Tending in the fields

     The book of Matthew in the Bible finishes with a commission for Jesus’s disciples to go make disciples of all people and baptize them in his name. It is a great book, written by someone who started out as a tax collector and dramatically dropped everything to follow Jesus Christ when Christ walked by his tax collector booth one day and said “Follow me.” Jesus invited two fishermen named Peter and Andrew in a similar way and said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  

     The fishers of men idea is usually applied to all Christians and the idea is that Christians should always be striving to invite other people to a life that is blessed and transformed by learning from Jesus in a way that is similar to the disciples in the Bible. It is very obvious and almost doesn’t have to be explained after reading the stories of those guys.

    But I think for me and for many others, especially from evangelical backgrounds where we really did think that we should share our faith in some way, there is another component to these stories that is also important but hard to remember. And that is the fact that the fishermen already were fishermen, so the calling was partially to just do more of the same but at a shockingly miraculous level.  And funnily, you could look back and see that maybe Matthew as a tax collector was like a creditor stalking people to take their money, so when Jesus said, “Follow me,” it was just as tailored a calling as for the fishermen, only Matthew would be following someone who did not hate him.

    Anyway, there are all kinds of interesting things about all of it, but I think the thing that helps me balance my messed up evangelical failures with my true identity, is to think that in some ways, the calling wasn’t about transforming all Christians into evangelicals, but that it was about turbo-boosting what people were already good at, so that they could be more truly themselves and unencumbered by deceptions and traps that keep people from meeting their true potential. People could interpret it as meaning that a good athlete has permission to follow Christ’s teaching in order to become a great athlete instead of a good FCA leader. And Christ’s teaching could just as well help an artist reach heights of genius instead of just switching over to religious paintings.

     These concepts have to do with things that people often decide very early in life, and I think many people could read this and think I am honestly saying nothing at all.  But I actually do think that all kinds of people have deep, torturesome problems related to frustrations about work, identity, and Christian service.  I read once that only 13 percent of bartenders are Christians, but if people were following the example of support that Jesus demonstrated, shouldn’t bartenders be the ones serving communion? It is just suspicious, and to me could just mean that more pastors should be behind bars.