January 21: "How to Win Friends and Influence People"

THE WORD IN THE GOSPEL  Mark 1:14-20

After John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee announcing God’s good news, saying, “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!”

As Jesus passed alongside the Galilee Sea, he saw two brothers, Simon and Andrew, throwing fishing nets into the sea, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” he said, “and I’ll show you how to fish for people.” Right away, they left their nets and followed him. After going a little farther, he saw James and John, Zebedee’s sons, in their boat repairing the fishing nets. At that very moment he called them. They followed him, leaving their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired workers.

MESSAGE     “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

When I was growing up in southern New Jersey, one of the things my mother liked to do was take me on drives. We explored most of south Jersey, and I saw a lot of interesting things along the way. We drove through the Pine Barrens, and to Ocean City and Cape May. I remember seeing Garden State Racetrack and downtown Camden, and the Navy Shipyards at the Delaware River waterfront. I remember seeing different churches and schools and shopping centers.

But there was this one place we’d drive by that always fascinated me. It was a fancy, sprawling building in Cherry Hill and the sign out front said, “Dale Carnegie Institute.” I had no idea what it was. I thought it was a college or something. But then one day, I noticed a book at the local bookstore, “How to Make Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie.

I learned that the Dale Carnegie Institute was a place where people, mostly business people, would go to learn skills that would help them be more successful in their business.

I was surprised to learn that Dale Carnegie courses are still around and are being offered in classrooms and online, around the world. I was also surprised to find out that Carnegie’s book was an immediate best-seller when it was first printed in 1936. And since then, it has sold over 15 million copies!

Now, I’ve never read the book, but I did do some research on the principles that are laid out in the book.

There are several things the book promises to do for you, including:

·       Get you out of a mental rut, give you new thoughts, new visions, new ambitions.

·       Enable you to make friends quickly and easily.

·       Increase your popularity.

·       Help you to win people to your way of thinking.

·       Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done.

Millions of people have completed the Carnegie course and many have used his principles to become successful and wealthy, and to make friends and influence people.

I thought of all this when I read this morning’s passage from the gospel of Mark. The reading starts with Jesus coming to Galilee and announcing, “Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!”

Then, Jesus is walking by the Sea of Galilee, and he sees two brothers, Simon and Andrew, fishing. He says to them, “Come, follow me, and I’ll show you how to fish for people.”

Evidently, the brothers left their nets and followed Jesus right away. Then they saw James and John, who were also fishermen, in their boat repairing the nets. Jesus calls to them, too, and they also immediately left their father, their boats, their nets . . . and followed Jesus.

This was a favorite passage of mine when I was growing up. There’s a song I used to sing in Sunday School about being “fishers of men.”

But as I got older, I thought about that idea of “fishing for people” and it started to bother me a bit. Especially when I became a pastor. In my first church, almost 16 years ago, I did a children’s message on this passage, and I dressed up in full fishing gear, with a vest and waders and a pole and tackle box. As I started talking to the kids about fishing for people, it suddenly hit me: the idea of using a hook to “catch” people isn’t exactly the image I wanted to share with the kids. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the whole fishing idea maybe wasn’t so good. After all, fish don’t want to be caught. Using a hook or a net is pretty violent from the fish’s point of view. And, of course, when you catch a fish, it dies. 

But of course, Jesus didn’t mean for Simon and Andrew and James and John to use nets of hooks to catch people. He was simply trying to relate to these fishermen, using an image, an idea, that they would understand.

And it worked! The text tells us that all four of them immediately started to follow Jesus.

As a child, I thought it was pretty cool that there was something about Jesus that made these guys drop everything in a moment and follow him just because he said, “Follow me.”

But it’s more likely that these four men were not meeting Jesus for the very first time that day. It’s much more likely that they had heard about him going around the countryside proclaiming the good news. Maybe they had even gone to listen to him one day as he taught about the coming kingdom of God.

So I feel confident that they knew who Jesus was before he said, “Follow me.”

But still, it’s pretty cool that there was something in Jesus’ message, something in his proclamation of the kingdom, that was so interesting, so compelling, so captivating, that they didn’t think twice when he offered them the invitation to become his followers.

Did Jesus use some ancient form of the Dale Carnegie method to persuade these men to follow him? Did he use some of the Carnegie principles to win these friends and influence their choice?

Well, no. Because there’s a fundamental difference between what Jesus did and what Dale Carnegie has taught millions of people to do.

You see, the whole purpose of the Carnegie course is so that YOU can be successful and rich and important. It’s all about YOU, or me, or whoever is taking the course. It’s all about personal success.

But Jesus was not the least bit interested in personal success or wealth or popularity or getting people to like him. Everything that Jesus said and did pointed to something beyond himself: to the kingdom of God, of whom he was the messenger. Everything Jesus did revealed what life in the kingdom of God is like: in the kingdom people would be healed and restored to community; outcasts would become welcome guests; sinners would receive mercy and forgiven; the unlovable would be loved; those who had always been last would finally discover their incredible self-worth as children of God. Jesus was all about the success of God’s kingdom.

In his life, Jesus demonstrated an alternative to the way the world defined, labeled, and judged people, an alternative to the ideals of personal wealth and success and popularity. Jesus demonstrated that the kingdom of God is full of acceptance, mercy, affirmation, and peace instead of suspicion, scorn, hatred, and exclusion.

This is what people found so compelling. I believe this is what made those fishermen leave their nets and boats and follow Jesus. This . . . the reality of God’s kingdom, this wonderful alternate way of living and relating . . . this is the only “bait” that Jesus ever used to persuade people to follow him, to become his disciples, and to model their lives after his life.

For Jesus, it was never about himself. It was always about God and God’s kingdom. When he invited people to follow him, he was inviting them to live into the kingdom.

As people who follow Jesus, we are called to invite others to follow him, too. The question is, what can we offer people that is so compelling and so persuasive that they will barely hesitate to join us on the journey?

The answer is simple! It’s not about whether or not we have the right kinds of programs or the right kind of theology or the right look or the right kind of worship or the right kind of music. Because, really, it’s not about US.

There is one quote from Dale Carnegie’s book that is helpful here. He writes,

“Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn't bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or grasshopper in front of the fish and said: ‘Wouldn't you like to have that?’

Why not use the same common sense when fishing for people?”

It’s not about us. But it’s also not about what we think people will want, or like, or prefer. It’s not about trying to make ourselves popular. It’s not about making other people happy.

It’s about offering people something they need, even though they may not realize they need it.

What we have to offer is simply this: we are the church of Jesus Christ. We are a community of God’s people. We are the bearers of that good news that the kingdom of God is coming. We are the ones who invite people to rethink their lives, to rethink their priorities, and to put God first. We are the ones who can say to our community, “You belong here! You are welcome here! If you want to be, you ARE part of this congregation.”

We live in a world in which being “acceptable” depends on who you are, what you look like, what you own, where you live, how much money you make. We live in a world that values personal success and popularity.

But, thanks be to God! We can offer an alternative to all that.

We are people who have made the choice to believe that something else is more important than all that!

We are people who follow Jesus instead of all of that!

We are people who seek the kingdom of God, and who long for it to spread and grow and take root in our world!

And so, with apologies to Mr. Carnegie, I’d like to offer a different version of his vision for success.

Instead of worrying about how to “win friends and influence people,”

all we need to do is “make disciples and grow the kingdom.” That’s the only kind of success we’ll ever need.

By the grace of God, when we are a faithful community that is grounded in the life of Jesus Christ, we will make disciples and influence people, not for our own benefit, and not even for the benefit of this church, but for the benefit of all of God’s people and for God’s kingdom.

By the grace of God, whether we know it or not, and whether we do it on purpose or not, WE are the ones who proclaim and live out Jesus’ message, “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!”

And that is good news, indeed. Amen.