Text: Matthew 4:12-23
Speaker: Elisa Stone Leahy
“Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.” From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him. And he went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.”
The seaside is bright and clear. The sun glints off the light brown hair of a man walking along the shore. He wears impractical white robes crossed with a deep blue sash. Everything is, inexplicably, clean, down to his woven sandals. When the hard-working fishermen look up from their nets, he beckons them to leave their daily labor and follow him, with a shining smile and a sparkle in his (probably) blue eyes. They do, of course, casting aside their labor in favor of a personal relationship with the savior.
The stories we tell are the lens through which we see the world. I was raised in an evangelical missionary family, surrounded by stories of Jesus that sounded just like this- cartoonishly nice. I call it flannelgraph theology. Some of you I’m sure have seen stories told in this format. An easel is covered with flannel fabric and felt pieces in the shape of Bible characters, animals, props, etc, are placed on the board as the story is told. There is certainly nothing wrong with flannelgraph. It can be a starting point to explore, to play, to wonder about the story. But a faith that never explores or wonders, that never expands beyond the safe lines of this easy, polished gospel lacks authenticity. It is a form of storytelling easily simplified, sanitized, softened. And flavored with something that feels oddly American. North American, to be specific. Very white.
I spent my childhood summers at the Christian camp my parents ran in a tiny Peruvian fishing village called Chaco. I had what you might call a free-range childhood. My parents believed that “the safest place to be is in the will of God.” That is quite the mantle of protection. And so, they paid zero attention to what my siblings and I did most of the time. I chased my sister with crab claws, slipped in piles of fish guts, and dared my friends over who could swim to the farthest of the anchored boats. From the broken shells and barnacles slicing my bare feet, stinging jellyfish leaving red streaks across my legs in the shallows, and the head-spinning pain from that one time I stepped on a scorpion, I knew that fishing villages were not soft places. I loved watching the fishermen bring their hauls onto the docks, and I remember what it was like. Fishing is rough, sweaty, hard, bloody work. And it stinks. But the Sunday School story of Jesus calling his disciples never included slimy, smelly algae. In that story, the sand was always clean, the air crisp as fresh cotton, and Jesus’ call loud and clear as a bell. “Follow me.”
The stories we tell. In the story I was taught, Jesus calls us to give our own personal self to God by accepting his salvation. The core of this call is a personal relationship with Jesus. It is an individual story.
A faith that is concerned mostly with personal decision-making is a comfortable one. When morality is defined by private devotion, there is no need to even leave the house. Why bring the stinging jellyfish into the nice stories we tell? Why soil the bright white robe of the man who called us to follow Him?
This version of Jesus will move you to hand cash to the homeless without a thought for the predatory housing system that led them there. This Jesus will place on your heart a desire to share your faith in other countries, without the need to examine the history of harm brought to those countries by colonialism. This Jesus allows you to pray for the poor, then go out and vote for policies that line the pockets of billionaires.
This Jesus knows you are a good person. He is always smiling. He is soft and small. He is a flannelgraph figure that fits in your pocket.
Let us look again at this scene. See the filth, smell the rotting carcasses of sea creatures, feel the salt-crusted nets scrape skin and blood, hear the rough fishermen who drink and fight and swear. Striding along the edge of the water, comes a fierce and passionate prophet, here to decry the sins of mankind. The preacher’s face is stern as steel. “Follow me,” he says, “and I will make you fishers of men.” In the bottom of their boats, glittering fishes, wrenched from their underwater dance, writhe in the hostile air they cannot breathe. The very act of fishing foists death on another for the benefit of those more powerful. Yet this is the call of the prophet. To fish for men. He offers them the power to cull those who do not belong from those who are chosen.
The stories we tell. In this story, the disciples are called into a group with clear lines, pointing fingers at those on the outside. This is a call that brings death. This Jesus is a fire and brimstone prophet with a message- join me or die.
A faith that is defined by who is not inside the circle, and the moral elevation of those who are, is a safe one. It is a faith of armored edges and high walls, where challenges to our way of thinking don’t often make it past the gate. It is a tribalistic faith.
Tribalism is a way of defining self within a particular group, often according to similarities in ancestry, beliefs or culture. Tribalism is typically shown through intense loyalty to the in group and animosity toward the out group. It is an ancient, primal organizational system of protection.
Shortly after the murder of Renee Nicole Good by an armed ICE agent in Minneapolis, Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary, held a press conference. She repeated the lie that Renee had assaulted the officer involved and defended his actions. Emblazoned across the front of her podium were the words, “One of ours, all of yours.” The message was clear. Harm to a single DHS agent will result in the obliteration of the perpetrator’s group. Just one member of the “in group” carries such weight and value as to equal the entirety of the “out group.”
The Nazis in particular were well known for collective punishment. The Czech village of Lidice is one of the most extreme examples, where the population was almost completely wiped out after the murder of a German officer. We are all constantly pummeled with horrific news, including the horrors of collective punishments such as those against the Palestinian people every day. I will not add to it with descriptions of the atrocities at Lidice. But what made Lidice unique was the way the Nazi media reported it. Instead of the usual misinformation, Nazi propaganda proudly detailed the violence, proclaiming exactly how they had erased the village from the earth. The message was clear—you harm one of us, we will destroy all of you. Now, lest you think that this mentality belongs solely to one side, when the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, heard of the massacre, his initial proposed response was to bomb three German villages for every one they destroyed.
“One of ours, all of yours.”
The same week of that press conference, people of faith gathered in Minneapolis for a singing vigil in the streets near where Renee was killed. This is a community that has formed remarkable networks of care under circumstances that mimic war zones. They are people who have built a society so welcoming and so committed to others well-being, that they are willing to give their lives to protect their neighbors. They have seen their own beaten, gassed, imprisoned and murdered, yet still they rise together. Under signs welcoming the immigrant and embracing community, the crowd sang these lyrics, “We belong to them, and they belong to us.”
The stories we tell. Two stories here. “One of ours; all of yours,” or “We belong to them, and they belong to us.” Each message references belonging. Each phrase is a call to be a part of a larger group. Each of them is a way of labeling “us” as an identity. Each is an attempt to fill an empty space.
Tribalism and community both recognize that individualism is lacking something.
On our own, we are never enough.
Think for a moment about the body you inhabit. Your sack of bones and muscles, your specific, small view of this one tiny corner of existence, is the epitome of limited. If earth is but a pale blue dot in the universe, then what are we, these minuscule less-than-ants, crawling over the surface? But when those boundaries between our personal existence blur and blend together with others, when we see our existence as bound up with those around us or those across the oceans, our very definition expands. We become part of something larger, we tap into a universal story that we all have ownership in.
Tribalism is small. It says, “my sack of bones is important because it is not that sack of bones.”
But community says, “my body and your body share this air and this space and so, we are here. Together.” I expands to we.
There is an archaic word I learned recently—commonweal. It is similar to the modern word commonwealth, which refers to the general common good. But commonweal has a slightly different meaning. It is not just the collective well-being of a group, but it is used to identify the people within the group itself. The “commonweal” refers to the whole population as one entity with a voice and a value. Each one of us, bound together into one body. Each of our stories, bound together in one book.
Speaking of stories, let us look at this story one more time.
“I’m so sorry to tell you, he has been detained.”
Twice, I’ve had to say those words. Once to tell a friend her husband was taken at his ICE check in. And again, just a few days ago, to tell a woman I tracked down on Facebook that her brother had been picked up on his way to work that morning, leaving us to find her only with the paperwork left behind in his abandoned car.
This passage opens with that same news. Jesus receives word of John the Baptist’s arrest. We do not know how John was taken. Perhaps it was at a scheduled appointment with Roman officials or on the way to his shift at the baptismal river. We don’t know how. But we do know why he was arrested. John the Baptist had publicly criticized Herod Antipas, calling out his immorality, and so, found himself behind bars. Prisons are so often tools to silence dissenting voices.
At the beginning of this story, word of John’s imprisonment has just reached Jesus. It is in this context that Jesus walks along the shores in Galilee, a rabbi in an occupied territory where critique of the empire leads to detention. With that background, how do we interpret this call of Jesus?
“Follow me,” He says. The question is, follow Him where?
To an individual, personal faith, private and disconnected from the messiness around us? Would this rabbi urge softness in a dangerous world of armed soldiers taking people who speak out?
Or perhaps He calls us to a vindictive, tribalistic faith, eager to point out others for condemnation? Would he urge us to rally with those who are most like us, shutting out the others?
If we are to follow Jesus, let us look where His footsteps lead. After gathering the fishermen, his first disciples, we are told that Jesus ‘went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.” Education, truth-telling, and public health. These are foundational aspects of community life. They are elements of a social collective. This is a communal faith. Not tribalistic, for we need not search for enemies among humankind. We can see our enemy in all that threatens the commonweal— poverty, want, disease, ignorance and so much more.
Lest we have any doubts about the kind of gospel Jesus calls us to, skip ahead just one more chapter and you will find the Sermon on the Mount, a radical transformation of society. Jesus flips ideas of power and hierarchy upside down and inside out, elevating the marginalized, advocating for unimaginable non-violence and telling a story of us, all of us, as a collective. Yes, we each have an individual story. But we are bound up together in a greater one.
“We belong to them, and they belong to us.”
The fishing dock at Chaco had a floating section at its furthest point out in the water. It was anchored in place by wide pilings at each corner. My friends and I loved to stand at the very edge whenever the wind picked up, looking out into the stormy ocean, certain that we were the bravest children in the world. To a small child, standing on the floating dock, staring up at those wide wooden posts, it felt like the pilings were moving up and down with the waves, while we were the ones standing still. All of us were certain that was the case. We could see them right in front of us, going up and down as the ocean churned.
Naturally, we dared each other to climb them. If you timed it just right, as the piling dipped to the lowest point, you could leap from the dock, grab the top of the round pole and heave yourself up, heart pounding to sit on top. Once perched on the piling, the waves tossing beneath you, you were the champion, the bravest of them all. It was a worthy dare indeed.
But something strange happened once you were on the piling. Everything shifted. Suddenly, you understood that this was the secure, stable position. That dock you thought was so safe and dependable a moment ago, was now rising and falling, tossed by the waves.
It’s all in the perspective. It takes a great deal of bravery to look at something from another point of view.
The older I get, the more I recognize how easy it is to settle into my own faults. Alone, our identity stagnates. The borders of who we are carve deep, especially if we are isolated. Our annoying tendencies that smooth out around others, instead become old habits that are sharp and entrenched. It is the same with the borders of a tribalistic faith. The connective tissue that draws a group together can feel safe and comfortable. It can feel stable and secure in a world tossed by the waves. Yet those clear lines limit our identity. Our perspectives are never challenged. We never take a chance to jump on the pilling and look at things a different way. The walls meant to protect, rob us of all the richness of the “other.”
But our faith is a collective faith. The borders of the commonweal are expansive and fluid. It is a place where your own dignity is bound up in the dignity of others. It is a place where you might face discomfort, because that is what the wellbeing of someone else requires. It is a place where you might risk your freedom to speak truth to power for the sake of the other. It is a place that might, sometimes, smell like fish guts. But it is also a place where you might feel like a champion. Where we might be, together, the bravest of them all.