What Does It Mean to Follow Jesus

Jesus calls his first disciples - to what exactly?  Or rather, to where.  See Matthew chapter 4

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

January 25, 2026

“What Does It Means to Follow Jesus”

Matthew 4: 18-22 – Common English Bible

As Jesus walked alongside the Galilee Sea, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew, throwing fishing nets into the sea, because they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” he said, “and I’ll show you how to fish for people.” 20 Right away, they left their nets and followed him. 21 Continuing on, he saw another set of brothers, James the son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with Zebedee their father repairing their nets. Jesus called them and 22 immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

Right before our story, Jesus had just been baptized. He stood in the river Jordan, baptized by John, just like everyone else. A nobody that no one knew except John.  But when Jesus came up out of the water, a voice declared him “My beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” 

But almost immediately, with no time to bask in this divine affirmation, he is driven into the wilderness, where he spends forty days alone, hungry, tested by the same temptations that shape every human life.  The temptations of success and power. Of security and control.

Refusing those temptations, he left the wilderness and learned that John had been arrested.  It was unnerving because it wasn’t for terror or organizing rebellion. It was because John invited ordinary people to change their hearts and lives, and in a system built on fear and control, that was a threat. And threats were not debated. They were removed.

Arrest, of course, did not come with due process or a court date. It was simply a way to make a problem disappear. Such is the precarious life for everyone who lives under occupation.

According to Matthew, Jesus pulled up stakes. He left behind his childhood home and moved from Nazareth to Capernaum, a fishing village along the Sea of Galilee near the main trade route – the perfect place for Rome to collect tolls and taxes.  A Roman centurion stationed nearby, a visible reminder of who held the power.

He walked along the shoreline where people were working, just like Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the sea. Then walking a little further along, James and John in a boat with their father repairing their nets.

Fishing wasn’t just their job, one you clock into and out of. Fishing was the life you inherit. It is what your father did and what your sons will do. Your future is already written. 

Jesus approached four men and without explaining exactly what comes next, he simply calls out:  “Come. Follow me.”

Matthew doesn’t say if there was any hesitation. Any conversation or bargaining. No explanation of what “fishing for people” might mean. Simon and Andrew just leave their nets. 

And James and John simply leave the boat with their father sitting there, watching his sons walk away from their obligations and responsibilities to take off with an itinerant preacher, one of many who passed along the trade routes through Galilee.  Don’t they realize that Rome is watching?  But Jesus said, Come follow me and that was it.  They got up and went.  

In their dangerous world, what did it mean to follow Jesus? And in ours, where violence wears different uniforms but follows the same logic, what does it mean to follow him now?

Dorothy Cotton was an important figure in the American civil rights movement.  She was a close associate of Dr. King on the Southern Christian Leadership Council, still most people have never heard of her.  She hardly ever appears in photographs because she wasn’t at the front of the march or standing in front of sanctuaries.  When she did stand in front, it was down in church basements or classrooms. 

Her role was citizenship education. She taught nonviolence about which she said, “Nonviolence is not a tactic. It’s a way of life.” And for her, that way of life was based on the life and teachings of Jesus. 

When she opened the Bible, the parallels to then and now were clear.  She didn’t explore doctrine. She asked a much deeper question. How did Jesus live in the world when power was so cruel and violent? How did Jesus stay human in a world determined to strip people of their dignity?

Dorothy believed that people didn’t just need courage. They needed grounding. She believed that if people were going to risk their lives, they needed more than passion. They needed a direction to take that could carry them through anger, fear, and exhaustion without surrendering their souls. Jesus.

She worked with people who had experienced violence up close. People who had felt humiliation and brutality in their own bodies. She was there to help them to live with their eyes wide open.

She also worked with people who were just now realizing that their silence and inaction implicated them in the suffering around them.  She helped them see both their worth and their responsibility.

When Dr. King said, “Wake up,” well, once you wake up, you can’t live the same way anymore. Dorothy taught what to do next. Which, for her, was guided by Jesus.  Dorothy said, “I was baptized in the church, and I was baptized in the movement.” In other words, for her it was discipleship.  

Dorothy Cotton understood something that is still true today.
 Waking up does not make people ready for being awake. Awake people still have to ask, What do I do now? Because what often follows clarity is not peace, but a kind of spiritual unsteadiness.

How do Christians live in a violent world?  By following Jesus.

 But specifically naming Jesus is where progressive Christians can sometimes get stuck.  We’re very good at critique and analysis and deconstruction. We’re good at naming what’s broken and exposing harm. But often, we keep the name of Jesus out of our mouths to avoid sounding like the authoritarians we fear, especially in public or pluralistic spaces. We don’t want to coerce or dominate or repeat the harm done in Jesus’ name. Amen to all that.

But following Jesus is not about demanding that others convert to Christianity. And when we refuse to name Jesus as the source of our direction, something else happens. Our commitments begin to sound like political preferences rather than spiritual grounding.
 Justice becomes ideology. Compassion becomes a personality trait instead of the true gospel.  Solidarity becomes something you agree with, not something you live together. 

Jesus’ invitation to “Come, follow me” isn’t about taking a position. It’s about alignment.  It’s about Jesus shaping how we respond to fear, power, and cruelty, instead of letting something else do that work. 

Because here’s the truth.

We can be awake.
 We can see what’s happening.
 We can know what’s broken.

But being awake without direction can leave us in motion without going anywhere. Jesus didn’t offer those fishermen a plan but a direction. And like them, we don’t have to know where the path ends.  But we do have to decide what sets our direction.  Because something else always will. What else can set our direction?

That something else might be anger or outrage. We stay awake, but everything becomes reactive, defined more by what we oppose than by what we’re moving toward.

The something else that might shape our direction is grief and despair, and slowly our choices become about staying safe. We don’t stop caring. We just start shrinking.

Something else can shape our direction, like urgency. But when everything feels like a crisis, nothing is important.  And we burn out.

Something else like habit. We keep doing what we’ve always done, not because it’s right, or it works, but because it’s familiar.  And we start dozing off again.

The something else that might shape our direction is the need to be liked, to so badly want to be seen as reasonable.  All so much that we stand for nothing at all.  Awake and with no purpose.

And sometimes that something else is control. We want Jesus to set our direction, but only as long as we can stay in charge.  But then we’re no longer following. We’re managing.  

But, in times of violence, that something else is often based in fear.  And when fear controls us, it leaves us feeling helpless.  Fear limits our imagination. 

Fortunately, Jesus does not leave them wondering for very long.  After gathering more followers, Jesus sits on the side of a mountain and begins sharing a vision of who is blessed in the world he is calling into being.  

It’s disorienting to the power, strength, and control crowd.  And it feels unbearably slow to those who simply want the fear to end. He says:

Blessed are the poor.  Blessed are the grieving and the meek.
 Blessed are the pure in heart.  The merciful, the peacemakers.
 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.
 Blessed are those who are persecuted for doing what is right.

That’s the direction Jesus leads us.  Toward people the world calls disposable.  Toward the people power mocks.  But it’s much more than empathy toward the downtrodden. 

When agents of the state turn their weapons on citizens, in the face of unrestrained violence, the orientation of Jesus is toward accountability.

When families mourn and neighbors are killed by militarized enforcement, when witnesses record violence and officials bury the evidence and lie, the orientation of Jesus is toward truth.

 The kingdom of heaven is not found in silent submission. The direction of Jesus is toward justice, in a constant movement toward the relentless pursuit of accountability and unflinching truth.

When the forces of death surround us, Jesus leads us toward life.  That’s the center he gives us before there is clarity.  That’s the direction before there is a plan.

It begins when he says, “Come. Follow me” and we drop everything else – habit, despair, urgency, anger…  

That’s the choice we have in a violent world.  That’s the choice about who we belong to, who we stand with, what kind of people we will be when something else like fear tries to shape us.  That’s what it means to follow Jesus.