The good news is that someone does.  God does.  Jesus does.  We have hope.

Hope is remedy for fear.  But how do we get that hope?  It's a little too simple to hear someone else say we should have hope and then suddenly and miraculously to have it.  But there is a way - following a path of seeking and learning, a disciplined path of inquiring in God's temple and seeking God's face.  We do this by establishing and following the disciplines of church attendance, daily prayer and study of scripture.  If we follow these disciplines, even if they feel unnatural at first, the fear will eventually give way to something wonderful.  Something life-giving will emerge in the place of fear.  This is important news for all of us.

This disciplined approach creates for us a new identity that cannot be shaken because it is not about our homes, our looks, our status, our jobs, our loved ones or even our lives.  Our new identity comes from the one constant – God.

 This is part of what our Girls group has been learning and dealing with.  The girls have learned about the beautiful women of the Bible and about their own identities.

But it doesn't end there.  We take a disciplined approach, we learn about God and Christ, we have our new identities based on the unchanging love of God.  We come to church.  We practice daily prayer and study of scripture.  Ta-da!  Good job, right?  Now we can rest a little and enjoy this new-found peace!

Enter Jesus, who now expects us to go to work.  In the reading Gabe shared from Matthew, we heard about the beginning of Jesus' ministry.  John's arrest is the trigger for Jesus to begin his public ministry.  He begins to preach repentance as John did.  And he calls his first four disciples.

According to Matthew, these men have never seen Jesus before, have seen no miracles, heard no teachings.  No explanation has been given them.  They are not told why they should follow Jesus, what following him will mean, or where the path will lead them.  We are met here with Jesus' first miracle, the miracle of his powerful word that creates following, that makes disciples.

There is a problem for us in appreciating what happened here unless we really think about it.  The problem is that this is a fishing story and our notion of fishing is very different than the reality of it in Jesus' day.  When we think of fishing we likely get one of two mental pictures.  Some of us may think of a day on a chartered boat with other fishing enthusiasts going deep sea fishing.  We see blue sky, an expanse of water and the dream of hauling in a marlin.  The other picture that comes to mind for some is an idyllic one - a peaceful soul sitting on the bank of a river or stream, casting a line and whiling away a summer afternoon.    

Fishing was neither fun nor idyllic in Jesus' time.  It was hard work - there was always something to be done.  The boats required constant care and repair, the nets had to be constantly checked and mended.  The nets were large and hauling up a net full of fish required strength.  And let's talk about those fish.  When they got to shore, those fish had to be sold quickly or smoked before they rotted in the heat of the day. 

Simon, Andrew, James and John were not idle; they were not waiting around looking for something to do.  They were actively engaged fishermen – a full-time occupation that provided their livelihood.  They were not looking for a new life; they were not looking for Jesus.  The call from Jesus was intrusive and disruptive, calling them away from work and family.  And he didn't ask them to give up the hard labor of fishing for an easy life.  He merely exchanged fishing for fish with fishing for people.  This was not a call to an idyllic interlude.  Jesus appears disruptively in our midst as well.  He does not call us to admire him or accept his principles.  He calls us to follow him.  He calls us to fish for people. 

The call of the first disciples was the beginning of the church.   Bishop William Willimon, speaking to the congregation in the Chapel at Duke University in 1999, believes that we [the church] have forgotten our assignment to fish for people.  He said, “Mainline, liberal Christians often think of religion, as something we do. Church is where we come to get our assignment for the week — work on your sexism, your racism, God has no hands but our hands. Suffocating moralism pervades. Where is the good news in that?  Like those first disciples, we [need to] reach out to others in the name of Christ because, in Christ, God has reached to us. That is evangelism. Yet our shrinking membership, our loss of virtually an entire generation of youth, indicates that there’s not much good news being done among us.  We have been poor evangelists. We didn’t want to get lumped with those tasteless “evangelicals.” We are shy, unwilling to say much about our faith to others.”

Paul says “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing comes from the preaching of Christ” (Romans 10:17). There may be religions that come to you through long walks in the woods, or pondering your psyche, of gazing up at the stars. Christianity is not one of them. This faith comes from the outside, by hearing something we would not have known had not [a Christian] or the church told us.
 

Theologian, Karl Barth, … said that, “the main difference between … Christian[s] and … non-Christian[s] is … that …Christians are not necessarily better people than non-Christians, nor smarter. We are simply those who have heard something whereas non-Christians have not yet heard.”  As Isaiah says, light has come into our darkness – a light not of our own devising - and that makes us see differently.  We have a different point of view.  
 

… Everyone has a point of view, everybody stands somewhere, everyone has been “baptized” into some culture. It may be that culture that we celebrate …around here at 10:30 on Sunday morning or it may be the more officially sanctioned culture of consumerism, the culture of the modern nation state.  Everyone has been “converted” into something. Or in the words of Bob Dylan, “everybody serves somebody.” So the issue is not “Will I be converted …?” but rather which pushy, arm-twisting culture will have its way with my life?

Willimon challenges us to express our point of view, “Let’s go ahead, put our stuff on the table.  Let’s share our Good News.”  Let’s let people know that Jesus really has the capacity to make human beings more interesting than [where the Jolie-Pitts had dinner, the super bowl or even the presidential primaries] and [let’s] see who’s left standing at the end.”
 

The good news of Jesus has been in conflict with every culture in which it has found itself including the very first culture it encountered. In about two months we’ll see where all this open-handed fishing got Jesus and his people — a cross.
 

Now before everyone gets nervous, I’m not suggesting that we go hand out tracts on street corners and airports or browbeat people in to hearing the message.  We are not permitted to do that, not because we believe in “tolerance” but rather because Jesus does not permit us violence and coercion. The only way that Jesus allows us to do our fishing is through persuasion and example.
 

It is of the nature of Good News to want to share its joy with whomever will listen. As Christians we ought to be intensely curious about the faith of others, we ought to listen, both in order to understand our neighbors better, and also better to understand ourselves. But at some point, we must share our Good News, in word and deed, the truth that we have found, or more properly the truth that has found us, in Christ.