The Magic Man
A sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
Matthew 4:18-25
I Corinthians 1:10-18

Jesus’ ministry is just beginning.  The Bible tells us he goes all over Galilee, teaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and sickness among the people.  Curing every disease and sickness among the people.  Can you imagine that?  Can you imagine living 2000 years ago, a time before modern medicine, a time before we lived so long, a time when people were afflicted with simple things like acne or psoriasis, or more difficult things like epilepsy or leprosy or incomprehensible things like cancer or heart disease or mental illness, just as they are today.  But they don’t have the words for most of these diseases, much less know how to treat them.  They live in fear and superstition; some find herbs and natural treatments that work to varying degrees, others suffer in silence.  Bathing is not something people do on a regular basis, nor is changing their clothes.  At best, when one walks from one house to another, covering a bit of distance, there will be a bowl of water at the door with which to wash your feet, but cleanliness is relative when compared to how we view it in America today.  Most people can’t read, and spend their days in backbreaking manual labor whether it is cleaning, cooking, planting, harvesting, tending sheep and so on.  When something goes wrong with your body or you have a child born to you that is not physical asset to your household, it is a big deal.

In the midst of this primitive scene, along comes a man who can fix it.  A man who cures all diseases and pains, he casts out demons, stops epileptic seizures, makes the blind see, the deaf hear, paralyzed walk again.  All he comes in touch with become whole for the first time or again.  Imagine that you live in a household where someone is ailing, a father who can no longer carry in the heavy loads at harvest, a son with a withered hand who cannot continue the carpentry trade on which your family relies, a daughter who is blind and manages to do her housekeeping duties quite well, but who will certainly never be chosen as a bride, but remain a burden on your household all her life.  Or imagine that it is you who is in pain with a crippled hip or an arthritic elbow or you’ve had a TIA, a mini-stroke and you can function, but not put words together the way you used to be able to do, only fumble to express yourself – and it is you who are supposed to be running the household or the business.

You hear that a great healer is in the neighborhood.  A man that if you will only touch his robe, your illness will leave you and you will be able to live out your life in fruitfulness and peace.  This man is so successful that all the neighbors hear of him, too.  All the people for miles around are buzzing about his capabilities.  Remember, this is a time when it is not only the hopeless cases who need to be cured, but virtually every family in every village has a problem that needs solving.

The Bible tells us that great crowds followed Jesus from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and from beyond the Jordan.  This is a huge region when you consider that the average man got around on foot in those days.  And the average woman didn’t go anywhere, but remained in her village her entire life.  It encompassed approximately 50 square miles and was tremendously populous for that time in history with towns only about a mile or two apart along fertile strips of land.  But these towns and villages are being emptied by the rumors that this man, this healer, this Jesus, is coming through.

Why?  Because he’s magic.  He can do what no one but God has been credited with before.  He can cure them all.

I don’t know if you ever saw the musical Jesus Christ Superstar back when it was a big hit, or even the last time it came to Broadway a few years ago which didn’t fare so well.  I have some theological issues with the play myself, but one thing I was impressed with visually was the crowds that followed Jesus.  This boiling mass of humanity all needing something, wanting something from him, all the time.  Person after person after person struggling to push past each other in order to reach out and touch someone.  Someone specific.  Imagine, if you will, the crowd going to see the Jets or the Yankees or even the Long Island Ducks, but not with the purpose of finding a seat and watching a game, but with each and every person trying to get to one person and touch him.  Can you imagine the havoc?  Can you even vaguely begin to imagine what it felt like to be Jesus?

Paul must have had some idea, because he writes in Corinthians about the factions in that early church community that are dividing along lines of who they should follow.  Clearly Paul himself, Apollos and Cephas who was Simon Peter are all charismatic leaders.  They’ve all been to the city of Corinth.  They’ve all taught and preached there.  They’ve all got their own views about how Jesus’ message should be passed on and the people there have their own views about whose teaching and preaching they like the best.  Who they want to follow.  Paul is cautioning them not to follow any one preacher or teacher, but instead to remember that they all belong to Christ.

This is a message for our day today.  It is a message that we all need to hold in our hearts.  There are people we like better and people we like less well in our own Sweet Hollow.  Just as there are people we like better and less well in our jobs, our neighborhoods and our communities.  But we are not called to love only those whom we admire or who like us, but all people.  For we all belong to Christ.  And the Bible tells us that He responded to them all.  He didn’t pick and choose the rich man’s son over the Gentile woman’s daughter.  He didn’t choose the woman with seven demons over the man with Legion.  He didn’t teach to only the disciples who were with him every day, every step of the way, but sat on the hill, on the mountainside, on the plain, in a boat on the water and spoke to thousands upon thousands of people who wanted to follow him and his teachings.

As I read the Matthew passage, the scripture lesson about Jesus and his draw among the people, a song kept running through my head.  A song called Magic Man.  It was sung by a band called Heart and is about a young girl’s coming of age.  She met a beautiful man with blue eyes who said, “Come with me” and she followed him.  He was magic to her.  Her mother cries for her to come home, but she is putty in his hands.  I keep hearing the refrain and thinking Jesus is the real magic man.

This is what the people of his day are responding to in our scripture lesson today.  The fact that he can do what they regard as, for all practical purposes, magic.  But that is not really what I want us to focus on.  Because I think that these healings that we read about in the latter part of the passage are far from the first act of “magic” that Jesus does.  The first act of magic – or, if you prefer, the first miracle that Jesus does is earlier in our lesson.

Jesus is walking by the Sea of Galilee when he sees two brothers, Simon Peter and Andrew.  He says to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”  Now Rabbis did not seek out students in those days.  Just as with great professors today, the students come to them.  If you were a rabbi worth your salt, your teachings became known and people came to you asking to be a disciple.  However, Jesus, never known for rule following, walks up to the brothers and tells them to follow him.  And they do.  They drop their nets and they follow him.  Without a word, they follow him.  He then walks up to two other brothers, James and his brother John who are mending nets with their father, Zebedee, and calls to them.  They, too, immediately leave their boat and their father and follow him.

Think about it.  These men have never seen Jesus before.  They have not heard him preach or teach.  They have not been the recipient of or even the witness to a healing or a miracle.  No explanation is given to them.  They are not told why they should follow Jesus, what following him will mean or where this path will lead them.  A reasonable response to Jesus’ request is, “Where are you going?”  But the new disciples don’t ask it or any others.  They simply drop everything else and follow him.  This is Jesus’ first miracle.

Jesus came among us as the Word.  The Word made flesh.  And his first act is not one of touch, of healing.  It is spoken.  It is a call to men who don’t know him, who don’t care about him, who have many other things going on in their lives that probably seem very important.  And yet, he speaks the Word, “Follow me” and they come.  Knowing Jesus, listening to him, following his call changes lives.  It did 2000 years ago and it still does today.

For Jesus is still calling us.  The call is often as subtle as it was to Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John.  Jesus is not standing beside us tugging on our jackets saying, “Come on, I need you.  I know you’re busy.  I know there’s a lot going on in your life.  Please drop it and come.  Please don’t worry about your mother or your health or your finances or your children.  Please set all that aside and come.  Please.  I need you.  Come ooooon.”

Jesus calls to each of us in our hearts with a breath, maybe with a small word.  We see someone in need and we hear a whisper that says, “Give.”  We are outside shoveling the walk.  The phone rings and we know we are to leave our station and go answer it.  A friend we haven’t heard from writes a note.  We know we are to respond.

Julia Cameron tells many stories about how her life path has been varied and rich as a result of her asking for guidance and listening carefully and prayerfully to the answers she receives.  She claims that all of us get clear and specific guidance.  It’s a matter of learning to hear it.  We often expect to hear answers in a linear fashion.  A, B, C, D.  But God doesn’t often work that way.  Do you think the budding disciples thought that it was linear to step away from their lifelong livelihoods and follow a rabbi?  Of course not!  And it often won’t work that way for us, either.

Dorothy Maclean, writer of To Hear the Angels Sing, tells about learning to listen for guidance in her book:

“At that time,” she writes, “when alone in my apartment, a recurring thought kept coming: stop, listen, write.  I ignored that thought until it became so insistent that I was forced to listen (if only tentatively, because my critical mind allowed me to write only trite safe truths).  I kept these sketchy writings to myself, until Sheena [her spiritual mentor] found out about them.  After reading them carefully, she told me they were truly inspired and asked why I didn’t put their suggestions into action.  With her encouragement, some inner floodgate opened to the most joyous thoughts and feelings.  To me their source was God, because the inspiration derived from the same sort of place, or non-place, as that first experience of God within; but in their joyousness, they were unlike anything I had ever encountered as being attributed to God.  My initial experience had come unsought, but now I could return consciously to that wonderful inner Presence, which was always different yet always the same.”

I love her description of God as joyous.  I wonder if this wasn’t the impetus for the disciples to leave their nets and follow Jesus.  Might it have been that they saw in him a joy and a love and a freedom that they would never have had breaking their backs fishing for the rest of their lives?  Could it have been a glow about him, an open and ready smile, a visual sense of that happiness of being filled with God that made them leave without hesitation?  That’s not to say that their lives with Jesus didn’t have some rough times: I can’t imagine going through the agony of watching your Master die on a cross.  But I can imagine the exhilaration of going around the countryside teaching and healing and bringing light and salt to those around you.  I can imagine the excitement of planting new church communities and setting others on fire with the love of Christ.  For that is what I’m hoping to do here.

Set you on fire for the love of Christ.  Help you – and me – to listen for the Word.  The Word that will set us free to be the people God intends us to be.  What kind of Word will it be?  I don’t know.  It will be different for all of us for we are in different times and different places in our lives.  Sometimes it means we protect ourselves.  Sometimes it means we stop protecting ourselves.  Sometimes it means we volunteer to do something we’ve never done before.  Sometimes it means that we take that time for ourselves and spend it in prayer and meditation.  Sometimes it means we reach out to another human being.  Sometimes it means we pull back.  Whatever it means, it means we must listen.  We must be open and willing to hear Jesus’ call when it comes.  For when we listen and we respond, we will be ever more likely to hear it the next time it comes around.  If we do not, the voice will get fainter and fainter until one day we will not be able to hear the call at all anymore.  But if we are open, if we are available, if we keep our ears and our minds ready, our lives will open up and blossom and be filled with wonder.

I want to close today with a story from Florence Scovil Shinn, a Christian metaphysician from the early 1900s, that I think is especially appropriate today given what’s outside:

A woman was very troubled over an unhappy situation in her life.  She worried and fretted, thinking “Will it ever clear up?”

One day, her housekeeper began chatting with her in about some of her experiences.  The woman was much too worried to be interested, but she listened politely anyway.

“I worked in a hotel once,” the housekeeper shared, “where there was a very amusing gardener; he always said such funny things.  It had been raining for three days and I said to him, ‘Do you think it will ever clear up?’  He laughed and replied, ‘My God, doesn’t it always clear up?’”

The woman was amazed!  It was the answer to her thoughts.  She said reverently, “Yes, with my God it always clears up!” and soon after, her problem did clear up in an unexpected way.

Will it clear up?  Yes, it will.  What’s outside our doors and windows will clear up and what’s inside our hearts and minds will clear up.  With God’s help, all things are possible.  Keep your eyes and ears open.  Keep listening for God’s plan and God’s will for you.  Keep tuned in for Jesus’ call to follow him.  And when he does, drop everything and go.  Answer.  Respond.  Be available to listen and the rest will be made clear in time.  In little ways and big ways.  In small things and large ones.  The magic man is calling us today; it is simply up to us to listen.  For when we do, that’s when the magic begins to happen!  Amen.