Here’s a fish story that is a real whopper,
the story of Jesus in a borrowed boat
teaching the people on the shore
and afterwards he sails away with the fishermen
so as to make an easy exit from the crowds.
Then Jesus suggests that while they’re at, why not do some fishing?
Well, Peter knows a thing or two about fishing,
and I can just imagine him thinking that
this guy may preach a good sermon,
may have some tremendously intriguing things to say,
but fishing?
So Peter seems to humor Jesus:
Well, WE didn’t catch anything,
we experts who have been at it all night,
but for you we’ll give it a go.
And the fish make a bee line for their nets,
they come at Jesus’ call,
they surrender themselves into the nets,
more fish than the nets, or the boat,
or their partners’ boat, can accommodate.
Not just enough fish to make up for the poor showing
that Simon and James and John had had the night before
But fish and more fish, way more than can be accommodated,
until they were overwhelmed with fish.
Like in Fantasia with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice
and the multiplying brooms carrying endless buckets of water.
Now Peter begins to get a glimmer,
this is someone who is more than
a good preacher, profound teacher, prophet, even messiah.
This is an encounter with the Divine Presence.
Jesus isn’t who you think he is.
The Word of God through whom all things came to be
is Life itself.
And Peter’s response is to contract away from that,
to see his own sinfulness in contrast to the Divine Compassion
being expressed right there,
understanding Peter’s poverty of spirit.
When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying,
“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
like the Prophet Isaiah experiencing the Presence of God in the Temple,
who said, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips…”
Peter was right about his sinfulness.
One way of looking at sin is to notice that it is reactivity
to this love and the liberation it could bring,
and reactivity to surrendering to this love.
The fish were surrendered to Jesus and so readily approached him.
Peter was not.
Sin can be described as self-contraction, and the illusion of separation.
Self-contraction is to pull into oneself in terms of attention and focus,
to see oneself as the center of attention,
self-absorption, the self-possessed life,
to thereby have a very limited field of vision
for anything outside of oneself,
and thus to act in isolation and without regard for others,
as though one could be totally independent of others,
that’s the illusion of separation.
When Peter was confronted with the way the fish swarmed to Jesus
and the wholeness of life Jesus exhibited,
he recognized his own lack of wholeness, his sin, his littleness,
and pulls back from this incredible demonstration
of outpouring and abundance of life.
And how typical it is to contract away from the very thing
that will address our heart’s desire, our deepest longing.
The fear we have that in this incredible Presence of Love
we ourselves, all that we have known of ourselves,
will likewise be pulled into a Divine Net,
that we will utterly lose ourselves, and be absorbed into the Divine.
And yet that is exactly what is needed, what is to our greater good,
what saves us and frees us and opens us to abundant life,
Real Life, life on level of limitless, timeless life.
Apparently Jesus was not going to honor Peter’s request
to depart from him.
Apparently this is just what Jesus wanted to see in Peter
so that he knew that Peter was in the right place
to be initiated into a whole new life,
and to be called as a disciple.
Jesus says to Peter that he is more like the fish than he may think,
as though to say, “You are caught in my net already, and eternally.
This is the good news here in this gospel lesson,
that as unworthy, inapt, inappropriate one may think of oneself,
that may be just the right stuff for the Teacher to work with
in the spiritual process of discipleship.
Now, you all may think that you come to Nativity
because you chose to associate here for any number of different reasons.
You may want to rethink that.
You may really be more like the fish, drawn irresistibly by Jesus into his net.
You are here because the Resurrection Spirit of Jesus
has been at work in you, drawing you,
and more than that, calling you,
not just to be a member of a particular congregation
but to be in discipleship
to be in discipleship so that you too can help cast nets.
Jesus tells Simon Peter, and James and John, and you and me,
that we are now to be fishers for our brothers and sisters.
Jesus tells them to catch people now, not fish anymore.
And there is a lovely little word in Greek in this passage - zwgrwn,
that means literally to catch or take alive.
We are caught in the net of our Lord into life, not death.
And when we share in the work of the Gospel,
we are bringing others to the place where they can become alive
in a whole new way.
We do our best to be good Christians,
but a lot of the times I think we miss the point out of sheer familiarity with the words we hear over and over again.
But have an encounter with Jesus,
and like Peter we too would be on our knees contracting in fear,
or finally surrendering and swimming into the net of his love.
Being with Jesus is not a very easy thing.
You can’t always feel comfortable around him.
On the one hand his voice calls to us, and we are irresistibly drawn to him.
“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest.”
His words are words of life,
that when we recognize them
and our inner being responds to these words
and resonates with them,
there is a great pulling of the heart to be near him.
Such as when Simon Peter in another place answered Jesus,
“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Yet at the same time, when we come close to him, when we approach him,
what we thought we could count on as business as usual
is now taking surprising turns
and not looking like the reality we had been used to.
The last two years have been an example of that.
There is the challenge of discipleship,
following Jesus faithfully
when things aren’t going the way we want them to go.
The teaching of Jesus is not so much then, can you see,
a transfer of information,
but a shift in perception.
And thus, when we share in casting the nets then, in sharing the Good News,
it is not about a transfer of information,
but about knowing we are in Jesus, in the Resurrection Spirit of Jesus,
an experienced shift in our own perception,
which then can facilitate others in perceiving the Living Christ
and their life in him.
The Gospel lesson ends with these words:
“When they had brought their boats to shore,
they left everything (that means even all those fish)
and followed him.”
We, like Paul in today’s Epistle lesson, can say,
“by the grace of God I am what I am,
and God’s grace toward me has not been in vain.”
Like Paul and Peter our only qualification for ministry is Christ at work within us.
No comments:
Post a Comment