cloudy day due to his loss of direction, so many a traveler becomes spiritually at a loss when he can not discern the right direction.

Much of our world, today, has lost its sense of direction. It is unsure of its values. It does not know its reason for being. We live in a world where many do not listen for any voice of God. We remember days when men did say that they knew God’s voice and we may have been confident, at one time, that we discerned it. We read that men lived and worked and sacrificed under a commission, like a heavenly calling. Not everyone is sure of such a commission now. We would like to hear the voice of God, but is it coming through? There are voices like the voice crying in the wilderness --- prophets of our day, who proclaim the divine voice. But “where is it? Toward what direction shall we look?” say the many. What we need is a whole army of men, women and children who know where to look for the call of Christ, and who will respond to it in obedience and service.

This morning we have read about four men whose sense of direction led them to hear and heed Christ’s call to a change in their lives. These four men bore the names Andrew, Simon Peter, James and John. They were commercial fishermen and, judging by scriptural accounts, fairly prosperous in their trade. When two of these men, Simon Peter and Andrew, were busy laying their nets in the sea of Galilee, hoping for a catch of fish, Jesus of Nazareth came by, saw them faithfully at work and called to them with a startling new challenge: “Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men.” And, says the Bible account, immediately they left their nets and followed him.

Going a little father, they saw James and John, sons of Zebedee, all of whom were in their boat mending their nets between catches of fish. Jesus called to James and John. And they came to follow him, leaving their father, Zebedee, we are gracefully told, not desolate, but with the hired servants. The nets would be mended and possibly another catch of fish could be landed. But the two brothers would be busy following Christ; interested, eager, watching him, hearing him, learning a new way of life from him. All four became disciples -- followers. They became apostles. They became tremendous forces for good in the world of their day.

Notice this item of interest, while we think of them. These four men were not sitting and waiting for something usual or unusual to happen. They were busy men! This was an inconvenient time. Two of the men were actually laying out their nets after a catch of fish. The other two were mending their nets between catches. There was no idleness; no fooling around; they were hard at work, and Jesus’ call came at a very inconvenient time! How often it appears that the busiest of people hear the call most clearly and often manage to undertake what is important! Jesus had a way of appealing to busy people. Levi was called while he was taking toll --- busy as could be! Not one of the twelve whom Jesus chose to the high rank of apostle was called to that rank when idle!

Another matter of note is that they were not told of any thrones on which they should sit to judge the tribes of Israel. They were not promised wealth or fame or privileges of any sort. It was no lucrative life to which Jesus called them. He simply said, “follow me,” and they came and followed him.

Perhaps they had no notion that they were being called higher. They were just called --- and they followed. They were to receive power to do wonderful things with their lives. Part of it is the power that always comes into one’s life when someone believes in us. These men found that Jesus trusted them with his work. He had picked them out, commissioned them, relied on them, believed in them. All that is memorable and distinctive in their character came from their response to that trust. How they must have encouraged themselves, in times of discouragement and distress and testing by saying to themselves, “He believes in us! He has trusted his work to us.”

And so they became the kind of people we need in our time. It is what the Christ in this world needs in us. And this is the kind of person the world can have if we will listen for Christ’s call, and listen to his call, as he speaks to us every day. That call can restore our sense of direction.

The voice of Christ is not silent. In a spiritual sense it speaks to us every day in the normal course of our daily routine. In the countless little things we do, in the decisions we make, his call, “follow me,” comes to us. If we do not hear the rightness and the challenge of his call, it is because we are too busy with our nets! If we have difficulty hearing the call of Christ in our day, it may be that one reason is that we expect to hear it in a different way than that in which it usually comes. We are conditioned to the spectacular. So many things clamor for our attention in superlative words, that we hardly know how to notice what is normal.

There was nothing very dramatic or spectacular in Jesus’ call to those first disciples. Those men were not called away from some wicked life to a life of sublime virtue. They were called from a life that was honorable and good to a life that was even better. They were called from the business of securing food for people’s bodies to the business of offering life for people’s souls. They were already engaged in performing an essential service. They were called by Christ to a higher service when he said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” It looks, from first reading, as though their following was a very abrupt change. In a sense it was abrupt. But James and John did leave their nets in charge of their father and the hired servants, and may have checked back a bit later. There was a time, later, when the disciples, led by Peter, were fishing again, when Jesus directed them to a great school of fish, a heavily-filled net, and a new vision of their call.

Most of the choices which we make in our living are not radical choices between good and evil. Most of our choices are choices between good or better. We are confronted with many possible courses of action, most of them quite good in themselves. But some of them are better than others. Most of our sins consist not in choosing to think, be and do what is evil, but in choosing to think, be and do what is fairly good to the neglect of that which is better.

A good teacher used to tell his graduate students that it was a sin to read a second-rate book. It was a debatable statement, or course, but he argued that the time and energy required to read a second-rate book should more properly be invested in reading a first-rate book. It was therefore, he declared, a violation of stewardship to read a second-rate book. We all know men who work so long and so hard at their jobs that they have no time or energy to spend with their families. When they do find time, they are so spent and emotionally drained that they have not much to offer. Surely the industriousness and diligence to be seen in these men are virtuous in themselves. But they lose their virtue when they interfere with the spiritual welfare of their families.

Most of the testings and temptations we face are of this variety. We are rarely offered the choice of an outright evil. Usually we are offered something good, but not good enough. We seize upon the lesser good, and the “devil laughs” because we have neglected something better. Aunt Emily puts her lodge first, because it is a congenial fellowship, when she might be doing a far more effective job using her natural gift for teaching a class of growing children at church.

These fishermen could have made quite a case for staying on the job. When Jesus called them to be his disciples, they might very well have said to him: “We would like to come with you, but right now we have to tend our nets. If we don’t, who will? We have families to support; the whole village depends on us for securing food. We can’t leave all of this now.” Would any of us condemn busy men for this kind of answer? But, if they had so answered, we would never have had a chance to condemn them. The good news of God’s grace through Christ would not have been told around without disciples to preach it and teach it and practice it. If these four men had not responded to Christ’s call to a higher kind of service, we would not have heard of them nor of the message they preserved and transmitted. Fishing for fish is good. Fishing for people is better. Jesus said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they left their nets and followed him.”

I recently noticed a little story which reminded me of one of my grandmother’s exploits. Grandmother had a setting of duck eggs that she wanted hatched. She put them in the nest of a broody hen in the chicken coop. After the hen had kept the eggs warm for the allotted time they hatched out as fuzzy little birds which the hen perhaps supposed were chicks. They were not, of course. They were ducklings and they behaved as such. They ate the food to which she led them. But when she led them to the brook for a drink of water they promptly swam out on the water. It was no way for chicks to act! The hen could not follow the little fellows. Grandmother laughed at the hen’s anxious antics and (being an amateur photographer) got one of the most effective pictures of barnyard frustration that I have ever seen recorded.

The fanciful little story to which I now refer has to do with a young farm boy who found an egg in the desert. He brought it home and put it in a nest in the chicken coop where one of the chickens hatched it. As the tiny bird grew, it acted in some ways like the chicks in the rest of the hatch. It scratched in the dust for bits of grain and grit, and it pecked at the corn and scraps fed to the chickens. But it was soon obvious that it differed from the chicks. For it was not a chicken; it was an eagle. The boy found it a pathetic sight to see this proud monarch of the skies scratching around and pecking like a chicken. And so, one day when the bird was feathering out, he took it to the top of a mountain and hurled it out over a cliff. For a moment, the eagle panicked. He spread out his untried wings to brake his fall through the air. The wind came up under his wings and his descent was suddenly arrested. He began to rise and descend with the air currents. Then he flapped his wings and began to climb toward the sun. He swooped and he soared. He circled over the boy’s head. Then he disappeared over the horizon.

I know that there are improbabilities in this fanciful little story, like an Aesop’s fable. But I want to say that people are like that. We are appalled at the man who lives like some earth-bound animal. He may be dirty, self-centered, vulgar. His life lacks discipline, and moral standards. But a man is part of the animal kingdom. People are physical beings. Why is it appalling to see man living only like other animals? Because mankind is not just another animal. He is destined for a higher existence than that. And any person who is content just to live like an animal is like the young eagle who looks so pathetic among the chickens.

The Christian faith teaches that a man is destined for a level of existence far above the highest cultural achievement of any civilization. He is destined for communion with God; for intimate fellowship with the divine. He is intended, by the creator, to be a participant in the life of God and a partaker of the divine nature. People who become satisfied with less are not being true to themselves.

This destiny was sensed by the prophets. It was Isaiah who spoke of the voice crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight....” John the baptizer appeared, generations later than those prophets, proclaiming the same kind of message and alerting the people to the coming of the Christ. In the fullness of time, Jesus appeared, he was baptized into his holy ministry, and he kept calling disciples to their higher destiny.

There is always a certain amount of godly discontent in even good life. You have found a great deal of good in your life, without doubt. And you have accomplished a great deal of good in the world. You have put your shoulder to the wheel, and helped where help was needed. But I doubt that you are fully and finally satisfied. For it is not your true nature to be fully satisfied.

Christ is constantly calling us, every day, to higher levels of good and to widening areas of service. Could he be calling you right now?

Usually, Christ’s call to higher service does not come in any very dramatic or spectacular way. It did not come in any blaze of glory to those Galilean fishermen. It was just a simple, direct invitation. They felt the challenge of it, and followed. If we are so engrossed in the status quo, in doing what seems to need doing right at hand, that we can’t hear; if we are so satisfied with the good that we have already attained that we do not even know we are called, we shall go right on being merely fish-handlers. But the higher mission to which we are called will remain unfulfilled.

Christ is calling us. “Follow me.” There are higher fields of service waiting our attention and devotion. “Follow me.” There are higher goods than these already good lives we now see. “Follow me,” says our Lord, “and I will make you fishers of men.” Will we leave our nets and follow him?

(Prayer. Let not the routine work of our hands, or the preoccupation of our minds, keep us from hearing thy Christ, O Father of our spirits. May we work faithfully and well; and just as faithfully give ourselves to the higher duties and responsibilities of Thy righteous realm. Amen.)

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 17, 1965.

Also at Wood County Infirmary, March 3, 1965.

And at Waioli Church, April 27, 1975.