Walking along the beach is one of my happiest times.  What is it about that meeting place of water and land: the sound of the water?  The breeze?  The birds?  Probably not the birds.  Does it seem to you, too, that people tend to be a little happier, at the beach?  The beach is a place to look for nothing and for something, to clear your mind and delve your heart.  In the days of Jesus, there on the shore of Galilee, it was also a place of labor.

Maybe Jesus had been walking that shore each day for days.  We know he had returned to Galilee from the wilderness.  We know he had begun to proclaim the Good News.  How long had this been then: days, weeks, months?  We don’t like to think it had been months, because then where are his followers?  If it had been months already, he had nothing to show for it!  Even weeks seems a little long, but beloved, think: haven’t you tried to talk with people about God’s love and God’s Word over weeks, even months, without much apparent progress?  What to do?  Give up?  That doesn’t seem right, but, why not: what’s to prevent us, when all we get is resistance and rejection, or just steady indifference?  But that’s not all that we get.  Sometimes, there seem to be hints of interest, a willingness to hear more.  Keep at it.  I know it can be discouraging, often, but when the Spirit moves, He moves!

Maybe it had been several days, and Jesus had not yet come across the ones ripe for the message, ready for the call.  Was Jesus there at the shore to get his mind clear and to refill his heart?  Was he there because the Spirit again compelled him?  I don’t want to limit Jesus to his human nature, and I wonder sometimes if we make Jesus out to be more God than man.  How to hold both together, equally, undivided?  Perhaps Jesus was wondering and working his way through that very question.

There, that day, Jesus “saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen” (1:16).  Maybe he had seen them before, a few times; maybe this was the first time he ever noticed them.  Beloved, the Spirit is always at work, preparing the ground, making the way open—we don’t always see it, don’t even necessarily feel it: this preparatory work is an article of faith.  It is happening, all around us.  Sometimes, it takes a while for the message to begin to take effect, to sink in and have results.

Neither Simon nor his brother had been looking for Jesus, that day.  They were working, in their routine, like any other day.  There was also something in each of them.  Call it a desire, a hunger, a whispering emptiness.  They didn’t think about it constantly, didn’t dwell upon it; they didn’t have long conversations with each other about their emptiness, and it was always there.

Then Jesus arrives.  That day, God’s presence, God’s Word, spoke into that whispering emptiness and caused the sense of something—light, food, a hand, someone reaching into them, touching that question mark in their hearts and saying I Am.  Perhaps they had forgotten even how to hope for anything like that.  They had made their adjustments to the emptiness.  There was life; life came with its emptiness, and that was that.

But not today.  “‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people’” (1:17).  Jesus would show them how (MSG); he could make them able (RSV).  Here was a stranger who was no stranger, whose voice was not strange but familiar, somehow.  They knew this voice, though they couldn’t say how.  We may think it highly unlikely that Simon and Andrew should just drop everything and go along with Jesus—was it following behind him a few paces or walking right alongside him?  Such things don’t really happen.  That might be our attitude, or maybe it was, at one point in our lives, before Jesus came, knocked, called.  When your One Best Chance comes along, and you have sense enough, inspiration enough, to know it, you’ve got to take it.  The One Best Chance might not come along again.  Can you afford to miss it?  Can you bear the prospect that, if you let it pass by, you’ll always, afterwards, live with that loss?  Take the risk!

Jesus tells them to follow so that he can send them.  We don’t follow never to go.  We follow in order to go.  We follow to be sent.  We’re sent to bring others.  Well, that was just the apostles, and sure, Jesus gave them power, and that was then, but we’re just the church, now.  We know it’s good to bring others.  It’s not as if we haven’t tried.  We’ve invited.  In response, we’ve gotten wonderfully evasive non-commitments.  We’ve gotten discouraged.  I wonder how often Jesus felt discouraged.  Never, not Jesus!  I’m not so sure.  I think we sometimes make Jesus out to be more God than man, but by all accounts, those whom he called, like on that day on the shore, saw and thought of Jesus as more man than God.  We think, well of course Jesus could do it!  I have the sense, though, that what those first disciples thought was, if Jesus could do it, I can too.

Jesus saw them there on the shore, casting their nets, waiting for what God would provide.  What caused Jesus to speak to them, call out to them?  Maybe he had been calling out to everyone for days only to be rejected and refused.  Or is that impossible, unthinkable?  What encouraged him to try again?  Let’s for the moment not presume the divine knowledge of Christ.  For the moment, let’s instead assume the struggling hope of Jesus of Nazareth, trying to work up the courage to approach one more person with the good news.  Faith doesn’t give up.  Can faith be disappointed?  Yes.  Discouraged?  Yes.  Can faith seem futile and foolish?  Oh, yes.  And faith doesn’t give up.  Faith says despite that.  Faith says because.  Faith does not trust in my uniqueness but in my commonness.  If this whispering emptiness is in me, it’s probably in others, too.  If Jesus speaks into my emptiness and fills it, others can make that same discovery—they’re just waiting to, and I can go to them, and they might hear, like I did, because the Spirit has prepared them already, even as the Spirit had prepared me for that day and hour I first believed.

Mark, telling it the way Peter told it, writes, “At once they left their nets and followed him” (1:18).  Just like that?  No questions first, no conditions?  No scornful laughter or jeering insults?  Well, it was Jesus, you see!  How can anyone say no to Jesus?  And we get so discouraged when people say no to us.  Try again.  Try later.  Try someone else.  Try.

You remember that Jesus then right away goes and calls John and James, who also drop everything and follow Jesus.  There’s something about that name!  So, by the end of that day, Jesus has a total of . . . four followers.  Jesus.  We don’t often take time to think about those who stayed in the boat: Zebedee and the hired workers.

It sounds as if Jesus called only James and John, not the others.  Rude!  Could it maybe just possibly also be that Jesus called out to all of them, but only James and John responded?  I mean, all gave their answer; James and John responded.  Yes, Jesus had particular plans for Peter and Andrew, James and John, as we know, but I don’t want to be too quick to assume that Jesus wasn’t looking for anyone else, that day; I don’t want to be too quick to assume that Jesus wasn’t also addressing Zebedee and the hired men.  But we’re told that it was the four who responded, that day.

Some days that begin like ordinary days end up being extraordinary.  By the end of that day, Jesus had four times as many followers as he had begun with.  Yes, he had only four followers, but from small beginnings . . . How we love success!  There’s nothing like success to encourage us to keep going, to try again.  Success begets success.  You may or may not be familiar with a movie from the ‘70s, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  It’s a British comedy, and there’s plenty of silliness in it.  One silliness is a king who tells the story of how he was determined to build a castle where he was told a castle could not be built, in the middle of a swamp:

Listen, lad.  I built this kingdom up from nothing.  When I started here, all there was was swamp.  Other kings said I was daft to                        build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ‘em.  It sank into the swamp.  So, I built a second one.  That                              sank into the swamp.  So, I built a third one.  That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one . . .                                stayed up!

Four tries.  Four costly tries, three miserable failures.  In the film, the king is just sort of a stiff-necked tyrant, but I think there’s a Jesus message here, for us, today.  When all you have are four people, or eleven, or forty, what possible grounds could there be for believing that growth is possible, that growth is on the way?  It’s daft!  All the kings here below say so.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.