There is an opportunity to further our Bath Essentials Gap Ministry by organizing teams of St John volunteers.  This group would meet at set times to arrange baskets for those referred by Love INC. This group will determine whether distribution would be weekly or monthly.  Neighbors would come to St. John at a predetermined time with a Love INC voucher to pick up their basket.  What a wonderful way to welcome them into our church and invite them to worship with us!

   If you have furniture or questions about item appropriateness, please call Ann LaRue at 346-3501.

September 01 Eagle Wing

Click on one of the following links to listen to a recent sermon from Saint John United Methodist Church!

• August 22, Caught in the nets of Continuity
• August 1, Saying Grace
• July 4, Behold I Make All Things New

Saint John UMC, Rev. Peter K. Perry, Pastor

One day many years ago, a fisherman and his wife were blessed with twin sons.  They loved the children very much, but couldn’t think of what to name their children.  After several weeks had passed, the fisherman and his wife noticed a peculiar fact about the unnamed boys.  When left alone, one of the boys would always turn towards the sea, while the other boy would always face inland.  It didn’t matter which way the parents positioned the boys, the same child always faced the same direction.  “Let’s call the boys Towards and Away,” suggested the fisherman.  His wife agreed, and from that point on, the boys were simply known as Towards and Away.

The years passed and the boys grew.  The day came when the fisherman said to his sons, “Boys, it is time that you learned how to make a living from the sea.”  They provisioned their ship, said their good-byes, and set sail for a three-month voyage. The three months passed quickly for the fisherman’s wife, yet the ship had not returned.  Another three months passed, and still no ship. The woman, lost in grief over her husband and two sons, still out the window every morning, expecting to see the boat on the horizon. Three years had passed when the grieving woman saw a lone man walking down the lane to her house.  She recognized him immediately as her husband. She ran and hugged him, and cried out “What has happened to my darling boys?” The ragged fisherman told this story: “We were just barely a day out to sea when Towards hooked into a great fish.  Towards fought long and hard, but the fish was more than his equal.  For a whole week they wrestled upon the waves without either of them letting up.  Yet eventually the great fish started to win the battle, and Towards was pulled over the side of our ship.  He was swallowed whole, and we never saw the great fish or Towards again.”

“Oh dear, that must have been terrible!  What a huge fish that must have been!”

“Yes, it was, but you should have seen the one that got Away….”

That story allows me to remind you that the two sets of brothers mentioned in our Scripture this morning, Peter and Andrew, James and John, were fishermen by trade.  They are at their work, mending their nets when Jesus comes along and says “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men!” BOOM! Just like that they drop everything and follow him!

That’s the way I learned the story back in Sunday school days.  Fishermen… minding their own business… when along comes this stranger that they don’t know from Adam…he says two words to them…”Follow Me”…and they leave behind their nets, and their boats, the families, their homes, everything…they leave it all and follow him.

Jesus said “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”

He didn’t say, “Follow me and I will make you rich beyond your imagination.”

He didn’t say, Follow me and you will see the world.”

He didn’t say, “Follow me and you’ll never get sick again!”

He didn’t say “Follow me and every day will be sunny and bright and wonderful.”

He didn’t say anything like that.  NO, Jesus said, “Follow me and I will put you to work as fishers of men.”

He said “Follow me” and they dropped everything and followed him.   Yessiree, dear sweet old Miss Johnson, my Sunday school teacher told it just like that…and she made sure we remembered the story because she taught us that old SS song,

I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.

I will make you fishers of men, if you follow me!

It wasn’t until many years later that I began to read the Scriptures a little more critically and learned that some scholars say it may not have been quite so spontaneous and quite so dramatic.  The big debate over this passage is whether or not the fishermen were already acquainted with Jesus before his invitation came to follow him.  That’s not really so far fetched.  We know that John baptized Jesus.  We know that John had identified Jesus as the Lamb of God.  We know that some of John’s disciples had already begun to follow Jesus. (John 1:37).  We also know that the Gospel writers often get their chronologies a little bit mixed up.  So the theory goes that these fishermen had been followers of John the Baptist, that they knew who Jesus was, that they knew he was a prophet, that they knew John the Baptist thought he was the long-awaited Messiah.  Perhaps the fishermen had been close to John.  Perhaps they had been with him when Herod arrested him.  Perhaps they had been outside the dungeon when John the Baptist was beheaded.  Perhaps they had sadly returned home, to their nets, not knowing what to do without their teacher John.  And then one day, Jesus comes to Galilee and says, “Follow me.”  And the fishermen, men who already knew who Jesus was, men who were deeply concerned about spiritual things, men who had followed John, dropped their nets and followed Jesus.

Dear sweet old Miss Johnson may have been right.  The professors who argue otherwise…they may be right. Maybe there is a rational explanation for irrational behavior. Maybe God worked a miracle in the hearts of the fishermen.  Maybe Jesus was so charismatic that all he had to say was “follow me.”

I’m sort of glad that there’s a question about this, since I’m not sure I can live up to the version Miss Johnson taught me.  After all, how many of us, in all honesty, would leave behind everything to follow Jesus.  We like to think we would…but would we?  Would we leave behind our jobs, our parents, our children?  Would we leave behind our homes, our cars, our hobbies?  Would we leave behind our credit cards, our bank accounts, our stock portfolios?  Would we leave behind our hopes and dreams?  Would we leave behind our pasts and our presents and our hoped-for futures?  Would we leave it all behind, not knowing a thing about who Jesus was, what he wanted us to do, what he stood for, what he would one day become?  Maybe now that we know him and love him, we might say yes, we would leave it all behind.  But when we first started on this spiritual journey?  Would we really have left it all behind then?  Would we have followed Jesus then? Would we have dropped our nets?

Those nets intrigue me.  What a wonderful metaphor the nets are in this story.  Nets are the things of life we got caught up in.  Nets are the symbol of all that clings to us, binds us, limits us… We live in the nets of this life.   You know the really crazy thing?  Like the fishermen, we spend lots of time and energy repairing the nets that constrain us, keeping them strong, all the while becoming more and more entangled in them…

Maybe our particular net is the net of addiction.  Maybe it is the net of guilt.  Maybe it is the net of despair.  Maybe it is the net of fear.  Maybe it is the net of greed.  We all have nets… But there is one net in particular in which almost all of us are caught and securely held.  I call it the net of continuity.  Maybe you would prefer to call it the net of status quo, or the net of sameness, or the net of routine, or the net of momentum.  Call it what you will, but it is one the hardest nets from which to escape.  It is the net which makes us say “Change is hard” instead of “Change is exciting and change is liberating.”  It is the net which causes us to say, “We’ve never done it that way before” and think that means we shouldn’t do it that way now.  The net of continuity is the net that resists change, that fights change, and that fears change.  I think that of all the nets that bind us up, the net of continuity is the hardest to drop.  For it not only clings to us, but we cling to it.  It is our security, our comfort, our shield.

But the fishermen…they dropped their nets and they followed Jesus.  Hallelujah.  They dropped their nets and they followed Jesus!  Say it with me…They dropped their nets and they followed Jesus! Oh yes, they did. We may not understand fully why or how, but we know they did.

We’ve got a lot in common with them. We all come to Jesus in different ways and we all follow for different reasons.  But you know what? I don’t care if they acted on impulse, or if they had been reasoning it out for a lifetime.  And I don’t care about how it works for you either…all that really mattered then is that they dropped their nets and they followed Jesus, and that’s all that really matters now for you and me too.

How about you?  Are you ready drop some nets today?  Are you ready to drop the net of continuity?  Are you ready to drop the net that keeps you from following Jesus the way you want to do?  Are you ready to change something about yourself today?

Want to hear a story about change?  (You might as well say “Yes” ‘cause you know I’m going to tell it anyway!)  Milton Wright was a bishop in the United Brethren Church during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  At one point, early in his career, Bishop Wright was asked about the prospect of human beings flying.  His response was “Blasphemy! Utter blasphemy! God intends only his angels to fly.”

Some years later, Bishop Wright, now age 81, was spending some time away from his episcopal duties and visiting with his two sons.  The good bishop was enjoying himself immensely as his sons introduced him to their exciting new project.  His son, Wilbur, with his feet firmly planted on the ground, could barely make out his father’s words, shouted to his brother over the roar of a motor a hundred feet above their heads: “Higher, Orville, higher!”  Evidently, the good Bishop dropped a net or two as he matured in years and faith… (Thanks to John Bristow and Don Hoffman from the Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary Email list for this illustration)

When we drop the nets we go higher, and we go faster, and we go farther than we’ve ever gone before.  And it is exhilarating.  And yes, it’s scary…but God calls us to drop the nets of continuity, drop the nets of routine and sameness, and follow him in new places and new ways.  Just as Jesus called the fishermen, God calls us.  “Follow me!”

A long time ago it seems, though in the grand scheme of things it was only yesterday, I decided to follow Jesus.  I’ve sometimes followed closely…and more than once I’ve lagged behind and been tempted by all sorts of nets, especially that old net of continuity.  But Jesus keeps looking over his shoulder, calling “Are you still following?  Hurry up, now!  Follow me!”  And it’s been a great adventure, hasn’t it?  It’s been a great adventure following Jesus, doing his work, loving him and being loved by him.

There was a church, not unlike our own, in a city, not unlike our city.  Everyday, at precisely noon, a man came into the church and went to the altar and stood there for five minutes and then turned and left.  He was not the kind of man you would expect to find in the church.  He was in need of a bath.  He smelled of last night’s beer.  He lived on the streets.  The prominent layman in the church learned of the man and was concerned.  He asked the pastor what he should do about this man coming into the church everyday, standing at the altar.  The pastor said, “Why don’t ask him if there is anything we can do for him.”  The layman hadn’t thought of that…probably wouldn’t have for his concern of another kind.  But to his credit he did what the pastor suggested, and the next day when the man came in at noon to stand at the altar for five minutes, the layman approached him and asked if there was anything the church could do for him.

The stranger, “Thank you, but no.  I’m fine.  It’s just that everyday I come here to your altar and I say, “Jesus, it’s me, Joe.” And then we talk.

The layman reported this back to the pastor.  “Preacher, all he does is come to that altar and say, “Jesus, it’s me, Joe.” He stands there for five minutes, then he leaves.”  Joe came every day and stood by the altar.  “Jesus, it’s me, Joe.”

One day, a few months later, Joe didn’t come.  He wasn’t there the next day, or the next.  They were worried, but no one in the church knew how to find Joe.  Then one day, the pastor got a call from a shelter run by a convent a few blocks away.  It was a shelter for old men who had no home.  The mother superior asked the pastor to come and visit one of his church members who was quite ill and expected to die soon.  The pastor said, “Who is it?”  It was Joe.

The pastor, straightaway, went to the shelter.  Before going to see Joe, he was stopped by a sister who told that Joe was in a ward of men that had always been the most difficult ward in the shelter.  The men would fight and cuss and swear.  The sisters had tried everything, but to no avail.  Then Joe had come, and overnight, the ward changed.  It became a model place, and the residents there seemed happy and hopeful.  Somehow it seemed, Joe’s presence had changed the ward.  But the sisters were concerned for Joe.  He was growing more and more ill.  And they could find no relatives, and no friends.  In the several weeks that Joe had been in the shelter he had not had a single visitor.

The pastor went in to see Joe.  He said, “Joe, they tell me you’ve really made a difference here, that you’ve cheered things up, and helped the men in these beds.”

“Oh, no, pastor,” Joe said.  “That’s not me that’s done that…that’s the work of my visitor!”

The pastor smiled and said, “Come now, Joe, you know you haven’t had any visitors.  Isn’t it true Joe that I’m the first person to sit in this here visitor’s chair?”

“No, preacher, you’re wrong. You see, my friend comes to visit me real regular.  He comes every day.  He comes right at noon, and he sits in that chair you’re sitting in and he says, ‘Joe, it’s me, Jesus.”  (after a version of the story told by the Rev. Dr. John Blackwell, Paradise Valley UMC, Paradise Valley, AZ.)

Brothers and sisters, God calls us to follow.  No matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done.  God calls us to follow.  And I can’t tell you for certain just what following Jesus is going to mean for you.  I can’t tell you exactly where he’s leading you.  I can’t tell you precisely what kind of work he’s got for you to do.  But I can tell you this: once you drop those nets of yours and follow Jesus, and something bad happens in your life, Jesus isn’t going to leave you alone.  You follow him, he’ll follow you.  You drop your nets and pick up his cross, and you will never be alone again.

You see, with Jesus, there’s never one that gets away.  Maybe you’ve been mending nets all your life and you never tried to follow Jesus.  Maybe you’ve been following him for years.  Maybe you once followed closely, but right now you’re lagging behind a bit.  It’s OK, because Jesus never stops calling out to you, whether you are near by or far away.  He keeps calling, inviting you to drop the nets of continuity, of the way things are and see through his eyes the way things might be…  Jesus is calling, and what Jesus is saying, is what he said to Peter, Andrew, James and John, “You can change, you can follow me today.”

Will you pray with me?

God, each of us is caught up in nets. Some are nets we’ve woven ourselves, some are nets the world has put before us, some are nets we’ve been caught in for so long that we can’t life outside of the net… but into each of our lives you come with an invitation… an invitation to follow you… to love you and see through your eyes, the eyes of faith, a new day and a new way.  Give us the courage, O God, to drop our nets and to follow…

God, in the quiet of this moment, here the longings of our hearts as we give them to you… love us, use us, and never stop calling us. Amen.

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. (Numbers 6:23-27, NRSV)

…by grace you have been saved… (Ephesians 2:4-10, NRSV)

I don’t know how many of you are in the habit of saying grace before meals.  Growing up at the Perry house, it was a ritual we followed… well… religiously!

God is great and God is good, and we thank him for our food. By his hands we all are fed, we thank the Lord for daily bread. Amen.

That was the usual and customary grace.

On Thanksgiving, or other times when the extended family would gather round our table, grace became my father’s duty. We would all bow our heads and join our hands and dad would pray… and pray… and pray some more… and we would finally all breathe a sigh of relief when dad would say finally pronounce the amen and we could all get down to the business of eating.

Grace… when I was growing up, the word meant the prayer before the meal… a daily reminder that the blessings of life we enjoy come from God.  Macaroni and cheese may have come out of a blue box marked Kraft, but first it came from God. Banana Cream pie may have been my mom’s best dessert, but despite her hours of preparation, it came from God.  The meat may have been sliced and diced by the butcher down at the Kroger Store, but it really came from God. This we knew, because every night we said, “By his hands we all are fed, we thank the Lord for daily bread!”

Once, long after I had become a pastor, when I was a parent myself, I thanked my mom for making us say grace before our meals. I told her that not only did I appreciate the practice, but the very word grace was perhaps my favorite word. That’s when mom told me a story from her childhood.

Mom said that when she was growing up, she lived next door to a little girl, a playmate a few years younger than her. Her playmate’s name was Grace.  They would wander around the woods behind their houses, slaying imaginary dragons and entertaining kings and princes over imaginary tea, which everyone knows is the very best kind of tea. But whenever dusk came and it was time to come home, Grace’s mother would come out the back door and shout as loud as she could…

“GRACE? GRACE? Where are you, GRACE?

Sometimes they’d be playing in the park across the street, happily swinging on the swings, or holding their dolls on the teeter-totter, when they would hear Grace’s mom at the door calling out…

“GRACE? GRACE? Where are you, GRACE?

Then one day, a moving van came to Grace’s house and Grace moved away. Mom said that she missed her neighborhood friend something terrible, but that every evening when she sat down to the dinner table and grandma would say, “Mary, will you say the grace?” mom would think of her little friend and the shout she had heard so many times…

“GRACE? GRACE? Where are you, GRACE?

Mom said, “Sometimes, when I am lonely or anxious, conflicted or confused, I just want to go out the back door and shout at the top of my lungs…

“GRACE? GRACE? Where are you, GRACE?

Shouting grace!  I wonder if mom’s old friend Grace loved her name as much as I do…

Grace … the seminary definition that I was taught is “God’s freely given unmerited love for everyone.” The word connotes the definitive nature of God… that God loves us whether we deserve it or not, whether we want it or not, whether we think we need it or not… God loves us.  From the early days of Hebrew monotheism, when Aaron and all his priestly sons began to pronounce the blessing we likely know very well, we have recognized that grace is what God is all about.

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace…

God’s gracious nature is at the center of our understanding of who God is and who we are in relation to God. God is grace and we live in that grace. When Paul preached to the Ephesians, he reminded them that this grace is not a human thing, but a God thing… We can’t earn it, we may only accept it.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God…

I’ve always loved the illustration about grace that compares our lives to that of a fish. A fish lives in the water… he swims around all day long in the water, doing his fish things, avoiding the hooks and the barbs and the nets and the bigger fishes. This is his world… and what is the defining characteristic of his world… it is the water. But the fish doesn’t even know he is wet unless you take him out of the water. He takes the water for granted, even though without the water he will surely die.

In the same way, we go about our human lives, day after day, year after year, doing our human things, avoiding the hooks and nets and bigger fishes of our world, unmindful that we are living in the midst of God’s grace. It surrounds us, through good times and bad times, giving us life, giving us strength, giving us love. “By grace we are saved,” says Paul. By grace we are saved. Nothing we’ve done. Just a gift from God. Grace.

As Christians we confess that this grace was made fully known to us in Jesus Christ. In the story of God’s incarnation in Jesus at the first Christmas, in the teachings of the rabbi Jesus throughout the lands of the Galilee, in the passion of Jesus on the cross in Jerusalem, and in the empty tomb of Jesus on Easter morning… in his birth, in his life, in his death, and in his resurrection, we see the grace of God at work.  So much so that the name of Jesus and the word grace begin to take on the same definition… by grace we are saved… by Jesus we are saved… Jesus so manifested grace, was so full of God’s love, that we use the words almost interchangeably.

You know I have some southern roots.  My dad’s father’s family was from Tennessee.  Maybe that’s why I’ve always liked the story about the old woman, born and nurtured in the South, who was endeavoring to impress upon her nephews and nieces the beauties of the South and its people.  One of her nephews spoke up. “Auntie,” he asked, “do you think that all the virtues originated in and have been preserved by the Southern people?” “No, not all, but most of them,” she replied. “Do you think that Jesus Christ was a Southerner?” he pressed with sarcasm.  The old lady hesitated a moment and said thoughtfully, “He was good enough to be a Southerner.”

Some Christians have a narrow understanding of the grace of God. They want desperately to restrict Christ to their sect or their culture or their race. As a Christian, I believe with all my heart and all my soul that it is through the name of Jesus Christ that I am saved, that the entire world is saved.  But I also believe, that Jesus is greater, far greater, than his name… because Jesus is grace.

We share this world with diverse people who hold many views.  Many are searching in vain for gods that cannot save them.  But others seem have found our God, or at least a part of our God, though they have given a name to God a name that is different from the name we use. In a world that is rapidly growing smaller, we will encounter more and more people of faith who know God by a different name.  Jews, Buddhists, Moslems, Hindu.  For me the truth of God will always have been most fully revealed in Jesus.  But when I meet persons of other faiths, I will look for Jesus at work within them. I will search for echoes of his name in the spirit of love and tolerance and forgiveness these people so often possess.  For Jesus Christ… grace… is already at work in the lives of everyone on this earth, whether they know his name or not.  We all swim in the grace of God.

When Helen Keller, that precious child who could neither see or hear, was first told the Gospel story, it is said that she cried out, “I already knew that such a God existed, I simply did not know His name.”

Sisters and brothers, God’s name is grace, and the love God has for you knows no bounds… by this grace you are saved…   and in those moments of doubt and wonder… in those times when you shout out…

“GRACE? GRACE? Where are you, GRACE?

Know that in those moments, you are living in the grace of God. Amen.

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