This week’s readings: Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13] , 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 , Luke 5:1-11 , Psalm 138
To start with some honesty, I have never liked this Gospel passage very much. In general, I like the stories of the disciples being called, the rag-tag bunch of people that Jesus encounters and who join him on the journey. But this passage irritates me. I feel like it started, way back when I was a kid, with the song, “I will make you fishers of men…” with a chirpy little sermon about inviting people to church. Now it reminds me of every little chirpy, overly simple segment on evangelism since then- “Jesus tells us to be fishers of men! Just invite someone to church and there will be such a huge number here that we won’t know what to do!”
I’m all for inviting people to church, don’t get me wrong, but I have always been irritated when we try to cover over all the complexity of what that might mean. Being fishers of men, or sometimes fishers of people, is associated with lots of all sorts of difficult history in our Christian tradition. There is the history of colonialism and oppression done in the name of growing the church- using the nets of power and war and even slavery to drag people into an oppressive system, often in the name of Jesus. There are the religious and spiritual traumas that people have endured in churches, that have kept people tied up in nets of oppression and pain, often done in the name of growth and evangelism at any cost.
We are grappling with that history in so many ways right now- certainly there are high profile places where that’s happening. Maybe you’ve heard of the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, about leaders like Mark Driscoll in the evangelical world. We could see our own grappling with our racist past and present in things like Sacred Ground as part of that work too. I know that, at least for me, acknowledging that difficult history of evangelism, of the idea of being fishers of people, and the present circumstances it has led to, is important, even if it is difficult.
And so, for many reasons, when I contemplated preaching a cheerful sermon about abundance and invitation and the great catch of fish that Jesus is preparing for us, I came up empty. Beyond the weight of the past interpretations of this passage, I think the thing I resonated most with, when I read the passage, was the sense of exhaustion that you can read into Simon’s words at the beginning of the story. He has been working hard, using all of his skill and experience as a fisherman, and not coming up with much. The past few years, for all of us, I think, have not largely been about easy catches, about easy growth.
As I studied this passage more, though, I came to see that there was more to the story than Jesus being like, “Hey, I’m Jesus, come join me, because if you do, everything is going to be awesome- so many fish!” This story happens in a particular time and place, after all, with its own difficult circumstances. Jesus grew up with and understood what life was like for these fisherpeople that he encounters here. Their fishing happened in a complex economic system- the Roman Empire owned all bodies of water, and every catch of fish was taxed, and fishermen had to be licensed to operate a boat. Simon says that they have been working all night, and that probably wasn’t because they just loved fishing so much- they worked long, long hours in order to make a living.
People poorer than them, who didn’t own boats and weren’t licensed, depended on them and their catch to survive, as well. Like we do, I imagine that Simon and James and John had complicated feelings about their place in all this, while they tried to do what was needed to survive, what was needed to live a good and meaningful life. Simon’s exhausted words were perhaps not just about one
bad night of luck- they were about a life that never really had enough. Things are difficult, even when they go well, and they aren’t going that well. Even if he does his best, it still won’t be enough to make things right, in a world where much is wrong.
And into all this comes Jesus. The crowd is hungry for his teaching. He gets in Simon’s boat and teaches from it, to those crowded on the shore.
And then Jesus tells Simon to lower the net. Simon says, clearly not thinking that it will work. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
And this miraculous catch of fish that occurs, speaks to that reality that Simon and the other soon-to-be disciples are living in. There is suddenly abundance- enough for everyone. There is so much that the containers cannot hold the multitude. This fish will feed everyone- Simon, and his family, and the others dependent on his catch, with more left over. There is so much abundance that it makes Simon afraid of who he is, and what he has done, his sin- “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!”- it makes him aware of his own need for mercy, for transformation.
And so Jesus invites him into that work of transforming himself, and inviting others into transformation. Certainly, the journey of discipleship does not leave Simon where Jesus found him. And Jesus, and later Simon and his fellow disciples, do invite many others into that journey of discipleship. We are descendants of those invitations. I am grateful that I have been invited into this journey and relationship with Jesus, grateful that others shared it so that it could live in every generation, and so that I could be a part of it too. And if I am an inheritor of that tradition, then there must be something for me to do with it. But, like I said at the beginning, I am also an inheritor, we are all also inheritors, of other things- of the history of sharing this tradition in service of domination and abuse and exploitation of other people, or of ignoring those things in service of growth as an institution.
So how can we be inheritors of Jesus’ invitation to Peter, in a way that does not fall into those traps?
Well, I think, for one, we can become more aware of that part of our history as Christians, we can seek to understand those tendencies and traps and the ways they’ve been manifest throughout the history of the church, so that we can recognize them when they come our way to snare us. Things like Sacred Ground, that increase our understanding of history that has been obscured from us, or that we have avoided, help. Other practices like land acknowledgments help us grow in our mindfulness, our capacity to remember, when the world would like us to forget. We can encourage each other in the work of noticing these traps and habits and patterns, by reminding each other of them when we see them surfacing in our common life. We can listen carefully to the voices of those most affected by things like racism, abuse, exploitation.
Beyond that kind of awareness, I think this story itself has some hints for us. Jesus doesn’t seem to show up in Simon’s boat with a 5 point plan for increasing discipleship engagement. Simon doesn’t appear to do anything impressive at all. All he does is to listen to Jesus’ prompting, and act with trust.
Theologian Debie Thomas says that much of the life of faith lives in the gap between Simon’s two sentences before he lowers the net. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. [pause] Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” All of Simon’s experience and skill as a fisherman has yielded nothing. He does nothing different- he is just honest with Jesus about the reality. He shows up full of exhaustion and frustration and failure. And yet he goes forward in faith, and Jesus is the one who brings the abundance.
And I think the other thing that we miss, 2000 years in the future, and maybe especially as people who usually have enough to eat- Jesus’ abundance actually feeds people, people desperate to survive. The story is about the ethereal, about faith and trust and vocation and discipleship, but it’s also about fish. Where Jesus goes there is enough for everyone- Jesus’s abundance spills out over the paradigm of the empire, where everyone maybe has just enough to get by, but only if they work themselves to the bone. The abundance that Jesus brings threatens the way of the empire, the rulers of that age, and our age, which want to keep everyone a little scared and a little hungry. But when Jesus is around, there is plenty for everyone- we see it here, and we’ll see it again.
What Jesus comes to bring isn’t about perpetuating growth statistics, neither in the church, nor in the balance sheets of the powers that be. It’s about there being enough fish for very hungry people to eat. It’s about healing what’s broken in ourselves and in the way we order our communities. It’s about a call to be a part of something transformative, something that turns death-dealing systems on their head and invites people instead into a life where there is enough for everyone. It’s about growth, but the kind of growth that transforms us all, that makes us new, that brings life and joy and plenty, not the kind of growth that happens at the expense of human life and community.
And yeah, if we’re disciples of that kind of life, that kind of healing, that kind of transformation, we’re meant to be a part of inviting people to it. But in my experience, and I think in the disciples’ experience too, when we come into contact with that kind of transformation, we can’t help talking about it, inviting people in. We do it because it’s about life, it’s about sharing what we have with others. It’s about Jesus inviting us into a life where we are changed and where we can help bring that kind of change to those we love, to those that we share community with. We’ve never done that perfectly, from Simon onward. So we meet Jesus in the boat, and we tell him how hard things have been, and we trust that his word will guide us toward abundance, toward life, toward there being enough for all.
Image by Idris Tajannang from Pixabay