I was all ready to preach about the qualities of a leader yesterday: how although Simon (aka Peter), as a fisherman looks to come from an unexpected place, and is an unexpected leader in the Jesus movement, the signs he shows from his previous work suggests that he might be perfect leader. I was going to talk about his personal experience with Jesus (his mother in law is healed of a high fever), his tenacity, his humility, his ability to work with a group (he has partners who follow him!), make him exactly the sort of person Jesus would want as a leader.
But then I started looking at our text from a different angle. Given the contexts of Luke Chapter 4- everything from Jesus going to his hometown to Jesus' continued healings; what if this recruitment story- in Christianese, a calling story is less about Peter's qualities, but more about the perspective and shape he brings to Jesus and his movement?
I started thinking about this because in Luke 4, Jesus says that he is fulfilling the words of Isaiah to "bring Good News to the Poor." Inadvertently, this feels like someone doing ministry to a group of people, not someone doing ministry with people. For example, we've all seen conservative churches that do ministry to LGBTQ people, hoping to "convert" them back into cisgender or heterosexual. Compare that to ministry with LGBTQ people, including members of that community in leadership in order to understand their struggles and celebrate their faith, and love as a beloved part of God's community as they are.
I can imagine Jesus doing this work of ministry to people- especially his healing ministry, healing one by one, and getting frustrated. Yes, he's doing good, but perhaps he starts to think about how to impact people beyond being a healer of individuals. There are plenty of healers in the world, but only one Jesus!
I think this is a interesting possible component of why Jesus recruits those fishermen- to get a different perspective. Luke tells us that those three first disciples, Simon, James, and John leave everything to follow him. No longer is Jesus solely doing ministry as one educated guy (he could read the Torah at a young age!) to the poor, he's doing his ministry work alongside the poor. As we've learned, change who's in the conversation, and we change the conversation.
Yesterday, we had a shorter worship service: after worship, we approved the 2025 funding for ministry plan (our church budget). More information can be found about that in your Friday Emails. All went well with that- thank you for everyone who worked hard on the budget this year, especially the Funding for Ministry Team.