A little boy, five years old he was, goes to the old quarry pit with Dean from next door, an older boy, eleven, perhaps, twelve, one warm summer afternoon. “We’ll be fine, ma’am,” Dean tells the little boy’s mom. “I’ll watch him close for sure.”

 

And he does for a while. But the little beach built by the borough council at the foot of the steep bank using the limestone company’s bulldozer is crowded that warm day with sunbathers, and the water, just two or three feet deep or so between the beach and the little island thirty yards offshore, is filled with swimmers and waders and splashers – just wonderful, ordinary folks cooling off under the hot, August sun after coming home from work at the end of the shift and just a few days before school is to begin again in a week or so.

 

It’s a gorgeous day, and Dean and his young charge are filled with the joy of just being alive. The clouds have shapes as they lie on their backs and float, and the water sparkles. Even below the surface it sparkles. Life is so, so good.

 

One of Dean’s friends calls to him from the little island: “Hey, man, come and try the new diving board.” The borough council has also invested in a spanking new board with lots of spring in it on the deep side of the island. “Come on,” the friend says. “He’ll be OK for a minute,” meaning the little boy laughing at the surface of the shining water with the older boy’s hand under his back.

 

“OK,” Dean says and takes his hand away to test whether the little boy can float. And, sure enough, he can, and the ladder to the diving island’s just a few steps away, and he’s just dying to give the new board a try. So he turns, confident the little guy will, in fact, be OK.

 

And he was, the little boy remembers afterward, as a young adult, then a middle-aged adult, then an older adult. He was OK, he remembers, even as his head sank beneath the surface on that warm, sunny day and he opened his eyes and saw the crystal bubbles rising to the surface and popping as he lay on the smooth surface of the sandy bottom, and even as he opened his mouth and began to drink. Even as his vision began to soften and blur he had a sense, at five years of age, that he was quite OK.

 

He was, even as Phil DeArment, the big fullback on the high school football team, came crashing through the knee-deep water on his way to the island to impress his girlfriend, who ran along side him, with a cannonball off the springboard. The little guy was quite OK even as big Phil stepped on him, then reached down beneath the surface and grabbed him up by one hand and pounded him on the back until the little guy coughed and sputtered and choked and came awake, having been found and saved. The little guy remembers even now, even as he remembers not being afraid, not knowing any better, I guess, but truly grateful now when he considers what might have been.

 

This week we’re taking a look at “discipleship,” how you get to be one of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth and how, once you are one, you stay at it, even after 10, 20 years – or even 60, 70, or 80 for some of us -- with as much energy and vigor as you had on day one. Wouldn’t seem you could, would it? You can’t with anything else you do for 60, 70, or 80 years. You just have to make peace with diminished capacity and learn to live with it. But not so with this one, discipleship and following the Lord Jesus, because, in this case, capacity doesn’t diminish, ever.

 

Discipleship’s special, you see. It’s a matter of listening to the voices that call you, but distinguishing between them, and listening to the right ones.

 

But…let’s go back to the story, the story of the little guy under the water being stumbled upon by big Phil in the crisp water of the old limestone quarry and being found and saved. I want to opine that discipleship, following the Lord Jesus, is a lot like that, like a little boy under the water being stepped on and saved from disaster, while, at the same, it is also not a lot like that. Discipleship, you see, is a matter of being found. That’s important to remember. We’re the found ones here and not the finders.

 

In the story that Alice/Walker read from the Hebrew Scriptures, the story from I Samuel, Samuel, as a little boy, is found and spoken to by the Lord God. He didn’t go seeking after the Lord.  Samuel was in the temple that night, and for every one of the night’s that his stint as a kind of altar boy required, not because he wanted to be there – I’m pretty sure he might have preferred to be swimming in the limestone quarry too – but, he was there because his mother wanted him to be there. Hannah, remember, had promised to dedicate her child to the service of the Lord, if only the Lord would grant that she become pregnant. The Lord did and she did. But it wasn’t Samuel’s idea. Little wonder that when the Lord called, he had no idea who it was.

 

Likewise…in the story of the call of Nathanael, in the Gospel this morning, it isn’t Nathanael who goes searching for, seeking for, the Lord. He is resistant, in fact, to the notion that someone from Nazareth could be the messiah about whom Moses had written. So, he lazed in the shade of the fig tree.  Nor was it his friend, Philip, in fact. Philip just happens to have been found and summoned first.

 

Rather, it was Jesus who found Nathanael…and knew all about him, in fact, having spotted him on one occasion sitting in the shade of a fig tree…hiding, in the shade of a fig tree. But the fig tree had nothing to do with it. Philip his friend had nothing to do with it. And Nathanael himself had nothing to do with it. But Jesus the Lord, the Lord mighty king, who was with God in the beginning and was the Word of God, and in fact, was God, the Creator God who knows all about all of creation’s children – every crease, wrinkle, and wart, even before our conceptions in our mother’s wombs – Jesus the Lord had everything to do with Nathanael’s being found and called.

 

Now, I hope you’ll forgive me if I seem to be making this either too subtle or complex or too simple and ordinary. I just want to say that what this seems to say – say loudly, in fact -- and that the story of Samuel also seems to say loudly, and every other story of a call to discipleship that I can think of in Scripture seems to say loudly, we have nothing to do – nothing – with our being found. We can’t make ourselves eligible, we can’t make ourselves worthy, we can’t qualify ourselves, we can’t raise ourselves up so we’ll be noticed and found by the Lord Jesus. We can’t go out and search and find faith. Rather, Jesus and faith find us, every last one. Our role, and the only job we have in this stuff, is to accept what being found and saved means and enjoy it forever, or reject it and fall back, back to the bottom of the quarry on the soft, soft sand.

 

It’s like a little boy being stumbled upon by a big, burly fullback and being saved, even though what the little boy was being saved from didn’t seem so bad to him. Sometimes we’ve got to let others make that judgment. Sometimes we don’t know what’s good for us. Samuel probably didn’t, but his mother Hannah did, apparently. Look what happened. The whole history of Israel hangs on what Hannah knew and did.

 

At the same time being found and called to discipleship isn’t at all like a little boy under the water being stumbled on and saved…because that salvation was happenstance, good fortune, purely luck. The Lord God didn’t have anything at all to do with that salvation, just as the Lord God doesn’t have anything at all to do with the drowning of little boys and girls that so, so often turn out the other way. Despite all of the popular theology that seems to scream at us that God is arbitrary in just such horrible, un-understandable ways, God truly isn’t. God’s love, grace, goodness, kindness, benevolence, is poured over all, all in spite of circumstance, qualification, mental capacity, physical ability, gender, race, sexual orientation, or age…all.

 

And therein is the final good news. You see, our age or diminished or increased mental, physical or emotional capacities, or how we were made or have turned out -- doesn’t have anything to do at all with being called by Jesus to be his disciple and responding to that call. I may have told you this story before, but it’s a good one and worth re-telling. When I was the interim pastor at Broad Street Church in Columbus, Ohio a few years ago, we had a Sunday school class for emotionally and mentally handicapped adults who lived in several different group homes on the east side of the city.

 

They had been baptized, all of them as a class, about 10 years before. Every Sunday, after Sunday school, they sat in the front row at worship. Talk about the joy of Jesus down in the hearts of people. I can’t explain. All I know is they knew they had been called by the Lord Jesus to be his disciple, and now they were going to be that with joy and energy forever, confident about heaven’s group home where they would spend eternity, with the rest of us, with their doctors and nurses and Jim and Diane, their God’s Treasures Sunday School Class teachers, forever and ever.

 

The stories we’ve read this morning testify that it will be the same for us and for all whom we love. We are found, every last one of us, and saved from drowning in the terrible brackish water of our sin. We’ve been found, like a little boy stumbled on by a big old football player running through the thigh deep water with his girlfriend. We are found, but also not like that. We are found and saved, if we want to be saved, by the loving Lord God who created us in the first place and knows exactly where we are. We are found. No hiding place under the fig tree or anywhere. We’re found. All we need to do is get used to it.

 

 And…we are called. This table and this font testify to the same thing: We have been found…and called to discipleship, every last one of us. What incredible good news. What a challenge!

 

Amen.