Preached · June 21, 2020
Hey friends, Anthony Parrott here, lead pastor of The Table Church. We are going to continue in our sermon series called Don't Be a Jerk. We're talking about these twin concepts and skills and characteristics that Jesus put in a place of invitation and challenge — how we, as Jesus followers, folks who are filled with the Holy Spirit, who are called to make God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, are meant to calibrate invitation and challenge to change the world. How we're meant to have relationships and make people feel welcome and warm and loved, as well as making sure that we're growing and changing and that things are getting better, and that requires challenge.
That's what we're talking about this week. Last week we introduced it. This week we're going to talk a little bit more about the invitational side of things. Next week we'll get to more of the challenging side of things.
I'm preaching outside, by the way, so there's going to be all sorts of background noise and some bees flying around. So this will be fun.
Making friends is hard
Let's talk about friendship. If you're a grown-up, you know that making friends is maybe one of the harder things you can do as a grown-up. It's not like kindergarten where you can just walk up to somebody and say, "Can I be your friend?" and they say yes, and you go on from there.
Fifty to seventy-five percent of Americans report feelings of loneliness either all the time or oftentimes. So that's the large, large majority of us. We deal with loneliness regularly. Gen Z is the loneliest age group on record, with the statistics that we have. And if we look at generations that say they have no close friends: 19% of Gen Z said they have no close friends; 27% of millennials; 33% of Gen Xers, because nobody likes Gen Xers; and 16% of baby boomers say they have no close friends. If we look at this by race, you're twice as likely as a Black person than a white person to say that you have no close friends. There are lots of other stats I could have pulled. The number of people who say that they have no close confidants — somebody they can share close, intimate information with — that number has increased over time. And the number of people who have said they have zero friends has actually doubled over the past ten years. So I think it's a quarter of our population say they have zero friends.
Invitation and challenge
So we're talking about invitation and challenge, and we're talking about friendship, because if we're going to be world-changing kind of people — people filled with the Holy Spirit who are going to be acting out on the prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" — we have to know how to build relationships. We have to know how to have friendships that are not solely based off of changing the world, but also so that we are healthy, growing, capable people who can change the world together in community, all together with our friends.
To review: invitation says, "I'm glad you are here. I'm committed to you. I welcome you no matter what." Challenge says, "I want you to grow. I'm committed to your growth. I care too much about you to let things stay the same." This can be true at the friendship, personal level. It can be true at the organizational, church level, or the business, or the world: "I want this nation to grow. I'm committed to this nation's growth. I care too much about it to let things stay the same." "I care about this church and its growing, and I care too much to let things stay the same. I'm glad I'm part of this church, and I'm committed to it no matter what, and I will do what it takes to make people feel welcome no matter what." Invitation and challenge.
We put this on a matrix. If you are only invitation and no challenge, we call that the cozy quadrant, where things are just cozy, fine, hunky-dory, and we never do anything hard. If you're high challenge and no invitation, that's the stressful quadrant — people might grow there and feel challenged, but they don't feel loved or welcome. If you have neither challenge nor invitation, that's apathy and boredom, and it's actually a way to cooperate with evil. And if you are high invitation and high challenge, that's what we call discipleship. That's what Jesus brought. He was this highly compelling person. People loved to be around him. And Jesus changed lives. He changed society. He changed culture. Sometimes Jesus was over in the high-challenge part of that upper-right quadrant, where he would call the Pharisees a brood of vipers, which was basically a first-century way of calling them mother-eaters, and he would knock over tables in the temple. And sometimes he was on the higher-invitation side of things, where he would have a friendship with people, forgive people, heal them, heal their hunger. But he was always calibrating both at the same time. Invitation and challenge.
Today we're going to talk mostly about the invitational side of Jesus, and we're going to look at that by looking at Jesus' friendship with a man named Peter.
(That was a bee. You get to see me in all my bee-frightened glory. I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen with a quick edit.)
The first meeting: Luke 5 and John 1
In order to start, we're going to take a look at Luke chapter 5. If you have a Bible, I encourage you to turn it on, power it up, download the Bible app, find a Bible in your apartment, whatever. You're going to find the book of Luke chapter 5. It's in the New Testament. It's the third book of the New Testament. I would give you a page number, except all of our page numbers are different. And this is what it says:
One day, as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret — which is another name for Lake Galilee, the Sea of Galilee — the people were crowding around Jesus and listening to the word of God. And he saw at the water's edge two boats left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. So Jesus got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked Simon to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.
I love this because Jesus is using the highest possible technology of his day to reach the highest amount of people. He got out into a boat. He used the natural amphitheater to talk to lots and lots of people.
When Jesus had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch." And Simon answered — this experienced fisherman said — "Master, we've worked hard all night and haven't caught anything. But because you say so, I'll let down the nets." So when they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus' knees and said, "Go away from me, Lord, I'm a sinful man." For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon's partners. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Don't be afraid. From now on you will fish for people." So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything, and followed him.
Now, if you've grown up in the church, or maybe this is your first time ever hearing this story, your reaction might be: man, Peter, that's a really big jump — from meeting Jesus, getting some fish, and then leaving everything to follow Jesus. You've probably never had a waiter bring you a really good meal and you say, "I am leaving everything to follow you, waiter." That's not how relationships typically work. So we read this in Scripture and think, well, I guess that worked out for Simon, but that's not how I'm going to live my life.
But here's something you ought to know. This is not the first time that Jesus and Peter had hung out. What we're going to do now is I'm going to lead you through a few scriptures throughout the Gospels and show you the evolution of Jesus and Peter's relationship, their friendship — this highly invitational Jesus, and how Peter builds this friendship with Jesus — and give us some of the traits of what friendship can look like and what we can learn.
If we go to the book of John — the fourth Gospel, the fourth book of the New Testament — chapter one, verses 35 to 42, we hear where Jesus and Peter are introduced. This is verse 35:
The next day John — this is John the Baptist, Jesus's cousin — sees Jesus and says, "Look, the Lamb of God." When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. Jesus turns around, sees them following him, and asks, "What do you want?" And they said, "Rabbi" — teacher — "where are you staying?" And Jesus says, "Come, and you will see." So they went and saw where he was staying, and they spent that day with him. It was about four in the afternoon.
So John the Baptist has disciples, tells them, "There's Jesus, the Lamb of God." The disciples leave John the Baptist — sorry, John, you're old news — follow Jesus, and basically just have a day of hanging out with Jesus. We're not told what they do. I assume some Nintendo is involved. Verse 40 continues:
Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, was one of the two who had heard what John had said and followed Jesus. The first thing Andrew did was to find his brother Simon and tell him, "We have found the Messiah" (that is, the Christ). And he brought his brother Simon to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, "You are Simon, son of John. From now on you will be called Cephas" — which is translated Peter.
Peter means "rock," like Rocky. I think Jesus gives Simon a nickname, Rocky, right here.
So we have the story of Jesus meeting some of John's disciples. One of them is Andrew. Andrew gets his brother Simon. Simon and Jesus meet. They're hitting it off. Jesus is like, "I'm going to give you a nickname."
I think there are a few things about friendship we can learn here. Number one, friendship requires spending time together. It's really hard to be friends if you don't make yourself available, make your time available to other people. In college, high school, elementary school, this is easy, because we're forced into these buildings together — dorms, hallways, classrooms — so we're forced to spend time together. Of course it's easy to make friends; we have nothing but time to spend together. When we become adults and get jobs, this becomes a little bit harder, because now we don't just have friendships of convenience, we have to have friendships of intentionality. I'm going to schedule time to spend with other people. And that's what Jesus does here. He makes himself available to John's disciples, to Andrew's brother Simon, and they hang out for the day.
Number two, we have to be open to new relationships. Andrew was spending time with John, and now wants to spend time with Jesus. He wants to be open to what a new friendship might offer him. And Andrew doesn't just keep Jesus to himself. He goes and grabs his brother Simon and says, "You have to hang out with this guy too." So Simon, Andrew, they hang out with Jesus and make a new friendship.
Number three, we have to allow our friends to be able to change us for the better. Spending time with friends is a formational thing. It shapes our souls and our characteristics and our personalities. And we have to let that happen for the better. Because friends will sometimes point out, "Hey, did you know it's really annoying when you do this?" or, "Hey, I really love it when you do this." Those kinds of conversations happen in friendships, and we have to let them happen so that our friends can shape us for the better, and so that we can shape others for the better. Friendship should be about growing together. I see this in Jesus and Simon's interaction: Jesus saying, "You've been called Simon, son of Jonah, for a long, long time. What if I start calling you Rocky?" And Peter was like, "Okay, I'll go with that."
Rejected at Nazareth, welcomed at Capernaum
Let's keep going. We're going to go back to the book of Luke, chapter 4. This is actually a passage that we read last week, so we won't go over it fully again. But in Luke 4, Jesus has been a traveling rabbi for a while, and he goes back to his hometown of Nazareth. If you remember the story from last week, in Nazareth Jesus proclaims the gospel, the good news, says it's good news for everybody — the Jew and the Gentile, the insider and the outsider — and his hometown's reaction is that they try to throw him off a cliff. They try to get rid of him. They try to kill him.
Now think about who's in this crowd. These are the people that Jesus grew up with. These are friends and family, cousins, siblings, who turn drastically on Jesus. They try to kill him. So think about the pain that Jesus has just been through, being rejected by his hometown. Reading between the lines and looking at some of the different stories, we get the impression in the Gospels that Jesus' brothers didn't like him very much — which, I mean, who would enjoy growing up with the literal Son of God? That'd be a hard sibling to have. There's one story where the brothers try to arrest Jesus, or try to take him back home, because they think he's gone insane. So we get this impression that the family relationship Jesus has is not great. I know some of you can relate to that, that you've had strained family relationships.
So what do you do? You look for new types of family. Sociologists call this fictive kinship, where we look outside of our biological bonds of family and toward friends. Think about some of your favorite TV shows. Lots of them have to do with these fictive kinship groups — groups of friends that create familial bonds together — everywhere from New Girl to How I Met Your Mother to the original Friends and all the way back to Cheers. These relationships mean something.
So Jesus, being rejected by his hometown, leaves Nazareth and heads to Capernaum. Luke 4:31:
Then Jesus went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath he taught the people. They were amazed at his teaching, because his words had authority.
So Jesus leaves his hometown, goes to Capernaum, and has a much better response. Why does Jesus go to Capernaum, you might ask? We find out in verse 38: Jesus leaves the synagogue and went to the home of Simon. Capernaum is the hometown of Simon and Andrew. So Jesus, he gets rejected out of Nazareth, and he doesn't just go wandering, looking for a new place to live. He goes to a place where he has some friends, where he has some connection, and that's Capernaum. Let's keep reading, verse 38:
He went to the home of Simon. Now Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. So Jesus bent over her, rebuked the fever, and it left her. And she got up at once and began to wait on them.
There are a couple other friendship keys I see here. Number four, we have to be willing to help our friends. Friendship is not just a take-take-take relationship. We have to be willing to offer help. Help them move. Help get groceries. Help them with whatever they need. Friendship should be about giving in some way.
And number five, friendship is also about being willing to receive help. If you have a friend who wants to help you in some way, I think it's a friendly thing to do to want to receive that help — to say, "Yes, I could really, really use that." I am naturally a person who doesn't accept help very well. Because of my upbringing, being through the foster system, growing up with a mentally unstable mom, I'm a very independent person. I don't like to receive help. And that can actually hinder relationship, hinder friendship, because people feel like, "Well, I have nothing to offer this person." So we have to be willing to help, and also willing to receive help.
The oikos turned inside out
Now let's pause here for a second. Jesus goes to Capernaum, and he goes to his friend's house — this acquaintance at least, Simon, somebody he spent at least a day with, Simon and Andrew — and they welcome him into their oikos. Now, oikos is the Greek word for the typical way that a family would organize itself in the Jewish and Greco-Roman world. The oikos existed for two reasons: protection and provision. The way the oikos was constructed, you would have four walls and a courtyard in the middle. Around the courtyard you'd have a variety of rooms for people, animals, livestock. If you were wealthy, you'd have a second level, and then a deck or a courtyard on top where you could look out. The reason they were built like this was for protection: you could see enemy forces, outside forces coming in, and you had these four walls and a courtyard in the middle, so you had ways of protecting yourself.
The oikos was also about provision. The family unit existed to provide for each other. So if Simon Peter was a fisherman, that meant his dad was a fisherman, and his uncle was a fisherman, and his grandfather was a fisherman. And the oikos wasn't just a nuclear family — mom, dad, a couple kids. Usually you would add on to the oikos. Listen: Jesus goes to Simon's house, and who's there? Simon's mother-in-law. And this isn't like an Everybody Loves Raymond situation where the mother-in-law is just there all the time. No, she probably had a house or room attached to it. Or, more likely, when Simon Peter married his wife, he moved into his wife's home and they built a place for him and his wife. The oikos would expand that way.
In modern-day Capernaum there's an archaeological dig believed to be Simon and Andrew's home. There are some good archaeological reasons why we think it's their home. It's next to a synagogue, which lines up with the story we just read. There are some artifacts that show this place was a place of Christian baptism; eventually a church would meet here. You can imagine the multiple levels, the walls and the courtyard, everything, on purpose, very difficult to get to so you could protect against any invading army or force.
So the oikos exists for protection and provision. Now listen to what Jesus does. Verse 40:
At sunset, the people brought to Jesus all who had various kinds of sicknesses, and laying his hands on each one, he healed them. Moreover, demons came out of many people, shouting, "You are the Son of God!" But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew he was the Messiah.
So Jesus takes the oikos — the thing that's meant to be about protection and provision of the family unit — and turns it inside out. He takes the oikos and makes it about helping the people outside of the oikos. He invites the hungry and the sick and the demon-possessed into Simon and Andrew's oikos so that he can heal them and feed them and help them. We'll talk about this in a later sermon series, but this is very important. Whereas naturally we want our homes to be places of protection and provision for ourselves, Jesus says, what if your home was the base of ministry for the neighborhood?
Thing number six about friendship: friendships ought to exist for the common good. The difference between a clique and a group of friends that you want to be a part of is that a clique exists for its own purposes. A clique doesn't want anybody else to join, doesn't want to help anybody else. But a group of friends that you look at and say, "Man, I want to be a part of that, can I join?" — they exist for the common good. They make everybody feel good around them because of the joy that they bring. Friendship and friend groups ought to exist for the common good.
Let's go to verse 42:
At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place. The people were looking for him, and when they came to where he was, they tried to keep him from leaving. But he said, "I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom to the other towns also. That is why I was sent."
So Jesus goes to Simon and Andrew's house, and then he goes off to pray for a while. I think the seventh thing to note about friendship is that we need to offer space to our friends. We've all had a friend who we might call clingy or needy, who we just want to give us space. We need to be self-aware enough to say, "Oh yeah, I shouldn't just spend all of my time with one or two people. I need to give them space, offer them the ability to be by themselves, and offer myself the ability to be by myself." Now, during the pandemic, we're all in a time where we've probably spent way too much time by ourselves, so maybe this isn't a particularly great point to bring up right now. But for the future, make sure that you're the kind of person who knows when and how to offer space to your friends.
Back to the boat
So that's all the background. John the Baptist introduces Andrew to Jesus. Andrew introduces his brother Simon to Jesus. Jesus gets rejected from his hometown, goes to Capernaum, finds his acquaintances Simon and Andrew, and hangs out with them. Jesus then goes back out as an itinerant minister, and then he comes back to the Sea of Galilee. And that takes us back to our original passage, Luke chapter 5.
Jesus is doing ministry. A large crowd is gathered. And Jesus says, "Hey, Simon, we've hung out before. Can I borrow your boat? Can we put out from the shore a little bit so I can talk to this massive group of people?" Simon says, "Sure." They then go out further. Miraculously, through Jesus, Simon and his fishermen friends and partners are able to make this miraculous catch of fish. And Simon's like, "Whoa, I am hanging out with an authority and a power and a person who I don't deserve to be around." And Jesus says, "Don't be afraid. You're going to be a fisher of people." And Simon leaves everything to follow Jesus.
So this is Jesus at his best. He is calibrating invitation, friendship. He's made friends with Simon and Andrew. He's healed Simon's mother-in-law. He's hung out in their oikos, their home. They've spent time together, spent the day together. Jesus offers Simon space. He comes back into Simon's life and wants to be friends with him. And he also offers Simon challenge in the form of vocation: "Simon, I know you've been a fisherman all your life. You've been called Simon, son of Jonah. Your father and his father before him were fishermen too. I want you to fish for people." And Peter's response is to leave everything and follow Jesus.
This is the power of friendship. Not that we want people to follow us and say, "I don't deserve to be around you" — that's not the point, we're not Jesus. But in friendship, we ought to be the kinds of people that other people want to be around. We ought to be the kinds of people that other people say, "I want some of what he's having." We ought to be the kinds of people who, when people are around us, they say, "Can we hang out some more?" And that requires, at least for some of us, me included, intentionality and work. We don't become good friends accidentally. We don't become the kinds of people that people want to hang out with just by doing nothing about it. Friendship requires work.
Invitation and challenge for today
In two weeks, we'll talk about how invitation and challenge all come together. Next week, Pastor Angela is going to talk about challenge and making the right kind of trouble. But I want to offer you an invitation and a challenge for today.
Invitation: express gratitude to your friends. Send a card. Send a meal. Offer to FaceTime out of the blue. Just recognize the friends that are in your life, the people who have invested in you, wanted to pour into you, and just say, "Thanks. I appreciate it. Can we hang out some more?"
And here's my challenge. Of the seven things that we talked about, which one or two — or seven, if you're like me — do you need to spend some time thinking about how you're going to grow in?
Number one, spending time together. Do you just need to put friendship in your calendar so you make time for it? Number two, are you open to new relationships? Or are you kind of settled with the friends that you have and have always had, and you're not willing to make any more? Number three, are you allowing yourself to be seen and to be changed for the better? Jesus sees Simon and says, "I'm going to call you Rocky, is that okay?" and Simon says okay. Are you willing to be seen and changed for the better by your friends? Number four, are you willing to help your friends — to help them when they're in a tight spot, when they need help moving boxes around, getting gas for their car, whatever? Number five, are you willing to receive help when you are in a tough spot? Are you able to say, "I will let you help me"? Number six, do your friendships exist for the common good? Do other people look at your friendships and say, "Can I be a part of that?" Or do they look and say, "Oh, that's a clique, I have no interest in joining"? And number seven, are you good at offering space? Not being clingy and needy and overly attached — are you able to say, "You're a person, I'm a person, we can be friends together and we can also exist apart"?
