FISHING FROM THE FISH S POINT OF VIEW February 7, 2010, The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Luke 5: 1-11 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: Being caught by Christ means being pulled from one reality into another, one where something has to die. You are the peace that passes knowledge, O Lord. You do dwell with us in our daily strife. You are indeed the Bread of Heaven, broken in the sacrament of life. Be present to us now in the words of Scripture read and proclaimed. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. When our son, Benjamin, was a little boy, a very little boy (I think he was five or six) he wanted to go fishing in the worst sort of way. He pestered me that summer until, at last, I relented. I had myself fished as a boy, but it was a pastime that had dropped out of my imagination when I was a teenager. I just didn t want to drive to K-Mart to buy the both of us poles and me a fishing license. And if we caught actually caught any fish (God forbid) I really didn t want to clean them. But little boys can be very persistent. We finally went fishing off the end of a dock. It was a perfect fishing day cool and sunny, the water untroubled. When we dangled the monofilament line at the end of our K-Mart bamboo poles in the clear water, you could see the bluegills come and sniff at the worms woven onto our sharp little hooks. Either they weren t hungry or they were clever sunfish, because we sat on the end of the dock for the longest time before we got a bite. It was on Ben s line. I could see the thrill spread across his face; he didn t say a word. It was the moment he had long imagined. He held the pole with both hands and pulled a little four-inch sunny out the world of water and into the world of air. He landed the fish on the wooden slats of the dock. It flopped about for a moment and then it lay still, its blue-tipped gills pulsing, the barb of the hook piercing the translucent flesh at the - 1 -
corner of its mouth. Ben took a long look at that scene... and began to weep. I removed the hook as gently as I could and slipped the fish back into the water. There are, of course, two ways to think about fishing from the point of view of the fisherman and from the point of view of the fish. Ben had imagined the first, but until that moment, not the latter. There are two ways to hear Jesus famous invitation to Simon Peter, that metaphoric invitation to fish for people. First, you can hear it as we usually do, from the fisherman s point of view. You and I are like Peter; we been issued an invitation to be fishermen of a new kind people fishermen. When you interpret it in this customary way, the story is a call to evangelism, an invitation to share the word of Jesus Christ that has become precious to us. This is the usual, and probably the more important way, to hear this Bible story. But, as Ben learned that day, there is a second point of view on fishing, a second way of looking at this fishing-for-people business. It s the point of view of the fish. Metaphorically, it s the point of view of the person being fished, the individual being pulled into faith. It s the point of view of those who hear the message of Jesus Christ and then find themselves caught by it. Note that Peter is not simply the fisherman in today s story. Peter is also the fish. Peter will catch, but Peter also got caught. He was just caught in the fine nets of God. Applied to us, this passage not only calls us to be fishermen, it also reminds us that we have ourselves been the fish. Before we ever do any fishing, you and I have been fished ourselves. This is one subtle, sleeper of a tale the fishermen are the fish; the catchers are themselves the ones being caught. Like any metaphor, fishing as an analogy to coming into faith will implode if pressed too far. But it s powerful because it s a word-picture with a bite to it; actually it s an image with a couple of bites to it. The first bite is this: to be fished out of the water of the old life into the new life involves being pulled into a whole new reality, a new reality in which old assumptions are turned upside-down. - 2 -
This new reality is not some slight modification of the old: air is not slightly modified water. Just so, there is a sharp difference between the world of no-faith and the world of faith. This image of being fished is a blunt reminder of something we wish were just not true about faith in God, namely that faith in God invites us into a very new reality, and it s a reality that demands a new way of being. - You and I tend to want God when we want God. But God is not God on our terms. - We like to turn to God when God is convenient to have around. But God insists on being terribly inconvenient. - We want God when we want the comfort. But the God of comfort is also the God of discomfort. - We want God when the Bible supports our view of things. But Scripture is replete with confrontations to our most tightly-clutched human assumptions. - We want a little canapé of religion on the side to round out our otherwise unaltered lives. But God insists on major life alterations. - We want our lives tweaked a little by faith. But God is not much into minor course corrections. God usually insists on a 180. With God, it s all-or-nothing. To trust in God is to be pulled into a reality as different as air is from water. To trust in God is to invite God into the whole of house of our lives, not just a pretty little Sunday-morning God-annex. I have a friend named Neta Pringle who used to serve as pastor of the Concord Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware. She once told me this story: Earlier this year one of the men in my congregation came in to see me. He was young. I had just married him last spring. He works for one the big banks in town (Wilmington s growth industry)... His bank s chief business is credit cards... His bank was targeting folks who had gotten in over their heads financially and generally offered cards that charged much higher rates than the competition. - 3 -
Bless his heart, the guy was worried about the ethical side of the matter. These folks (meaning his strapped customers) just don t know what s out there, he said to Neta. So I tell some of my clients, Look around and see what else you can find. Don t just take this. But if I do that (he went on) I m not creating good business for the bank. Nobody else seems to be very concerned, but it doesn t feel right to me. Then Neta added this postscript to her story: I m glad it doesn t feel right to him, and I know it s his having been fished that s created his dilemma. Time and again, your own pastor has also seen people fished like that fished into a new world. - I ve seen people fished into a new world when they ask the kinds of deeply ethical business questions that young banker was asking. - I ve seen people fished into a world where it makes sense to give up your Friday night to spend it with homeless folks from the Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter. - I ve seen people fished when the choice is to give up precious Saturdays to work all day long hard and for nothing at building a Habitat house that somebody else will live in. - I ve seen people fished into a world where it makes sense to forgive a person who has said or done the cruelest things, perhaps a relative or friend who doesn t exactly deserve it and hasn t really asked. - I ve seen people fished into a world where they give sacrificially, give to the work of their church in a way that actually impacts their life style. - I ve seen people fished into a world in which they discover that love really is more powerful than anything else, more powerful than money, more powerful than fear, more powerful than ambition. - I ve seen people fished into a new world in which their happiness is necessarily interwoven with the happiness of other human beings. I said earlier that this fishing metaphor has two bites to it. The first is its suggestion that faith is like being pulled from one reality to very different world. But there is a second implication to the fishing image. It s patently obvious, and I have side-stepped it so far. You know what it is. My five-year-old understood it - 4 -
the day he went fishing... The fish die. The unavoidable truth necessarily implicit in this fishing image, is that when we are fished, something in us also needs to die. When you think about it, this fishing metaphor is simply the image of baptism turned upside-down. A fish is lifted from water into air and dies. When you and I were baptized, we went (emblematically speaking) from air into water and something in us is supposed to die... The old self that imagines itself the center of its own little solar system has to die. The old self that fancies itself an autonomous actor disconnected from God and the other has to die. I don t know about you, but this old self-centered self of mine is slow to drown. Even when you hold it under, it s slow to go. But this is what being caught, being fished, being baptized, is all about a new self rising from the waters, slowly perhaps, but rising, a day at a time, rising. The Southern writer Will Campbell once remembered his own baptism. He was a young boy, and he was baptized outdoors in the East Fork River in Mississippi. For the occasion his parents had ordered him a new suit of clothes from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. He was also accompanied by his brother Joe, who was something of a youthful skeptic. As Joe watched from the river bank as new Christians were immersed in the river, he grew increasingly worried for his brother s safety. Finally, Joe slid down the muddy bank, grabbed his brother, and said, Will, dear God, don t let them do this to you. A fellow could get killed doing this. Years later, reflecting on Joe s comment, Campbell said, It took me thirty years to recognize that was precisely the point. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 5 -