An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Anyone for Fishing?

A sermon on Matthew 4:12-23; Isaiah 9:1-4 & 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 by Nathan Nettleton

I’m probably not going out on a limb to suggest that I’m probably not the only person in this room who doesn’t much like being rung up by telemarketers. Am I right? I don’t blame the telemarketers themselves. Everyone needs a job, and they’re just doing theirs, so I try not to be rude when I’m refusing whatever they are selling. It is the big companies that plan such marketing strategies that annoy me, and sometimes I politely ask the caller to pass on the feedback that I have a policy of not buying any product that is promoted to me through unsolicited phone calls. I understand that these companies have a need to fish for new customers, but I don’t like the feeling of being treated like the fish when they get their dragnets out.

And for that reason, I squirm rather uncomfortably when I hear Jesus, in tonight’s gospel reading, talk about calling us to follow him and become those who fish for people. True, he only addressed those words to two fishermen named Simon and Andrew, but the story is related by the gospel writer in such a way as to imply that it is a model for all disciples, and that includes us. But if I am also taught by Jesus to treat others the way I would like them to treat me, and I don’t like being fished for, what am I to make of this call to allow Jesus to make me into one who fishes for people? I mean, nowadays the term has become so on-the-nose that with a slightly different spelling, phishing has even become synonymous with fraud in the online sales area. So if Jesus is proposing that we should first be fished for, and then when successfully caught, we should become those who fish for other people, is he really any better than an Amway pusher? Is there any way we can hear this now that might be good news?

Well, I guess the first question is “what is the message”? I’m not about to argue that the ends justifies the means, because that argument underpins much of the world’s unethical behaviour. But the question is still important in understanding what it is that Jesus is talking about when he asks us to become fishers of people. Actually it may be very important. Jesus’s message is summed up in this reading as “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In the gospels by Mark and Luke, the wording is “the kingdom of God”, but it doesn’t really mean anything different. Matthew is just more Jewish, and so the change to “kingdom of heaven” is typical of the Jewish aversion to using the name of God. Now, I could easily spend a lot of time on the question of how we should understand the call to “repent”, but I did that just two weeks ago, so all I’m going to do here is repeat one of my main points from then that repenting is not so much about what you turn away from as what you turn towards. Jesus is not focussed on condemning what we have been doing, but on announcing the emergence of the new kingdom, the new culture of heaven. He is announcing the arrival of something that is wonderfully good news and urging us all to jump on board.

Now one of the reasons that I want to emphasise the importance of that before going any further is that it is such a contrast to the way that many churches today present the message, and in particular it is a contrast to much of the “fishing methods” that have given the churches a bad name and which many of us are so wary of being associated with. Because, in many churches, the message is not “something wonderful is coming, jump on board”, but “a terrible punishment is coming if you don’t do as you’re told”. It’s all “repent or go to hell”, “repent or God will torture you for eternity”. But Jesus doesn’t threaten anyone. Jesus’s message is not all about avoiding punishments, but about embracing a new culture, a new life, and being liberated to live life in all its fullness.

Why have we in the churches so often mutated the message into a threat of fire? Perhaps because we have lost sight of what it means to embrace the culture of heaven. When we reduce our understanding of following Jesus to little more than being good citizens and behaving nicely and respectably, then it is difficult to see that the gospel actually has anything much to offer. Life seems pretty much okay as it is, so long as we behave and do the right thing, and so we can no longer really promote the gospel positively as making a big difference. And if we can’t attract people into it, we are reduced to trying to scare them into it by making out that there will be fearful consequences for failing to sign up. Salvation becomes merely being allowed to keep the life you already have without being punished at the end, instead of embracing an exciting and wonderful new life.

It is also then in real danger of being further distorted into a crude tribalism where it is just about whether you belong to this tribe or that tribe, and it becomes competitive.Then we’re just fishing because we want more people on “our” side so that we can stick it up the “other” side, which is another attitude that Jesus never seems to have exhibited. Amidst all the various celebrations of Australia Day this weekend, we will no doubt see a number of examples of ugly tribalism that seek to parade some supposed superiority of this national tribe over against other national tribes to stick it up them, and we know well enough what sort of ugly hatred, fears and violence that sort of thing can inflame. Religious versions of it are every bit as ugly and often worse, and we heard the Apostle Paul warning us in our second reading about the godlessness of such divisiveness.

Now, although I said that repenting is more about what you are turning to, what you are leaving behind is not irrelevant, and it is clearly spoken of in the first half of this reading with a quote form the prophet Isaiah, which we also heard in its original setting: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned.” We are called to turn towards the great light and to embrace the light, but our former situation is described as being in darkness, and in the shadow of death. And you might think that if that’s what people are living in, then they wouldn’t need much fishing. They’d be jumping at the chance to escape the darkness and the shadow of death. So how come they’re not? I often hear people in this congregation express bewilderment that this church hasn’t grown much bigger because they feel that surely this is what people are looking for. So on the level of humanity and salvation in general, or in relation to this congregation in particular, we see the same thing. What looks so naturally attractive to us, doesn’t appear to be attracting many others. Why?

It’s probably a bit like what I was saying about when the gospel is reduced to just a cleaned up version of normal; you don’t know what’s wrong with what you’ve got if you haven’t seen an alternative. So just like people who have grown up under the dark shadow of death in war zones or extreme poverty, what you presently live with doesn’t seem so bad because to you, it is normal. Isn’t this darkness just what everyone lives with? The feeling that “I’m going okay” is always relative and can only be experienced in relation to what you witness of how others are doing. And so, many many people are quite incapable of recognising the darkness for what it is until they have first experienced the light. Some of you who didn’t grow up in the church, but only encountered Jesus as adults will relate to this more easily, because you are able to look back on your life before, and you probably have a real sense of what was wrong with it now that you didn’t feel nearly so keenly while it was still your normal.

So, in whatever sense we are to be fishing for people, our fishing is aimed at leading people out of the darkness into life in the light, but if we are following the example of Jesus, we won’t be doing that by going around pouring scorn on people’s present lives and trying to shock them or scare them into repentance. It is true that in the face of disaster, say a severe flood, we don’t object to the word “fishing” when it is about fishing out the victims to safety. And it is also true that dire warnings have their accepted place in the face of disasters. The recent heatwave was a good reminder of the value of code red warnings in our bushfire zones. But it is still true that such an approach does not characterise the sort of fishing we see Jesus doing and calling us to follow him in doing.

What is it then? While Jesus doesn’t seem to be trying to scare anyone or coerce or manipulate or trick anyone into repentance, he does does very openly and invitingly live and speak about the new culture of the kingdom of heaven. He is very open in his practice of its values of non-judgemental acceptance, self-giving love, and generous forgiveness. And as the final verse of our reading made clear, people were experiencing healing in his loving and forgiving presence. When you experience real healing, you realise how unwell you were before. When you experience generous unconditional love, you realise how starved of it you were before. And when you experience radical mercy, you realise how relentlessly score-keeping and score-settling the darkness you were living in before was. And, of course, without the lived reality, the words are meaningless, but Jesus is the real deal, and so people are soon drawn to him like moths to a flame, wanting to get on board this new culture that is emerging at his touch. Actually, I don’t know whether you’ve ever been fishing for prawns, but generally it involves shining a bright light into the water, and they are drawn to it a bit like moths to a flame. Maybe Jesus meant to teach us to “prawn for people”!

Maybe that’s stretching the analogy, but the primary call is clearly to live as Jesus lives and to shine our light into the darkness the way he did. So it doesn’t mean carefully crafted marketing campaigns, and it doesn’t mean slick techniques in seal-the-deal evangelism. It means living the new culture of the kingdom openly and humbly and graciously, and (and this is where many of us sometimes get paralysed) talking about it openly and naturally just as we would about any other aspect of our lives and experience. Don’t hide your light under a bucket if you go prawning, and don’t hide it in the living of your life either. Don’t hide it, but don’t try to pretend it is something other than what it is either. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it is all up to you. Note that Jesus didn’t say that you have to go and make yourselves into fishers of people. He said he’d do it. He will make you fish for people. It is as you allow Jesus to transform you in his own image, filling you to overflowing with love and forgiveness and joy and gracious humility that you will find yourselves successfully drawing others towards the light, for the light will be shining through you. So don’t worry about it. You’re not called to be a religious telemarketer. Just allow the light of Jesus to fill you up and shine through you, and let the prawning begin!

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