Mark 1:14-20

William F. Schnell

January 25, 2009

Tell me if the following conversation between husband and wife sounds familiar. "Hey Honey, how long ‘til you’re ready?" "I’ll be down in just a sec." "Yeah, well a sec has just come and gone and you’re not down here yet. How long do you think you’ll be?" "Why do you always rush me? I don’t do this to you." "I’m not rushing you; I am just seeking a little information here. If it is 15 minutes I will compose an invocation for Sunday morning. If it is 5 minutes I’ll check the weather channel. Is it closer to 15 minutes or 5?" "Just give me a second and I’ll be down."

I think God must get similarly frustrated when he can’t get a straight answer from us. The title of our message last Sunday was, "When He Calls Me," taken from a song our youth sing at Church Camp: "When he calls me, I will answer." The title of our message this morning is, "I Will Answer." When God calls us he expects a straight answer. He doesn’t expect us to beat around the bush, as Moses did around the burning bush when God called him to a monumental undertaking. I once preached a message on Moses’ reluctant response to that calling entitled, "Here I Am, Send Aaron," or as I like to put it in contemporary terms, "Here I Am, Send Kevin."

When God calls us, he does not expect us to either beat around the bush or to ignore him. But doesn’t God sometimes ignore us when we call to him? We ask him for certain things which don’t come to pass and we complain, "Why doesn’t God listen to our prayers? Why doesn’t God answer our prayers?" Does it ever occur to us that "No" is an answer? It is not a matter of whether God answers our prayers; it is a matter of whether we can take "No" for an answer.

Well then, maybe God should learn to take our "No" for an answer too. Let’s remember who is the parent here and who is the child. We expect our children to take "No" for an answer when they want to eat candy bars for supper. We know what will give them a tummy ache. We know what is in their best interests even better than they do. So when we tell them to stay clear of the road lest they get hit by a truck, we definitely do not expect to take "No" for an answer. God is our Father in Heaven and we are his children. While he expects us to occasionally take "No" for an answer from him, he definitely does not expect to take "No" for an answer from us.

Although God calls us in many different ways and for many different purposes, his call always involves one central feature which can help inform our proper response—our proper answer. Our text for this morning is, in my translation, under a heading: "The Calling of the First Disciples." In Mark’s Gospel, it recounts Jesus’ first foray into the ministry after his baptism and 40 day sojourn in the desert wilderness. After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God (Verse 14).

Did anything in that verse sound strange to you? After John is imprisoned, Jesus proclaims the good news. If I were John the Baptist languishing away in a dark, dank prison cell for no other reason than answering the call from God, I would be wondering where the good news was in that! Indeed, there is some biblical evidence to suggest that imprisonment led John to have second thoughts about Jesus. When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?" (Matthew 11:2-3).

Ultimately, John the Baptist was to pay the supreme price for his faith. King Herod had him beheaded on a whim, making him a public example of why not to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Imagine, then, how others would have regarded the "good news" Jesus was preaching. And yet time and again, when he issued the call to follow him, his true disciples answered the call. As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." At once they left their nets and followed him (Verses 16-18).

Jesus did not have to ask them how long until they were ready. They were ready at once to leave their nets, their boats and their livelihoods to follow Jesus. Others left their families to answer the call. When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him (Verses 19-20).

You will notice this common element of sacrifice involved in answering the Master’s call. James and John sacrificed home and family, Simon and Andrew sacrificed livelihood and material rewards, John the Baptist sacrificed first his personal freedom and then his life. Indeed, Jesus tells everyone who would answer the call that sacrifice is the price to pay for following him. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34).

A few years ago I was invited to return to my seminary to help teach a class. During a question and answer period I was asked what seminary had not taught me in preparation for the ministry. I thought for a moment and said that there was one central lesson that I really didn’t get until I left seminary and entered the ministry, although I could hardly blame either the seminary or the Church for failing to teach it to me because the lesson was always front and center.

In fact it is front and center in this sanctuary and just about every other Christian sanctuary you have ever been in. It is the cross of Christ—"the emblem of suffering and shame" as it is called in that hymn, "The Old Rugged Cross." Most seminarians are afflicted by a certain naïve conceit whereby they are going to save the world. In due time they will graduate with the earned honor of being called, "Reverend." They may even take to wearing a clergy collar so that everyone will know, by God, they have been called and they have answered the call to ordained ministry.

Then off they go to save the world, probably in a little struggling church for starters but one that will certainly grow into a Crystal Cathedral by the time they are done with it. Then the cross bearing begins. They preach like John the Baptist and get hammered like John the Baptist and wonder, "What did I do to deserve all this?" In the end they hopefully leave that little church no worse than they found it and limp into the next one to find that people there are every bit as unreasonable as those they left behind. Then they question their calling. Maybe they should have pursued that more lucrative career track they foolishly sacrificed for this business.

"Sacrificed," there’s that word again. Then the realization begins to dawn on our poor pastor, "Could this be what the cross of Christ is all about? Could these be the sacrifices I am called to make to follow the Master? Is this what they were trying to tell me in seminary, but I did not have ears to hear? Is this what the church put front and center all these years but I did not have eyes to see? Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me"?

Where is the good news in all of this? If John the Baptist gets beheaded on a whim, if Jesus gets crucified for a capital offense, if all the disciples get martyred, if the budding Christian church gets persecuted, and if I get stuck dealing with difficult church people where is the good news? What is so great about answering the call to follow Jesus if he only leads us to a dead end? Because if that is where denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Jesus ends, I don’t want any part of it and I wouldn’t expect you to want any part of it either.

But the Good News of the Gospel does not conclude with a dead end. It concludes with Jesus being raised into glory. The great good news is that denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Jesus leads us to glory land too. Again, like The Old Rugged Cross puts it, "I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it some day for a crown." First the cross, then the crown. First the crucifixion, then the resurrection—the resurrection into glory.

As a seasoned pastor who has matured beyond the naïve conceit of a seminarian, and who has experienced the resurrecting power of God which makes the crosses we bear an insignificant price to pay by comparison, I can tell you that there is no place I would rather be than right here. There is no vocation Kevin Horak would rather have than being one of your pastors. I believe parents who answer the call to sacrifice on behalf of the children God entrusts to their care will always find life’s greatest meaning and purpose and contentment and satisfaction in the roles of parent and grandparent long after all other roles, professional and otherwise, have faded from view.