Sermons for the Month
IXTHUS
DATE: February 4, 2001
SERVICE: Epiphany V
TEXT: Luke 5:1-11“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
Mirja McDade is a cook at a Denver tavern. Her love, however, is not cooking but sports. She plays baseball, volleyball and basketball. But she spends most of her free time with a group of young men playing tackle football in a city park. Mirja's dream? She wants to play professional football. Now, it looks like she might have a chance. Move over you male testosterone filled NFL/AFC football fans. The WPFL (Women's Professional Football League) was formed last fall, and over 300 women showed up in Denver to try out for the Colorado Valkyries. Three teams - the Minnesota Vixens, Lake Michigan Minx and New York Sharks - competed in a Barnstorming Tour in 1999 to test the fan interest in women's football. Based on their success, 14 teams emerged for the 2000 season - double what everybody expected. As many as 700 players have shown up for tryouts at a single site, despite the fact that the WPFL is marketing its game as "full-contact, knock-down, drag-out, bleeding football." This is not touch football. This is full-contact, knock-down, drag-out, bleeding gridiron gore. What are these mothers thinking? If all went well, just yesterday - February 3 - the American Conference champions and the National Conference champions played the final decisive game of the inaugural WPFL season. The Daytona Barracudas, Dallas Wildcats, Atlanta Amazons and 11 others all tried to pass, punt, kick and run their way through a grueling 10-game season to the final championship contest. And if we haven't had enough football - what with the WPFL finishing their schedule, and the Super Bowl only a recent memory - there's more to come. Today the XFL kicks off its own brand new version of football with attitude. Maybe you've seen the commercials on TV. They promise the new XFL season will offer a rougher, tougher version of the NFL. More fun and more attitude, say its backers. NBC and the World Wrestling Federation have put together a combination of football technique and wrestling attitude in a return to "old-fashioned, smash-mouth football." As for the "X" in XFL, it stands for NOTHING, according to its Web site - "X" is just a cool letter that has come to identify an aggressive lifestyle. Plus, there are a lot of great words with the letter "X" that will be used to describe the XFL - eXciting, eXhilarating, eXplosive and eXplicit. The XFL is where they say "the future tackles the past." As interesting as all of this is, you're probably asking yourself, "Where is he going with all this? What's this got to do with any of our Bible lessons for this morning?" Well, look at the good news text, the call of Jesus to his first disciples. It's not that big of a stretch to link up Jesus with a bunch of gridiron cowboys. Think about it. You'd assume that when Jesus held tryouts for his discipleship league, he'd understand that testosterone might be a key consideration. Confronting the open road; sleeping under the trees; putting up with adversaries; living off the land for months at a time; crowd management; carrying nothing but a knapsack. And so its not surprising that among his first group of disciples, he calls a rough group of sunburned, callused and tough-talking fishermen on the lake of Gennesaret. Today, these are the kind of guys who'd probably be drawn more to a sports stadium than to a synagogue, and be interested more in XFL statistics than in Torah scrolls. And yet, Jesus hooks them by speaking the language of their trade, inviting them to "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch" (5:4). When they do, their nets are filled to the breaking point. With this great catch under his belt, Jesus invites them to join his team for a brand-new game. He calls the fishermen to become his followers, to join a start-up discipleship league. "Do not be afraid," he consoles them; "from now on you will be catching people" (v. 10). Jesus wants them to know that the game is changing, and they are moving now to a sport that may be eXhausting and eXasperating, but at the end of the day is also eXtraordinary, eXquisite and eXceptional. A most eXcellent discipleship adventure. But what if the fishermen are not interested in playing? After all, fishing is not a sport for Peter, James and John - it is their occupation, their livelihood, their way to put bread on the table. Joining the discipleship league is not like joining women's pro football - an organization that lays out its schedule so that players are able to keep their day jobs. Jesus is asking the fishermen to fundamentally and radically alter the nature of their vocation, and move from being fishers of fish to fishers of people. And Jesus is calling them to join to be part of league that is anything but rough and tumble, anything but "in your face" tackle football. This "game" requires a special touch. After all, good evangelism is a waiting game, not an assertive and aggressive contest. When fishing for people, you don't coerce the catch - you invite them to take the bait. There's no hitting or blocking or tackling in the gospel-spreading game. Instead, it's a game of touch. Jesus teaches us that our vocation is to touch people, to create a climate of change and to offer hope, renewal, healing and forgiveness. Jesus wants his fishing evangelists to grasp the difference between the XFL and his own brand of touch ball: Fishers of people are to avoid the "turn-or-burn" hard-sell tactics that pop up in some forms of evangelism today, and instead take a compassionate, transformative, inviting approach that can link the gospel with people's deepest needs. Bottom line is that bad evangelism is like the XFL, a game of tackle, while good evangelism is the fishing style of Jesus, a game of touch. All this assumes, of course, that we are a bit "touched" ourselves. But that's the discipleship game: being tagged by Jesus and going into the world to tag others. We can't reach others until we've been reached ourselves. So how might we "touch" others for Christ? Let's take an example. Let's say we're fishing for GenXers. Updating traditional worship music with hip hop may not be all of the answer since many GenXers see this as a crass grab for market share. Besides, they can find better music elsewhere. They can be cynical so we're not going to get very far by tackling GenXers with the idea of an "absolute truth" - most doubt that there really is any all-inclusive truth, and even if they did, they would reject the assertion that any person or institution could possess it. So, what kind of touch should a fishing evangelist use? Sara Hinlicky, a GenXer herself, says that the "story" is the key. "Generation X was raised on stories," she observes, "and every part of the entertainment culture is dedicated to feeding people narratives." If anyone has a great story to tell, it's the church - tales of miraculous catches, mysterious miracles, forgiven sins, and resurrection life. Reassurance and redemption. That's the touch. "Do not be afraid," Jesus says to his followers, in both the first century and the 21st. He tags us with reassurance and redemption, and sends us out to tag others with the very same message. We're not going to get very far with old-fashioned, smash-mouth evangelism, so let's leave full-contact, knock-down, drag-out, bleeding aggression to the WPFL and the XFL. For us, the letter "X" stands for Christ, and it brings to mind not an aggressive lifestyle, but a compassionate, cross-based lifestyle. "X" doesn't stand for nothing in our view of life; as a cross, as well as a Greek letter, the X stands for the Christ who sacrificed himself for the salvation of the world. A cross-based, Christ-centered life. That's the life to which we are called, and to which we must call others. So let's hit the field and start playing touch with those who have not yet felt the hand of Jesus in their life. AMEN