John 1:35-42 (2)

09/28/08
John 1:35-42
Hudson UMC


As a pastor, I get all kinds of things in the mail, talking about various conferences I could go to that would surely teach me the things I need to make the church grow. It is absolutely incredible that so many people have the perfect solution to the declining church in America and all I would need to do is give them a few hundred dollars and four days of my time and all my church leadership problems would be solved. As a seminary student, I am in different classes, covering a wide range of topics. In classes like “Christian Doctrine I”, questions are asked, but the class does not offer up too many examples from their own lives. However, in my class on worship, it is a different story altogether. Everyone in that class has been in leadership in their churches for a long time and probably about half of them are currently serving churches. Everyone in the room has something to contribute to the discussion. It seems like everyone in the class holds the secret to effective church leadership and, if they could just share it with the class, everything would be perfect. You know, I’m a bit unconvinced. If church growth is as simple as changing the order of worship every Sunday or getting a rock band in front of the congregation, I would do it in a heartbeat. However, I don’t think that it is that simple.

The reason that I don’t think that it is that simple is because of the many passages in the New Testament like ours for this morning. On one level, Jesus’ strategy is very simple: He just kind of walks by people and they start to follow Him. If this is what Jesus did, doesn’t that mean that this is what the church should do to reach out to people, just kind of walk by them and hope they notice us? It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. There is something deeper happening here. It is a very good thing to ask questions of the texts that we read, but sometimes we ask questions that the text has absolutely no plans of answering, but they should stir up our thoughts just the same. The question I want to address is, “Why in the world did they follow?” Now, though this question is just burning in my mind, the text never answers it; it just tells me that it is the case. However, to apply the story to my life, I can still ask the question and the reason I ask it is because I want to consider what would make me follow Jesus that suddenly and without reserve.

Again, I don’t know exactly why these two men did what they did, but we can speculate a little, bounded by some reasonable guesses. We know that they were looking for the truth. What they did not know at first was that Truth (with a capital T) is not a thing but a person. To me, it is not simply interesting that they followed immediately, but that they followed at all. In my own life, I find that, the more interested I am in knowing the Truth, the more hesitant I am to follow any particular leader. I want people to basically show me their credentials and prove to me that they are even remotely able to show me the Truth before I will put my trust in them. These were people who were following John the Baptist. They were not spiritual novices. They already had the best teacher they had ever seen and yet they followed this new man whom they had never seen nor heard before. This is not a small act of trust, but a radical example of spiritual recklessness. There was something about this man called Jesus that attracted them in the very deepest within them. They did not follow because He was hip and contemporary, or because he had a polished brochure to hand out to people to get them interested. He merely looked their way and their hearts were captivated and they were almost compelled to follow Him.

It is important to notice at this point that Andrew, one of the two who started following Jesus at this point, did not only follow, but did something else. We read that, before he followed Jesus to the place where He was staying, he goes and finds his brother Simon and says to him, “We have found the Messiah”. What does this say about Andrew’s experience with Christ? It shows us that he is far more perceptive of the importance of Christ that we all too often are. He shows us, by what he does, that he realizes that Jesus actually is Truth with a capital T and that, if this is true, other people need to know about it because they need Truth just as much as he does. When he goes to tell his brother about Jesus, he doesn’t talk about how much of a sinner he is, nor does he say, “Hey, this Jesus guy has a bunch of programs you can participate in if you just follow” or “There’s a great band and some free food”. He makes no pretence that he holds the answers, but that there is a person that he needs to meet. At this point, he does not fully understand all that Jesus has to teach or all of who He is, (in fact, there is no way that he could understand fully,) but he knew that, if Jesus was really who he thought He was, this was news that needed to get out, it was something earth shattering.

I think that it is also interesting to notice that Andrew does this before he has even spent a single day with Jesus. To be honest, most people in the mainline church in America joined either because they were born and raised in the church and have never known anything different, or because it was the socially fashionable thing to do. The mainline has not had a really strong emphasis on evangelism and, since we see some of the obviously flawed techniques that some other bodies use, we tend to want to distance ourselves from the idea altogether. However, this is not only practically disastrous, but also is completely counter-Scriptural. I don’t know the exact statistic, but only about five percent of all church goers bring even one other person (outside their immediate families) to church in their entire lives. We are all really good at coming up with reasons why we can’t bring anyone to church; shoot, I’m really good at it, and yet, what does that say about how we perceive Christ? Andrew, with just a glimpse of the Truth of God, dropped everything to tell someone else about it because he knew that it would make a difference. How much of a difference do we think Christ will make in the lives of others if we won’t tell them about Him? What does it say about the work that God has done through the Holy Spirit in our lives if we show by our actions that we don’t think He will do much in the lives of others? When we see Andrew doing something like this, it makes us feel uncomfortable, so we want to know why.

As interesting as Andrew’s case is, I want to talk a bit about Simon. We know that Andrew and Simon are brothers, but we don’t know much else apart from this. It seems like they might be rather different people. Andrew was already following a teacher, and a very ascetic one at that. He had already left home and given up the luxuries of life to go after God. He was already participating, at least in a superficial way, in the life of a disciple. He was not yet following Jesus, but he was doing a lot of things that disciples do. Simon, on the other hand, was not following John. In fact, he was married and had a house. He was living the way most of the people around him lived, but this was not the way that someone who wanted to know God in a more intimate way lived. He was not considered to be among the spiritual elite. In fact, we might even wonder why Andrew would have even taken time to talk to his brother about this at all. After all, if Simon were to take off like Andrew did, it would put a tremendous strain on his marriage, and yet he does it anyway. If he wanted to, Andrew could have made a list of reasons that Simon would not be interested in what he had to say, but he says it anyway and God does a work that would have been completely unforeseen.

I want to take a little sidestep and talk about the different ways that Andrew and Simon were called. Andrew saw Jesus in the flesh after living a life of discipleship under John, taking the next logical step in his devotion; Simon was at home and was told about Jesus from another human being. Both of these calls are valid. Throughout history, some Christian groups have glorified individuals who have been in the church since they were born. There are other groups that tend to consider a dramatic conversion experience later in life to be the best way to become a Christian. However, there are no distinctions made regarding the validity of these two different calls in our text. Jesus accepts both of them and makes both of them His disciples. If you have ever felt less worthy of the love of God simply because of when you became a believer, take heart because we are not able to ruin the graciousness of God.

Simon responded to Andrew’s call and goes to meet Jesus. The very first thing that Jesus does when He sees him is change his name. He says, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas”, or, Peter. Here was a guy who, for all intents and purposes, was nothing spiritually special. He shows up to find out what this guy is all about and He goes and changes his name! This seems so unusual to us in twenty-first century America, but the meaning would have been immediately understood to first century Jews. Every time God has changed someone’s name in the Old Testament, it was always a big deal. Abram’s name was changed to Abraham when God made a covenant with him to bless the world through his children. Jacob’s name was changed to Israel when he wrestled with God and his life changed forever. For Jesus to change Simon’s name implies not only that Jesus saw Himself as God but that Simon’s life was about to change forever. To change Simon’s name to Peter was to say that his role in the eyes of God and the life to which he was called was to be one of stability and strength; what a funny thing to say to an average fisherman. This man who woke up as Simon the fisherman went to sleep that night as Peter the disciple of the Lord.

I want to encourage you to put yourself into this story. Who are you today? Are you Andrew? Are you someone who has been living the lifestyle of a disciple who needs only give up your heart to the God who is calling you? Are you already following Jesus but have not yet shared that good news with someone else? Are you Peter, someone who has been waiting their entire lives to find the truth but have allowed the customs and practices of the culture you live in to draw you away from seeking after God in a deliberate way? If we cannot find ourselves, or at least parts of ourselves in the stories we read, we will never understand what God has to teach us through them. I have to say that I have never read a Biblical story where I could not relate in some way when I looked at it carefully.

We are setting forth, as a congregation, into a new day. We are taking steps as a church council to look at how we do things with a critical eye to learn how we can improve and so we can live more like the church is meant to live than ever before. We are realizing that we have desires to serve the Lord and spread the good news of Jesus Christ but don’t really know how to pursue them, so we are seeking out people who can take us by the hand and teach us how to make a difference in Hudson and in the world.

I began this sermon with an observation about how human beings often see ministry. I want to take some time and look at this issue again in the light of our text. When we consider the calling of Andrew and Peter, what do we see? I’ll tell you what we don’t see. We don’t see people trying to dress Jesus up in some kind of secular image to make Him “relevant” to the world in which He was ministering. We do not see people talking about how exciting Jesus is. We do not see people talking about how good of a system of morality He was teaching and how it just makes sense to follow Him. We don’t find Andrew, in reaching out to Peter, preparing a dazzling multi-media presentation to give him three solid reasons that all start with “p” that he should also follow Jesus. We don’t see him preparing a carefully thought out mission statement full of deliberately inclusive language. We don’t see any of those things. I think that the reason we don’t see any of those things is that none of them really gets down to the core of what is going on here. I think that Andrew had some fundamental convictions about who Jesus was and his own need for a Messiah that drove him to share the good news that he had found Him with other people. It is because God has transformed our lives that we tell others. If I have not been fundamentally changed by the power of the Gospel, how can I be surprised if I don’t want to reach out to someone else? What I would need are people who have encountered Christ in a life-changing way to take me by the hand and show me this God that they love so much.

Jesus is telling us to come and see where He lives. We can either keep it to ourselves or we can tell it to the world. Let us learn from the simple testimony of Andrew. We don’t need to have all the answers, we don’t need to be perfect, we just need a willingness to talk about what God has done for us which God Himself will give us if we are willing. In the end, we can never know for sure why Andrew, Simon and the other disciple followed Christ. All we can ever know is why we follow Him. We can never tell another human being beyond a shadow of a doubt why they should follow Christ and have them fully understand; all we can do is bear witness to the reasons that we follow Christ. We once were lost in our sins, helpless and broken. In time, we encountered the living God and began to be conformed to the image of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the single most effective strategy for outreach: real people with struggles and problems reaching out to other real people with struggles and problems, not commanding them to believe certain things, but encouraging them to encounter the same God that we have encountered. This is, after all, how Andrew did it. Let us pray.

AMEN