Fairhaven UMC

When I’m on vacation, above all, I want to sleep. Stormi is not like that. Stormi is very different than me. She’s up at or before sunrise every day at the beach.

and she and my dad will go down, go down to the sand and set up the tent, the chairs, long before anyone else can encroach onto our spot. My dad is very territorial on the beach, which I’ve inherited. Stay far away from me. We spread out our chairs, right? And I can usually get myself out of bed, sunscreened, coffeed up onto the beach chair by like 9:30 or so, by which time Stormy’s already starting to sunburn.

But I can’t deny the magic of sunrise on an East Coast beach. And I do my best to make it to the sunrise at least once on every trip. Because there’s nothing like that silence. And it’s hard to express the way a sunrise on the beach feels because it’s really not silent.

It feels silent, but it’s not. The seagulls are slicing through the air, cawing. You know, you have the little shorebirds skittering on the sand trying to outrun the water coming in and out. And the waves always seem just very peaceful, no matter how big they are, whenever the sun is glowing red.

But there’s this spiritual silence there. Yeah. It feels like you’re not really supposed to talk. It feels like you’re supposed to be quiet.

And the light that you see there can’t really be compared to anything else. Somehow the sun starts very small, this little red-pink disk, and over the next couple minutes it turns into a big orange ball of fire, and then just the regular daylight. And how is a person supposed to react to something like that? What are we supposed to do in moments like these where we can tell there’s something divine happening around us? And the way we respond is that we pull out our phones and take some pictures. And that’s not the right answer, but that’s what we do.

And we want to capture what’s happening when we’re seeing something beautiful in some way so we can take it with us so we can enjoy it later. That’s why you see people doing it in all these silly circumstances. You’ll be at a concert and someone’s filming the whole thing. You’ll be at fireworks, same deal.

And it’s kind of bizarre because, no offense in case you’re a great photographer, but I have never seen a smartphone picture of a sunrise that was worth looking at. There is nothing that you can capture in a picture that conveys what that looks like, what that feels like, this experience that’s just immersive in every sense. And you are not going to feel anything like that looking in that picture. And while you’re still there, this desire to catch it puts a barrier between yourself and whatever miracle is happening around you.

And so we might be tempted to diagnose this as a very modern problem. Our inability to be in the moment comes from technology. And I don’t know. You think about, back though, James Audubon, the early 1800s naturalist, he sought to record every bird in North America, and he had to sit down and paint every single one of them.

You think he knew them pretty well. And in 1909, Robert Peary was the first explorer to ever reach the North Pole. We have no pictures of that voyage. We just have his diary where they calculated, looking at the son, that they must have been there.

We have evidence in pencil, right? And even 30 years ago, you didn’t have to put a forceful note in your wedding program requiring people to stay seated and refrain from taking flash photos during the ceremony. Without the possibility of some random aunt or cousin stepping out to snap a picture with her iPad, right? Right. Now, things have changed in that way, but I don’t think the general phenomenon is new. And the world we live in makes it easier than ever to keep ourselves from really absorbing what’s going on.

But the Apostle Peter shows us today that this is a human condition, right? Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the day that marks our transition from the season after Epiphany, which looks at the early, exciting, new, fresh moments of Jesus’ ministry into Lent where we walk along with Him to the cross. The symbolic turning point from uphill to downhill happens on the Mount of Transfiguration this morning. Jesus’ upward journey up the mountain, up to the shining moment. gives way to that long downward drift to betrayal.

But the apostles don’t know any of that. The apostles don’t know that they’re standing in this symbolic moment. They’re just walking with Jesus up a mountain. So here’s the scene.

Jesus has taken Peter, James, and John, three of his first disciples, to the top of a very high mountain. And we don’t know that he’s given them any explanation as to why they’re supposed to go. And in fact, based on what we’ve seen in Scripture over the past couple weeks, you remember when he called them at the seashore and just said, follow me? We can probably speculate he didn’t tell them much at all. He just said, let’s go.

But the four reach the top of this mountain. Jesus is in the lead and is out in front of them. And miraculously, Jesus is transformed before their eyes. His face starts to shine like the sun.

His clothes become as white as pure light. And Jesus is completely different now. at a fundamental level from who they thought he was seconds before. It’s not just that he’s the same guy but glowing.

Something is different. And as if that’s not enough for the disciples to take in, suddenly Moses and Elijah, who are respectively long dead and bodily taken into heaven, they show up. And they’re there having a conversation with Jesus. And there’s a sense in which Jesus is really bringing the story together.

Jesus. Old Testament prophets, law in this new promise. This is the first time that Moses has set foot in the promised land. Really fascinating.

So Peter, naturally, is overwhelmed. He’s standing in the midst of this glorious moment, brighter and more immersive than the most incredible sunrise, and he is just overtaken. And I imagine Peter is trying to stay firmly in his rational brain, to keep control, to hold on so this high-voltage emotion, the spirit in the air doesn’t just knock him down. And he says to Jesus, quite sincerely, in doing his best to be a servant of the one he has very recently called the Son of God, he says, Lord, it is good that we’re here.

Off to a good start. And then he says, if you want, I’ll make three shrines. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. And it’s this beautiful gesture.

We’re always attempted to kind of raise an eyebrow at Peter for being clueless, but he’s not. He’s talking about the kind of tent, the kind of shelter that the Ark of the Covenant was kept in. This is a tabernacle. He’s trying to make this holy place.

Yeah. Peter wants to build the kind of structure that’s intended to be a shelter for the presence of God. So he kind of gets what’s happening here. And he thinks, understandably, that doing something is the way to respond to this moment.

You know, I’m here. I must be here for a reason. I’ve got to do something. And Peter’s mistake is not in his intentions.

His intentions are good. His mistake is that he’s refused to just let himself be overwhelmed. He has this desire to stay in his right mind, to keep a handle on the situation, and, yeah, to put something between himself and this act of God that’s happening before his eyes. He puts the smartphone up, so to speak.

He’s attempting to make tangible and permanent something that God intends to be fleeting, something that’s a special gift just for those who are there. Peter is you and me, standing in front of a sunrise, trying to figure out the best way to capture it. He doesn’t have a phone, so he wants to build a monument. It’s not a sin or anything.

It’s just this intensely human tendency to do something whenever all God wants is just for him to be there. And it’s the stark contrast to the example we see from Moses in our Exodus reading, if you listen there. When Moses goes to be with God, although Moses has had kind of a longer standing relationship with God at this point, Moses goes to be with God on the top of Mount Sinai, and when he does, Moses fully unplugs. He is there to be with God.

God doesn’t even show up for the first seven days, and everything else gets left at the foot of the mountain. So Moses’ warning to the people before he goes up the mountain, I think is actually kind of funny, but it’s really powerful. It’s important. He basically says, you know, if you guys, the people of Israel, if you guys have any complaints, any legal disputes, go talk to Aaron, go talk to her.

Somebody’s name is Hur. I’m off the grid. You know, I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with your silly nonsense. There’s people here who can handle it.

Leave me alone until I come back. Moses is ready to hear. Notice how differently Peter responds. He’s just desperate to maintain control, to be a responsible disciple, to keep up this job that he has.

And it results in him speaking before God does. How often have you done that? He’s ready to hear. Have you wanted to do something and spoken then before God has actually spoken? I would say most of the time for me. And if we’re lucky when that happens, we experience in these moments what Peter does, and that’s that God cuts us off.

God cuts us off to say what God needs to say. And so in this case, on top of the mountain, this cloud descends, this physical representation of the Father. It’s the same cloud that surrounded Moses at Mount Sinai. The same cloud that leads the Israelites across the desert.

And here on the mountain, from that cloud, God reaffirms to the disciples what he said at Jesus’ baptism. They weren’t there the first time around, but they get to hear it this time. This is my son whom I dearly love. I’m very pleased with him.

But God adds a little addendum to this, something that he didn’t say at the Jordan. Listen to him. Moses received the law for the first time on a mountaintop from God. That’s what Moses went up for in our Exodus reading, to get the tablets.

And now the disciples are receiving the fullness of that law. Listen to him. Listening to Jesus, that’s God’s orders now. And it’s simultaneously so much simpler and so much more complex than the law of Moses.

It’s not just a bunch of yes or nos, it’s listen to him. And Peter is probably more than a little bit embarrassed because he has not been doing a lot of listening in this couple moments. But hearing the voice of the Father, he does hear, he does listen, he drops to the ground, which was the proper response all along, just to take it in. Jesus then comes to them, comes to the three disciples, reaches out and touches them and encourages them to get up and not to be afraid.

This moment is a moment of wonder, of grace. It’s not judgment. You know, Peter, you got it wrong, but here’s your opportunity. This is what you’re here for.

But as they lift up their heads to see what’s going on, it’s done. that special liminal moment of the sunrise, this brief miracle after the darkness has just drifted as it always does into the plain light of day. And then they head back down the mountain. It’s done.

And Jesus does something, I think, really puzzling at this point. And he tells Peter and James and John, don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody about this vision until the human one is raised from the dead. Interestingly, they don’t seem to have any questions about that.

But he says, don’t tell anybody. That incredible experience of transfiguration, of meeting face-to-face with God, with these great heroes of Israel’s history, of watching Jesus be transformed into pure heavenly light, don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody. That’s just for them.

Don’t tell anybody, Jesus says, not the crowds coming to hear me preach, not those wounded souls who are coming to you for healing and for exorcism, don’t say anything to the people who are trying to decide whether or not to believe in me. Don’t even say anything to the other nine disciples. levels. It’s as if they’ve gone out alone to the beach at daybreak, submerged into this ocean of color and sound and smells they couldn’t have imagined, and now they’re just supposed to go back home, slip into bed before anyone knows they left.

left. Envision doing that, though. I have done this. Doesn’t it feel more sacred not to tell anybody? You’ve seen something that nobody else has seen with you.

This gift that was given from God to you, and it remains between you and Jesus. it’s easy, I think, in our lives to believe in a Jesus who’s either just completely beyond us and very distant. You know, he’s removed from our lives. He’s seated up on a heavenly throne.

Or to believe in a Jesus who’s very abstract. You know, he’s contained in like the words of the Sermon on the Mount, these commandments. It’s easy to think of Jesus being distant in that way. But the transfiguration shows us a Jesus whose most fantastic miracles and signs are sometimes just one-on-one.

Who gives those who love him the overwhelming power of his presence. Not for public consumption. Not for any purpose of convincing other people. But just because.

Just because he wants to give it to you. You know, we don’t go out and look at a sunrise for any reason, you know, to help us see in the dark. We go because it’s beautiful, because it’s a great, wonderful thing to see. And once we have seen it, once we’ve seen the sunrise for ourselves, we know every night that that same thing is coming again in the morning.

And so if Peter had distracted himself from what he was seeing to build these three tabernacles, these three tents, or if the disciples had spent their time engulfed in this cloud of God debating among themselves, trying to nail down the meaning of what they were seeing, what is this about? That would have been as good as missing it. Why even go? the presence, their presence with Jesus, is the entire point in that moment, just being there. That’s it. Wrestle with the theology, wrestle with the meaning, talk it out later.

For now, just be there. And so as we move into Lent this week, we do that walking alongside Jesus and the disciples down the mountaintop. We have the opportunity to wrestle with the meaning of all of this. But we often think Lent is about what we’re going to do, what we’re going to give up, what new practice we might take on.

But the voice from the cloud doesn’t say, copy him. It doesn’t say, obey him, at least not yet. God says, listen to him, which is a very different thing if you think about it. Listening and obeying are not the same thing.

And so the question is, before you do anything for Lent, before you do anything, can you just sit in the sunrise? Can you put down the phone to take pictures, the plans that you’re coming up with to build tents, and just sit down, just listen? So for the next 40 some days, we’re walking towards Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. We’re walking towards the Last Supper, towards the Garden of Gethsemane where, again, the disciples have trouble just being there. We’re walking towards the foot of the cross. At every step of the way.

we can devote ourselves to taking seriously these words from heaven. Listen to him. Just be with him. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

The Prophet Isaiah’s words feel especially heavy, visceral for us during a western Pennsylvania winter, I think. You know, we’re living in a pitch-dark land, right? I feel like we’re home for two hours after this before we’re in pitch darkness. We get just a few hours of clear sky a week. Christmas cheer, the busyness of the season, the high points of winter, unfortunately front-loaded, have completely faded at this point.

We’re in the long part of winter, the intractable piece, where it feels like the sun just barely gets over the horizon and then drops back down. So it might feel a little bit disconnected to hear Matthew’s gospel text this morning that takes place on the beach. You can picture the image of Jesus and these first disciples. Some date palms swaying, the light pebbly sand, the water gently lapping on the shore against the tied up boats.

You’ve got the sunrise. James and John are just silhouettes against the morning sky. Yeah. And this is this really appealing image.

Almost feels like a tropical paradise, very different than what we have right now. And we can envision the sounds of these men sloshing through the surf, boats slicing through the waves, these four future disciples throwing their nets on a peaceful morning. I think that’s a mistaken image, at least an incomplete image. Because we picture fishermen in our context as doing something for fun.

It’s leisure. We picture them going out to relax on the water while the rest of the world is asleep. But these are men at work. This is their job site, these fishermen.

And they’re doing this work to provide for their families. They’re commercial fishermen. So forget the palm trees and the sea spray. Drop the idea that anybody’s on a casual stroll on the beach to watch the sun come up.

These guys are at work. Five in the morning on the job. And envision what that’s really like. There’s a cold wind.

You can’t escape the smell of seaweed and wet wood mixed with the smell of dying tilapia flopping in the boat. And every man’s hands out there are chafed and blistery from throwing ropes over and over and over again. No. And this is, as Isaiah puts it, a land of deep shadow.

And so envision what that’s really like. The people of Galilee are an occupied people. They’re just keeping their heads down. They’re trying to make a living under the boot of the Roman Empire that just marches violently and carelessly through their cities.

There’s massacres all the time. The king’s a tyrant. This is a shadow over the land that isn’t just emotional, isn’t just spiritual. It’s killing people.

It’s creating orphans. And maybe we can feel that shadow in our land, in our world. Right? And so all this said, this is not a leisurely day on the lake. This is not like going to Presque Isle.

It’s not like going to North Park Lake. This is hard labor in a hard place. And that’s where Jesus shows up to meet the disciples. Not the synagogue, not the temple, not the market square.

He goes and sees them at work. And so we meet Jesus this morning, walking through all this bustle on the lakeshore, all of this mourning work. And he has just returned from his 40-day temptation in the desert, which we get back to in Lent, strangely. But the Holy Spirit had sent him out immediately after his baptism by John in the Jordan, and he’s tempted in the desert for 40 days.

And after this great trial, he’s proven his ability to resist Satan at all costs, but And so he chooses now to begin his ministry in the world. So he moves away from his hometown of Nazareth because the prophets never heard in his hometown, right? And he decides he’s going to begin a new chapter in the lakeside town of Capernaum. And so that’s where we are today. And what’s happening here is the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

He transitions from being this Nazarene carpenter to a preacher across the region of Galilee. And he’s no longer the guy that he was in his hometown. One chapter has closed, a new chapter has begun, and he’s no longer the guy that he was in his hometown. And the time has started for something new.

And he has this simple message that he proclaims everywhere that he goes, and he says, Repent. The kingdom of heaven has come near. A better translation, the one you heard Flo read from the CEB this morning, is, Change your hearts and lives. Here comes the kingdom of heaven.

And Jesus’ message is clear: God is doing something right now. And He’s doing it here, He’s doing it among you, He’s doing it in this place. Amen. This isn’t just a far-off, abstract prediction.

So shape up or face the consequences. And this is why I think the change your hearts and lives language is so much better than repent. We understand repentance to be like apologizing. But repentance is, there’s a word metanoia in Greek, which is not about apology.

It’s not even a call to recognize, to name the sins you’ve committed. It means turn around. It means to become radically different than how you were, to go in a different direction. So don’t just fiddle on the edge of things.

Don’t just apologize for what you’ve done. Change your life. Change who you are completely. And so this is the message that Jesus has started proclaiming.

We don’t know how long he’s been doing this at this point, but he’s still a really minor character on the Galilean landscape. You know, just like Pittsburgh, they have preachers that wander around on the street corners. Jesus is still just one of those people. But we meet him this morning, walking along the Sea of Galilee as a new chapter begins.

So first he sees Simon, Peter, and Andrew, and they’re fishing from the shoreline. They’re casting their nets into the choppy sea. And he says, come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people. And they drop their nets immediately.

These tools that have been their livelihood for the entirety of their adult lives, Amen. and probably before that, they drop their nets and they go immediately. They follow Jesus up the beach. And now these guys are a group of three, Jesus and these other two, and they continue along the shoreline.

And soon they spot James and John, and they’re not on the shoreline. They’re out on their father’s boat a couple yards out into the sea. And again, Jesus calls out to them, follow me. And they’re out on the shoreline.

That’s it. And he doesn’t try to pitch them on anything. He doesn’t give them a plan or a job opportunity. He doesn’t promise them the secrets of the universe.

But still, they just respond to this simple invitation. And they drop their nets. They climb out of the boat. They wade to shore.

And they set out on this journey to somewhere with this guy. And without so much as a see-you-later to their own dad, he just stands bewildered in Okay. the boat, what’s he going to do now? What are they going to do now? Nobody knows but Jesus, but they’ve decided to go. And I think the most glaring question that grips any of us as we read this story is a really basic one, and that is, why did they go? because at least as Matthew tells it, they’ve not seen a miracle.

Why? They’ve not seen any kind of wondrous sign. They’ve not even heard Jesus preach. They’ve not interviewed Jesus to see what he’s got in mind. And they’re not like John the Baptist.

These guys are fishermen. They’ve not been actively waiting for the Messiah, pouring over prophecy, seeing if he’s going to show up. And yet without a moment’s thought, without a moment of debate, they just leave behind everything. No, they’re not.

Their family, their friends, the livelihood that keeps food on their tables, a roof over their heads. They drop it and follow this man they’ve never met. Why would they do that? Why would they do that? Well, Matthew tells us that the Jesus ministry as he moves away from Nazareth into Capernaum, which is this land of Zebulun and Naphtali on a road by the sea, the same place that Isaiah talked about, he says that this is a fulfillment of prophecy. And Matthew tells us that the people in this very land live in the dark.

And Jesus’ arrival marks the coming of this brilliant light that just shines upon everybody there, that slices through this shadow of death that they lived in. And I don’t think that these fishermen knew Isaiah’s prophecy by heart. They did not have all this stuff memorized. They were not looking for the Messiah.

They didn’t see Jesus and go, aha, just like Isaiah chapter 9, that’s the guy. They didn’t do that. But I think they did feel something shift when they saw Jesus. They felt this disruption.

life under the Roman Empire, well, really in any empire, is just painfully predictable. Right? With a few exceptions, there aren’t many. You know your place in the world. You know your fate.

And these four fishermen, they know what each passing day is going to bring for them. They’re going to fish. They’re going to eat. They’re going to sleep.

They’re going to wake up and do it again. And a couple times a year, they’re going to pay their taxes. Repeat. Repeat.

From adolescence to old age when they can’t do it anymore, their life is going to look the same every day. And their fathers pass this life on to them. They’ll pass it on to their sons. There’s nowhere to go.

It’s a closed cycle. It’s a limited horizon. And the shadow that hangs over them and over their land is not just this darkness of oppression and occupation. It is that.

But there’s this deep spiritual stagnation too. There’s this feeling that this life that they have, that’s all there is. Nothing really ever changes. That’s it.

And Jesus, when he arrives on the lakeshore here… offers this straightforward call that they come and follow him, that disrupts that stagnation.

This is something completely different. They’ve never seen anything like this before. Come and follow me, he says, and I will show you how to fish for people. What does that mean? They just sit there wondering, what does that mean? But it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter what it means. They don’t figure it out. Their feet are already moving. It was compelling.

They’ve already dropped their nets. Jesus says, I will show you how to fish for people, and this would mark a transformation for them in their lives. Okay. It marks a transformation in what they do, and it marks a transformation in who they are.

It is this metanoia, this changing your hearts and lives that Jesus has been proclaiming. It’s them doing it. They have this opportunity, this offering for a radical and complete change in their lives. No one else was offering that.

And they follow Jesus because he offers them this really captivating mystery, an unknown future that lies in this possibility. They can become something new. And that’s more compelling to them, more captivating than the security of just staying the same day in, day out, nothing to look forward to. This is what life is.

the mystery of something different is more compelling than staying the same. And so I wonder, is that true for you? What would you prefer? The security of staying the same or the mystery of something different with Jesus? Because who knows? Think about this. Jesus might have walked past a dozen other boats before he got to Peter and Andrew. He might have called out to some other fishermen who looked up, thought about it, and looked back down, pretended they didn’t hear Jesus or just waved him off.

Right? It’s safer in that shadow than getting into the light. But we, I think, have a instinctive understanding of this, don’t we, about living in shadow. We know what that’s like. About a life that’s a closed cycle where we just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

There’s nothing on the horizon. And that’s not just the deep freeze that kept us in our house the past week, switching from one pair of sweatpants to the next day’s pair of sweatpants. This is a spiritual climate thing. It’s a spiritual thing.

It’s what our world feels like, what our souls often feel like. We have our nets that we take care of day in and day out. We try to hold things together. We try to survive.

We get nearsighted. And like some of these other fishermen probably, we stare so hard at these nets we’re mending in our hands, the bills, the schedules, the family stuff, the worries that we have. We miss that Jesus is over here waving at us from the shore saying, come, I have something else for you. And as we’re bogged down in all this stagnant routine, we can easily forget that life is supposed to be something else, something more than this.

We stop believing that we were made for anything besides just keeping that boat floating. But there’s Jesus on the shore, shining like this light in the darkness that’s gotten dangerously comfortable for us, this darkness. And he’s issuing an invitation to you. But of course, you can decide to keep your head down if you want.

But whenever he calls this first set of disciples, notice how he does it. He doesn’t hand them a set of instructions. He doesn’t give them a printed copy of the Beatitudes to memorize. He doesn’t give Simon and Andrew one of those little comic book tracks to hand out to people about the good news of Jesus as part of this fishing thing.

He doesn’t say, go and convince people. He says, follow me and I’ll show you how to fish for people. And he is inviting them to undergo this transformation. He’s inviting them to this turning towards something mysterious and new.

They were once in the shadow and now they’re invited to radiate his light into the world. And I think this is what we often miss anytime we talk about evangelism, which isn’t very often. We think that evangelism is handing out these little packets or saying the right thing to people to convince them to try Jesus. Right? We think it’s this task where we have to drag people to church and hope that they stay.

But in this story, we see here that fishing isn’t a chore that they’re assigned, that they have to do. It’s a result of change that starts inside of them. Jesus is saying, come with me and I will change you so radically. I’ll give you all of this light that you won’t be able to help but shine that on to people.

And it will catch them the way that my light caught you. And the invitation here from Jesus is not to become like a salesperson for God. The invitation is to become living proof that there’s more than the drudgery of the life that we have in the shadows, where nothing, where nobody could ever be any different than they are already. And think about what that means for us.

To accept that Jesus gives us this invitation means refusing to accept that just stagnation Amen. is the final word, that sameness is how things are going to be. It means refusing to believe that our lives, this church, this community, this country are finished growing. And it means dropping these heavy nets that we cling to, the nets that mean this is just how things are, this is what we do, this is how we’re always going to do it, and instead step towards the light that has shown up.

Right? And it’s choosing to know that God wants more for you personally than what this world can give you, what you can achieve on your own. And whenever we allow ourselves to be changed like that, to be turned by this mystery, we start to have that light. We don’t have to sell Jesus to people because our lives become that gospel. That’s how a net works.

It just catches what’s around. It doesn’t persuade each fish to come jump in the net. People are drawn to the light. People are drawn to hope.

People are drawn to those who live like they’ve seen something big that has changed their world. People notice that. They get caught in it. They get caught up in it.

They see it. They want to know. And so the question for us on this cold day is not, you know, who can we recruit? That’s not evangelism. The question is deeper.

The question is scarier. Are we willing to get out of the boat, the place that’s been safe, that’s been familiar for decades, whatever that means for you? Are you willing to let go of routine, the safety of knowing exactly how tomorrow’s going to go forever in exchange for this unknown journey that Jesus could call you to do something totally different tomorrow? Are you willing to let Jesus change your heart, your life so completely that you become a different kind of person? Yeah. Because that’s the choice that Andrew and Simon face. That’s the choice that James and John face.

They look at their father. They look at the boat. They look at these endless days of a predictable future. And then they look at Jesus.

And they realize that one of these paths is safe. They know it. They like it. But the other path is alive.

dangerous, maybe, but alive. And these everyday fishermen become fishers of people. They travel places they never could have imagined. They proclaim good news.

Right? They heal disease. They cast out demons. They even face down death itself and win. Jesus calls you not just to go with him, but to become something different because you have gone with him.

Your net is in your hands right now. We’ve all got our nets. Maybe your grip’s tightened on that net as you’ve heard this story. but Jesus stands on the beach.

He calls you. Will you drop that net and follow him wherever he goes? In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.