Have you ever noticed that the passages of Scripture that we are most familiar with are the ones that we fail to examine? It is as if they become old friends to us, comfortable, predictable. We don’t want to disrupt the cozy relationship that we have established with these passages. We say, Oh, I know that passage! And we stop listening. Who wants to reexamine something when it feels so familiar, so comfortable? Who wants to disturb and old friend? So we gloss over the passage, smiling and nodding and failing to listen to the depths of God’s message contained in the sacred words.
Today’s gospel is one that many of you have heard. You know, the one about fishing for people? Jesus has just emerged from the desert. He walks along the shore of the Sea of Galiliee and sees two fishermen casting their nets into the sea. The nets of fishermen were made of rope tied in hundreds of knots. They were invaluable as tools in making a living, second only to the boats in their value. It was probably close to dusk for the fishermen tended to fish at night. The fish would not rise in the heat of the day, but preferred to take the bait in the cool hours of the night.
Jesus saw Peter and Andrew, two brothers, going about their daily lives. They were hauling the heavy net, and throwing it out like a weighty sheet into the water. Jesus said to them
Come. And I will make you fish for people.
These words were life-changing. With these words, Peter and Andrew left their entire livelihood behind and followed Jesus. But they sound so simple, so metaphorical.
Come. And I will make you fish for people.
Listen to these words with me. For their meaning is so rich, so deep as to penetrate our understanding of what it means to serve God. These are not familiar old words, or the words of a comforting fairy-tale. These words are the stuff of change itself. To catch a glimpse of what Jesus was talking about is frightening. It is frightening. And I will tell you why.
When I was five years old, I went fishing with my cousin Edward. Edward was eight years older than me and I thought that he knew everything. I was so proud that he had invited me. I was determined to learn a lot, to do everything he said, to be totally and utterly useful.
It took hours for Edward to catch a fish, or at least that’s what my five-year-old mind remembered. Hours of waiting. It seemed like forever. Then then, he hooked a fish.
A tug of war ensued between Edward and the fish. Edward won and he lifted the fish into the boat where it flailed and struggled. I watched it in horror.
It was unable to breathe, it’s gills pumping in and out. It seemed totally panicked, desperate to return to it’s world of water. I watched and watched. I was horrified by the agony of the fish. I had no idea that something so peaceful could be so brutal. I watched longer and, finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I threw that small fish back into the water. Edward was furious. I never went fishing with him again.
Most of us come to church because we are hungry for something. We want peace of mind. We want to understand why our lives aren’t working out quite like we planned. We want some guidance, something more meaningful than ordinary existence. Maybe we have a child and realize that we cannot raise that child by ourselves. How can we teach them about morality when we don’t really understand it ourselves? Or maybe we get sick and begin to wonder, “What does happen to me when I die, when my body no longer works?” We begin to hope that there might be something more and it is this hope that drives us here, to this beautiful space. We are hungry for something that we cannot articulate.
We come to this beautiful building, here this music that stirs our souls and some of us begin to get hooked. We find ourselves longing to return. We realize that our lives just don’t feel quite right when we miss church. We begin to recognize that there is something here which we cannot explain but which moves us deeply. We begin to believe, to be willing to put our trust in God. And that’s when the tug of war begins.
The early person of faith wants God to do his or her will. We want to be believers, we know that God made us and we want to serve God, but we are still convinced, somewhere deep inside, that we know what is best for us. We pray for things like health and prosperity, a balanced budget and safety for our children. We all do this. We pray for our will to be done. We ask God to help with our agenda and then we strain and tug against the pull of the fisherman. Do it my way, God, we say. Not your way, but my way.
At some point, we give up trying to tell God what to do and we begin to listen. We awaken to the fact that God wants to pull us out of our very existence, to a realm of being that is totally unfamiliar. God wants to pull us into what Jesus described as The Kingdom, a reality that it completely different from what we know. This kingdom is so unknown and so foreign to us that we struggle and we are afraid. We must die to ourselves so that we can be born to God.
To be truly caught, utterly and totally by God is to know that God really knows so much more that we know. It is to hand ourselves over to God, body and soul and to wonder what God will do next with us. It is to live in the Kingdom, in the resurrection life, and to make all our choices from that vantage-point. To be caught is to say, with sincerity and with hope, Thy Will be Done.
I just returned from a visit to Cuba. The Christians there are incredibly healthy spiritually. They have so little to hold onto in this world. There is so much poverty and so many economic issues in Cuba. The buildings are literally crumbling. Many would be considered hazardous in this country and would be condemned. Just going to church has been a great risk in years past. To become a priest is to give up a steady reliable salary for the uncertain hope of the generosity of a small struggling church.
But, despite all of this struggle for money and belongings, for a secure place to live, the people are so happy. They have light shining from their eyes.
At the Installation of the new Dean, I wanted to give them something, but my Spanish is terrible. So I sang an Irish blessing for them. They were so happy and gracious. They thanked me and kissed me and told me how wonderful it was, a silly, simple blessing that my mother used to sing to me. And at the Peace, every single person in the Cathedral had to hug every other person. The peace lasted for a full 15 minutes. These people had been caught by the fisherman.
An elderly woman approached me after church. She ran a house church for Episcopalians who could not get to the cathedral. She spent her meager pension on helping those less fortunate than herself. And she had light shining from her eyes.
It strikes me that there are many stages of fishing. There is the time when you are just getting hooked, a time of excitement and thrill as you realize the beauty and the hope that God provides for you. Then there is the tug of war, as we struggle to try to make God do what we want, what we think that it means to be Christian. And then there is the final stage, when you allow the fisherman to pull you right out of this world into the resurrection life, where your life is no longer your own and everything is new.
And even when you have been pulled into the Kingdom itself, and your life becomes dedicated to God, there are times when you flail around, not knowing how to give your life away, not knowing how to die to yourself. There are times when you long to be thrown back into the water, the humdrum simplicity of ordinary, selfish human existence.
Who says that fishing is easy? It is a struggle, a death, an ultimate change of existence. It is a process of being pulled from everything that we know into something so free, so incredibly other, into God’s service…into life itself.
