I love the weeks after Christmas.

• Time with family,
• Watching cricket, playing some tennis, maybe some swimming,
• Seeing a few movies or a musical
• Warm weather (usually), BBQs, honey biscuits, almond bread, fruitcake, and pavlova.
• Now that I am retired I don’t nervously check text messages and emails while on leave. I am on leave every day, and my phone doesn’t ring any more!
• It’s a quieter time of year in Adelaide and easier to get around.

The month after Christmas can also be a quiet time in the church. The season we call Epiphany can seem like a post-Christmas let down.

• Churches are even more empty than usual,
• Many places have only one Sunday service rather than two,
• Some regular ministries are on hold and
• Many pastors are on leave.

This week more people are heading back to work, your own pastor Tim will return from leave, and churches will be thinking about the ministry year ahead.

In the gospels for this Sunday every year, Jesus gets going in his ministry, and he calls us to join him as his disciples in his life and in his ministry in the world again this year. Jesus wasn’t coming off a holiday. He had just returned after being tested and tempted in the wilderness for nearly 6 weeks, and he had heard his cousin John was in prison for his preaching. But Jesus didn’t swim the other way like Jonah, nor did he curl up in a ball and say “It’s all too hard”. No, Jesus was triggered into action! Mark writes:

“After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.”   “The time has come…”

The word for time here is not time as in stopwatch, but the big moment we’ve all been waiting for, the opportunity, the time planned for by God has arrived.

“The time has come,” …“The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

“The kingdom of God has come near”…

That’s what the good news of Christmas has just said to us.

God is in fact here because Jesus is here. God and his kingdom has come that close, that near to us. God has revealed himself to the world in the person of Jesus, which is what Epiphany means, and these Epiphany weeks are not a post-Christmas let down but time to ponder what the nearness of God in Jesus means for our lives and for God’s church in 2024.

Whatever happens this year there is a life with Jesus we can be part of:

• Where we can know God personally and can relate to him intimately at every moment this year
• Where we can know we will always be loved by God, even on our worst day.
• Where our many sins aren’t and won’t be counted against us as we repent of them and look to him for his forgiving love.

We are now part of a life where:

• Repaying evil with evil is not the norm and we have received more than enough forgiveness ourselves to forgive others who sin against us.
• A life where you can find more joy in serving others than serving yourself.
• Where you can find strength from God to live through anything this year.
• And a life where we can know with certainty where you are ultimately going should this year be your last year on earth.

All that and more is the life we enjoy in the kingdom of God, by his grace, all because God in Jesus has come near at Christmas.

With Jesus, I pray you will be again caught up in this life, his life, his good news this year.  Jesus first word in ministry was to call people like us to “Repent and believe this good news”. He calls for our faith. Then he goes down to the beach, the shore of the lake where he comes across four fishermen. “Come and follow me” he calls out.

“At once (immediately) they left their nets and followed him.”

In one sense that makes no sense to us. What did they know about him? They had obligations and commitments, families and a livelihood… I would have asked “Where are we going? What will we do? How long will we be gone? What do I need to take? Where will we stay? And of course -will we have mobile coverage and internet access?”

But Jesus does not offer a map, itinerary, a travel pack or a destination, just an invitation to travel through life with him. This is not the type of journey you can prepare for. It’s an adventure of following Jesus every day to wherever and to whoever he might lead you.

Something about Jesus so captivated them that they left everything on the spot and walked after him, watching, listening, learning, (which is what the word disciple means). Learning who Jesus is and what life with him is all about. Learning on the job – failing, being forgiven and repeat….

To leave their old selves and even their own livelihoods behind and follow after Jesus called for faith. Faith that knowing Jesus was worth the risk of following him. So as we get going in this new ministry year in the church Jesus in these words calls for your faith and he calls you to follow him.

And Jesus didn’t call them to follow him only on Sundays, or into a church. He called them to follow him every day into the world. To go fishing with him….. That’s right. Jesus promises his disciples they will go fishing with him. Not for sea creatures but for his human creation. Fishing, not as a pastime, but as a vocation, a life calling.

“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”

And we sitting here today on the other side of the world are among the countless “fish” Jesus anticipated would be gathered to God through the ministry of these four fishermen. They would never have guessed.

Australia Day is coming up soon. (We don’t know for how much longer…)

I was installed as your pastor on Australia Day – 21 years ago, called to go fishing here with Jesus and fishing with you in this place by the sea. Not everyone is called to leave home and family and vocation for full time ministry like Simon, Andrew, James, John, or your own Pastor Tim. But as disciples of Jesus you are part of Jesus’ ongoing mission to gather people back to God.

The truth is we are often apprehensive about that. We fear the waters in Australia are not conducive to us Christians. Like Jonah we feel like swimming or running the other way, and unlike God we don’t have His patience and compassion for people.

But Jesus meets us here by the beach today and calls us not only to faith but to follow him into Australia as it is today and to not be afraid of:

• An Australia that isn’t sure who it is any more.
• Where wounded and broken relationships abound and reconciliation is needed everywhere.
• A land where the more people who live here the lonelier we are becoming, and where more people each year are losing hope and falling into addictions, depression or despairing of life altogether.
• A disillusioned Australia that looks to our leaders for saving help to give us the life we want at the same time as we don’t trust them to fulfil their promises.
• An Australia where not all is as it seems below the surface, behind closed doors, or behind the image we like to project.

The presence and message of Jesus speaks to all of the above, and by God’s grace we are part of that Australia at the same time as we are part of the kingdom of God. I thank God for both. And we are simply called by Jesus: To give witness to that life we know and enjoy with him. To give witness to the rock under our feet as we sang in Psalm 62 today. To give people a glimpse of life in the kingdom of God by the way we speak and live so by the grace of God they too might be caught up in his gracious rule together with us.

 “The time is short” St Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7 today as he calls us to live in the world but not attached to the people and things of this world, because “this world in its present form is passing away”. So we don’t get unhealthily attached to anything or anyone as if they were God. Rather because we are attached to God through Jesus and so we are free to give ourselves away, to love, serve, sacrifice and be generous and yes to forgive.

I have been reading two books lately – “Christianity matters in these troubled times” and “Christians – the urgent case for Jesus in our world”. That author writes in his conclusion:   “Christians in the West are not persecuted, but they are discouraged. Our culture is indifferent or hostile. Some of Christianity’s critics would like it to go quiet for a time, not to rock the boat. But Jesus in Mark’s gospel gave a very clear instruction. The Good news must be preached to all. No matter how silly or awkward we look, no matter how silly or awkward we have made ourselves, there is still a need to tell people the Good News. People deserve the truth. ….When after the resurrection Jesus ascended to heaven the early disciples not only had to follow Jesus, they had to model Jesus. For people who had not known or seen Jesus personally were most likely to form their sense of him through their experience of the real, living Christians they met.”

People around us in Australia today deserve to know the truth of God’s word about Jesus from us. Who else will tell them? But before they will listen to our words about Jesus they need to see what the life of Jesus looks like in us. You will have different opportunities for that at different times in your life.

I am getting used to “retirement time”, a less pressured time than I have been used to. I often say “there is always tomorrow” as I have less demands and expectations on me now.  So, what does that mean for how I follow Jesus as a retiree this year? What is my life for God in this time? What does retirement free me up for as a Christian? How does the adventure of following Jesus continue in my life now?

 “The time has come” Jesus says today – the time had come for him to get going in his ministry. Whatever time of life it is for you, Jesus calls out to you personally, and to us as his church at the beginning of 2024 in today’s gospel saying that now is always the time for faith in him and his good news, for following him, and yes, for fishing with him, casting the net of God’s grace and love over his Australia and his world with Jesus this year.

God bless you as you go with Jesus into this new year.

---