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The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany Luke 5:1-11 Today’s gospel is set in the context of a fishing story. Living on Cape Cod as we do, we are all familiar with fishing stories. When you think of fishing stories perhaps you think of our own Pete Gouger, fly fisherman extraordinaire, with his meticulously tied flies and graceful cast. Or perhaps, like me, you think of someone like my Granddaddy, who used to fish for catfish with a bamboo pole and worms on the banks of a muddy river in North Carolina. Or perhaps you recall afternoons on a sandy beach casting into the surf or pleasant hours spent on a lake or in the bay. There’s another side to fishing stories, though, and we who live on Cape Cod are all too familiar with them as well—the stories of those hardy folks who make their living fishing, who brave deep and often treacherous waters in search of a good catch, who, as we know all too well from listening to the news over the last week, often put their lives on the line and lose. This is the kind of fishing story we encounter as the setting of our gospel—a community that depends on a good catch for its livelihood, a group of hard working men who spent long hours of casting out heavy nets and hauling them back in, hopefully heavier yet with fish, and then spent more long hours washing and mending nets for the next day’s work; hardworking men who ventured out into often-dangerous waters seeking out the most plenteous schools to fish, men for whom empty nets meant no fish to put on the table, no fish to sell at the market, no income. This was the situation Jesus encountered in today’s gospel. Jesus has been traveling through Galilee preaching and teaching, and arriving at the shore, he commandeers Simon’s boat so that he might put some space between himself and a presumably large crowd that has been ‘pressing in on him’ as he taught. When he finishes his teaching, he tells Simon to take the boat back out to deep waters and cast out his net. Simon protests—we’ve already fished all night here, and there were no fish. Jesus persists and Simon does as Jesus has asked and to his great surprise, he pulls up a net so full of fish that it threatens to sink the boat. Simon and his colleagues recognize this sudden abundance for what it is: a sign that something extraordinary, miraculous even, is taking place and Simon falls on his knees before Jesus who reassures him and tells him that from now on he will catch people. I don’t know if Simon had a clue as to what Jesus meant by that, but he along with James and John abandoned their boats and their nets to follow Jesus No matter how often I hear this story, I’m always struck by the way Simon and James and John just leave their nets and their boats and presumably their families to follow Jesus, to catch not fish but people. Did they know that their lives would be forever changed? Did they have even an inkling of what catching people would entail? And if they’d known, would they have gone anyway? Of course, we don’t—and we can’t—know the answer to these questions. But we do know that Simon and James and John were just the first among many who would literally or figuratively drop everything to follow Jesus, to become catchers of people. After Simon and James and John came the rest of the twelve, and then the others who heard Jesus’ teaching and became believers, and then the ones who only encountered Jesus after his death, those like Paul who did not know Jesus during his earthly existence but who nonetheless became true believers and who took on the task of spreading the good news. And through time came the subsequent generations of Christians, each generation more dispersed than the last, spreading first through the Mediterranean world and then on into Europe and Africa and eventually around the entire globe. This long line of believers extends down through time, stretching across the years from Simon and James and John right down to us. Yes, us—Christians in the 21st century. For me there is something very moving about making this connection with the great cloud of witnesses who have come before me. Of course, the experience of each generation of Christians—the particular events that influenced their beliefs, the response to those beliefs, what it meant to live them out in the world—likely was radically different. But we are here, today, a community of believers because each generation before us made the decision explicitly or implicitly to follow Jesus and to ‘catch people’. So what does it mean for us 21st century Christians to be followers of Jesus and to ‘catch people’? The first part—the following—is fairly clear. We may not have literally dropped everything to follow Jesus as Simon and James and John did, but we have accepted Jesus’ invitation to follow him and marked that acceptance with our baptisms. And because of that we gather each week to worship, to share in the teaching and preaching and most importantly to share the blessed body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. Because of that we give back a portion of our resources to God and to the church and we devote those resources not just to caring for ourselves but also to caring for those around us. Because of that we try to live in such a way that we are authentic witnesses to the faith of those who have gone before us, and authentic witnesses to the saving power of Jesus, witnesses not just within our community of faith but also out in the wider world. And that’s where the ‘catching people‘ comes in. Just as Simon and James and John became catchers of people when they accepted Jesus’ invitation to follow him, so too do we take on that obligation.—an obligation to invite others to follow Jesus, to pass on our faith. We fulfill that obligation in part by ‘catching’ our children, bringing them up in the faith, teaching them the sacred stories and rituals, but our obligation doesn’t end there. It’s this obligation to share our faith with others that is, I think, hardest for 21st century Christians. Because we live in a diverse world and in a culture that respects and celebrates that diversity, and because the word ‘Christian’ can connote a variety of meanings to the larger world, we find it difficult to even consider how we might share Jesus’ invitation to follow him, how we might ‘catch people’. And it is here that we can return to the idea of fishing and use it as a metaphor for what we are about. No matter how dedicated we are to following Jesus, many of us are reluctant to see ourselves as evangelists—and that’s what Jesus meant—because we don’t want to seem overpowering or coercive—we don’t want to catch people like the fisherman who snatches a fish from the water by sheer force. But what if we think of catching people not by snatching them up but rather by luring them with a taste of the kingdom, by casting a net of love—God’s love and grace—casting that net far and wide and then seeing who might be caught by God’s vision and grace? If we can provide that taste of the kingdom, if we can cast that net of love and grace far enough and wide enough, if we make sure that net is big enough to embrace people of all sorts and conditions, then we might catch those who are lost, those who are seeking, those who are looking for God, perhaps unaware of what they are seeking. Then we might as Simon and James and John did, truly follow Jesus and catch people. AMEN
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