I apologize for the awful pun above, but I wanted to share a little from my thoughts on a passage in Luke, where Jesus called the first disciples. In both Matthew and Mark, we find Jesus walking beside the see of Galilee, he sees a few fisherman, and says, “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” And they listen, they drop their nets and follow. It is a pretty remarkable display of obedience and the power of God. But today, I want to focus on the scripture from Luke and change our setting from the see of Galilee to the  Augusta National Golf Course where The Masters are played annually.

I am going to need you to use your imagination today, and put yourself in the shoes of a golfer. The power of the story in Luke, is that this call of the disciples comes directly after the greatest catch of these commercial fisherman’s lives. They are obedient to this Rabbi, even after their greatest success on the water, and without having the chance to enjoy even a bit of the glory involved.

So let’s take the leap into the year 201o, and pretend that you are a golfer named Charles Hackney. You have been struggling on the PGA tour for the past 4 years without much success, and you are just getting by. Remarkably you did just enough last year to get invited to The Masters in Augusta. You make it through Thursday and Friday without much drama and manage to make the cut to play through the weekend. Come Saturday, you have the worst round of golf in your life. You are embarrassed, your caddy quits, and you are thinking about faking an injury so you don’t have to show your face around the clubhouse on Sunday. However, your plans change when a Rabbi comes along and offers to carry your clubs for you on Sunday. To your amazement, and to the amazement of the entirety of the spectators you have an incredible round. You have 3 eagles, 9 birdies, 6 pars, and not a single bogey, a course record. But then your caddy asks something pretty remarkable of you, he asks you to leave your clubs and scorecard at the 18th green and just walk away from it all. He says he has something much better in store for your life.  You happen to obey and your life is now filled with adventure, grace, joy, and purpose beyond your wildest dreams.

I know this is a bit of a stretch, but it is not far from what happened with Simon Peter and his brother Andrew. Our version of success is very different from that of God. We are called to be obedient, not just in our failures, but our successes as well, and to understand that God’s better is always better! “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will catch men.”

Read Luke 5:1-11 for a companion to this blog.

April 28, 2010 <> Michael Warneke

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