Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day. I never saw the point. I never got the bug of angling when I was a kid. My friend Ian tried to get me interested. He went fishing every weekend on the gentle rivers of Surrey. Once he showed me his tin of live bait.
A seething mass of wriggling, jiggling, maggots. I think that was the moment I decided I didn't have the stomach for fishing. Also, it seemed a bit, you know, dull.
Ian tried to stir my imagination with tales of hour long battles with 10 pound carp that eventually he overpowered and dragged into his landing net. But I wasn't convinced. I knew that he really just sat on the riverbank with his flask of hot tea, his cheese sandwich, his mass of maggots, and he waited and waited.
I wanted a hobby that involved more risk, more action, more white knuckle terror, and dare devil danger. I wanted a hobby that demanded you take your life in your hands. You throw off all caution, and you step boldly into the arena knowing that any moment could be your last. So I took up golf.
So I used to read today's gospel lesson with a kind of dread in my heart. No, surely not. I thought fishers of people, God doesn't want me to be an angler, does he? Jesus begins this passage with a heavy heart lead. Actually, the opening words of these, when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.
Jesus starts this story grieving. His cousin, John the Baptist, who had just baptized him, has been seized by Herod and thrown in prison. We know, as I'm sure Jesus did, that John never emerged from that cell. He died there executed by empire, and in his grief and disorientation, Jesus goes home. Of course he does.
That's where you go when you are in distress. He goes home to Galilee, to some villages by the sea, and while he's there one day walking along the beach, he gets another glimpse of God's unfolding plan for him. John's time is over. His ministry is at an end. A page was turning and the time of Jesus is about to begin.
Jesus needs a team of friends and followers who will go with him on his three year journey of miracle and wonder, and there they are for fisher folk, but they aren't the sort of fisher folk that we are used to. Peter and Andrew, James and John are not anglers. This was not a hobby. They were not on a peaceful river or a placid lake.
It wasn't even the sort of sea fishing for Marlin that we see off the Florida coast. Dismiss all you know about fishing and go in your mind to deep seaman. Come with me to the to New England and to the lobstermen who eke out a living in foreboding waters. Or even further north to the hunters of co and haddock near the Arctic Circle.
This kind of fishing is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and risky. On the lakes and rivers of Alabama, there isn't much of any of those things. Fishing is a relaxing pastime, A peaceful day out, you might come home with a trout or two, but that's not the point. It's about recreation. Trawling though is uncomfortable.
It is now, and it was 2000 years ago when Jesus strode along the beach at the Sea of Galilee and called those four fisher folk to leave their nets and go fishing for people instead. The crew would dock their boat a few yards from the shore. So before they even set sail, they had to wade out waist deep and clamber aboard.
Then if they were blessed to make a catch, the men would haul their fish laden net up the beach. So a trawlerman had painful joints and aching muscles during a drought. In 1986, an old fishing boat was unearthed on the sea of Galilee. Carbon dating suggests it dates from around 50 ad, and this boat was small and spartan and fragile.
This was a dangerous career. The Sea of Galilee is actually a lake. And it is prone to storms that can be violent and unpredictable. It lies 680 feet below sea level and is surrounded by hills as high as 2000 feet. So the lake sunbathes in the bottom of a deep bowl, but cool dry air often descends the hills and collides with this subtropical body of water.
And when that happens, the air undergoes a seismic change in temperature and pressure. And a storm is born and that little boat and its occupants are tossed like a toy. Trawling is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and risky, but they had no choice. James and John, Peter and Andrew, they were born for this. Their fathers each had a boat, and from as early as they could remember, they knew that one day those boats would become theirs.
Those hard days, nights, theirs, those arthritic joints, theirs that seasickness theirs, that plea to God that tonight those nets would swallow fish so their families could swallow bread was theirs. Those dark fears of a watery grave were theirs. Of all the metaphors Jesus could have used when he called these four brothers, trawling has to be the most vivid and the most accurate because it's tough out there.
Many people are walking paths of grief. Many of us feel broken by life, scared of the uncertainties and bruised from conflicts. We are broken people, and we live among a nation of broken people. Standing with them in their brokenness can be uncomfortable, inconvenient, and risky. When you tell your friend that you will pray for them in their stressful situation, it's uncomfortable, it's inconvenient, and it's risky.
When you try to comfort your coworker in their illness and you feel the urge to mention something about God, it's uncomfortable, inconvenient, and risky. When you are making friends with a new neighbor and it crosses your mind to invite them to church, you know, it's uncomfortable, inconvenient, and risky.
We fisher folk in the historic churches know very well that turning our gaze away from ourselves and our agendas and focusing instead on our neighborhoods is frightening. It's uncomfortable, it's inconvenient, and it's risky.
If you were here three years ago this Sunday, then you saw me use a visual aid. Now I try never to use the same illustration or story twice to the same congregation, but today I am going to repeat that 3-year-old illustration because it's brilliant. It's how we Episcopalians go fishing.
It's our foolproof resource. We've been using it for centuries. I guarantee that this attractive and affordable item will remove all discomfort, inconvenience, and risk from fishing for people.
And we put that on the beach and wait for the fish to jump in.
Now, clearly this is a better kind of fishing. There's no embarrassment. It involves no hard work or imagination. No one is going to reject us. The fish just jump in and actually from time to time, by the grace of God, a fish does land in the bucket and we pat ourselves on the back for being so welcoming and inclusive, but it's not fishing and it doesn't produce the results of the adrenaline pumping vision, exploding heart, transforming mission that Jesus calls us to.
So what happens when the fish don't jump? Some fisher folk think there must be something wrong with the bucket, so they buy a bigger or more attractive one. They confuse Jesus' law of fishing with Kevin Costner's, law of Baseball, build it and they will come. Now, building a comfortable new church would indeed make them come if the building were the reason they were not already coming.
But the reason people don't come to church is never because they don't like the color of the carpet. They don't come because they are waiting for members of the church to show them by word and deed that there is a God who loves them and a savior who died for them. Some fisher folk blame, um, the lack of fish jumping into the bucket on the sea, uh, or the sand, or the wind or the tide or the moon, or anything that is outside their power to influence.
These fisher folk complain about how society has changed, especially the fish blue laws and the fish schools with their fish soccer on their fish Sunday mornings. In the early years of my ministry, I was the evangelism officer in an English diocese, and I had the task of visiting parishes, meeting with Vestries and other groups of parishioners to try to help them fish for people.
It was rewarding work, but at times it was demoralizing. On in England, as you know, uh, the process of secularization is much further on than it is in the states of the Deep South. Church attendance and membership has been alarmingly low for decades, and this has had an impact on the morale of the faithful remnant who long for their churches to be full.
Again, an exercise I would often set before BET Vestries was to name why they thought people did not come to their church. Their replies were all dishearteningly similar and had one thing in common. Namely, the people don't come for reasons that are out of our control. And if the reasons people don't come are outside our influence, then there's nothing we can do to change the situation.
No one has to accept responsibility for how things could be. I longed for people to say that their neighbors don't come to church because we haven't invited them. Or when we do have a guest, we don't make them feel welcome or because we're always fighting among ourselves. And so why would somebody want to come or because we make the Christian faith irrelevant by not living it outside Sunday mornings.
Some fisher folk even blame the fish for their lack of faith. They're skewed priorities, their materialism, their lazy preference to stay in the sea rather than jump into the bucket and their sinfulness. That keeps them from seeing what an excellent place the bucket is. If only those immoral fish would realize what is good for them.
Come with me, says Jesus and I will make you fishes of people. We must go where the people are. If we don't fish where the fish are, all we are doing is drowning. Maggots, trawlers of women and men, boys and girls. Inconvenienced uncomfortable risk takers who are not content with buckets, but do the uncomfortable thing, the inconvenient thing.
The risky thing. Amen.