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PB&J Inc. Fishing Enterprises

Posted by on Sunday, February 6th, 2022 in News

Watch the sermon video here:

https://youtu.be/CfzHsIzb5RQ

Hespeler, 6 February 2022 © Scott McAndless
Isaiah 6, Psalm 138, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Luke 5:1-11

Is it just me, or did you notice it too? Did you notice how Peter comes across as a pretty lousy fisher in our gospel reading this morning? I mean, he’s supposed to be a professional. Fishing has been his life, probably, ever since he was a child. He has even entered into a partnership with two other men, James and John the sons of Zebedee. But, in our reading, the partners of PJ&J Incorporated Fishing Enterprises seem to do just about everything wrong – at least, they don’t seem to have planned for success.

First of all, they clearly have their priorities wrong. When the scene opens, we see them on the shore washing their nets. Yes, this is an essential activity for any fishing enterprise. Good fishers know that they have to maintain their nets. If you don’t properly clean them and mend them, they will start to smell and rot and soon they will be no good to you. So, it’s not a problem that they’re washing them, but the problem seems to be that they are not washing them at the right moment.

Where they are Failing

As the story progresses, we discover that they have been out fishing all night long and that they haven’t caught a thing. So, first of all, I’ve got to wonder how dirty their nets can be if they haven’t actually caught anything. But even more important, you would expect really good fishers to have some sense of where and when the fish are available. And it turns out that there are tons of fish out there at the very moment when they are in on the shore and washing up their nets. They are clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And, what’s more, Peter seems to know it. When Jesus has finished speaking to the crowds from Peter’s borrowed boat, he comes up to him and says, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” And did you notice what Peter says? He doesn’t say, “Master, there are no fish out there. They’re not interested in our nets.” He doesn’t say, “What are you a carpenter, why do you think you know where the fish are?” No, he doesn’t deny that there probably are lots of fish out there because he knows that there are.

What he does say is, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” That’s right, he says that there may indeed be fish out there, but we are tired. We just don’t want to fish anymore. And I’m all for workers deciding to set some boundaries and saying when they’ve had enough. But I would just like us all to understand that Peter is acknowledging that the problem isn’t that there are no fish.

A Failure of Equipment

But that is really just the first of Peter’s failures. There is much more to come. Peter does let Jesus talk him into going back out and putting down the nets despite how tired they are. Once they get out there, they proceed to gather within their nets the kind of massive catch that fishers always dream of. I mean, isn’t this why they go out in their boats every night, because they are supposed to bring back this kind of catch?

But no sooner do they get it, than new problems begin to appear. The nets, the ones that they were so carefully cleaning and tending only minutes ago, prove themselves quite unable to deal with such a catch. They immediately begin to tear. And then, when despite the tearing nets they actually manage to get their catch on board, it seems that their boats aren’t up to the task either. They immediately start to sink!

So, when it comes to the PJ&J Incorporated Fishing Enterprises, what do we see? We see a partnership of fishers who are really good at going through the motions of the industry. Yes, they will go out and put in hours upon hours of casting nets on the waters despite never catching anything. They will meticulously clean and mend their nets. But, when it comes to actually bringing in huge catches of fish, they seem to be singularly bad at the job.

Maybe they Don’t Care

And I can’t help but wonder if it may actually be because they don’t really care all that much about the results. The fact of the matter is that the fishers who plied the waters of the Sea of Galilee in the early first century had a pretty raw deal. Herod Antipas, who was the ruler in those parts, had set things up in order to make sure that he and his buddies were the ones who profited the most from the trade. It had probably gotten to the point where the men who did the labour barely scraped by no matter how hard they worked or how much they caught.

It is not unusual for workers to just put in minimum effort when that is the deal. They have lost the will to fish. And maybe that’s one reason why they have such little trouble walking away from their nets and boats and a huge catch of fish once Jesus calls them to follow him. So, maybe it’s not surprising that they are unsuccessful. It seems as if decades of mistreatment have left them feeling apathetic at best.

And finally, and perhaps related to that, they just don’t seem to believe that they should succeed. That is the rather surprising response that we get from Peter when, despite all the failures of their nets and their boats, the partners actually manage to bring in the huge load of fish. Peter just stares at all the fish and at Jesus, the man who actually made this catch possible, and he falls to his knees and cries out, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For whatever reason, he just doesn’t seem to believe that he deserves such good things happening to him.

What does this have to do with us?

I hope you agree with me when I say that Peter, James and John just don’t really impress me very much as fishers. But wait a minute, you might say, what does any of that have to do with us? None of us are commercial fishers. It is not really a big industry around here. So why do we need lessons about that industry from this gospel passage?

But that is just the thing, isn’t it? This story isn’t really about fishing. You can tell that by the way that it ends. At the end of the story, Jesus doesn’t tell the boys that they should go and try to fish better, does he? No, he challenges them to do something quite different. He challenges them to fish for people instead. That means that everything that has happened in this story up until this point has actually been trying to teach us about fishing for people, not fish. And fishing for people is still the business of the church.

So, and stay with me for a minute here, what if this story isn’t really about how lousy PJ&J are as fishers, what if it’s actually about how lousy we are at fishing for people? What if we take the negative example of these fishing business folk and apply it to the life of our church today to ask why it is that we are sometimes not so good at attracting people. So, what are some of the mistakes that PJ&J make that we are making too?

We’re not Where the Fish Are

Well, first of all, as I said, their first mistake seems to be that they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are in here on the shore washing and mending their nets, when the fish are plentiful out there in the lake. And I’m pretty sure we do that too. How much energy in the life of the church is expended on maintaining our nets, on taking care of our own worship practices and maintaining the things that feed our own spiritual life?

Now, I am not suggesting that these things are not important, of course they are. But sometimes our emphasis on them is misplaced. We need to be focusing on the world outside the walls of the church. We continually make this mistake of thinking that the church exists for the sake of those who are inside of it, when it actually exists for the sake of the community and of the world.

Now, you might say to me that there are no fish out there – that there aren’t hordes of people who would respond to the message of the gospel. But I think there is no doubt that what Jesus tells Peter in the story is the same thing that he would tell us. There are fish out there. There is so much in the gospel message, in the Bible and its various applications that respond so directly to the very things that people are struggling with in our world right now, that there is no way that the issue is that they’re just aren’t any fish in the lake. The problem is elsewhere. The problem, as quickly becomes evident when PJ&J head out, is with our nets and our boat.

Our Nets

So, let’s start with the nets. What, in the church today, might be considered the nets. Well, a net is the thing that, when it encounters fish        passing by, gets those fish to stay around for a little while. Think of it this way. As a church lives out its life, it will come in contact with various people in the community and in the world. It will meet them as they pass through the building, as they click through the presence of the church on the internet, as we reach out to people in the community to try and meet their needs in some way and so on. These are all good things that we do, but these are not really the things that bring people into the life of the church.

No, that’s what happens when somebody has an encounter that connects them on a deep personal and spiritual level to the life of the church. These are the nets of the church. They are what happens when somebody has a personal encounter with, not one or two, but a few people in the church. It is what happens when somebody shares something about themselves, and they are met with love and appreciation for who they are. It is what happens when they have some significant experience associated with the church.

These are the things that I would call our nets. They persuade people that it is worth sticking around. And we do not deploy them in predatory ways like industrial fishing trawlers go after fish, but when we connect with people in these ways with integrity and a genuine spirit, people will stick around. But it is something that the whole church needs to be involved in. So, if we really want to be effective at what Jesus calls catching people, we really need to pay attention to these nets. But if our nets are breaking, we will not fish well for people.

Sinking Boats

The other problem that we have is that our boats are sinking. And that is also something that has a specific meaning in the context of fishing for people. You see, when we look at the people who come in or potentially come into the life of the church, we have a tendency to see them in terms of what they can do for the church – what work they can do, what committees they can sit on, what support they can give.

But if we are really attracting the fish – those who are most in need of the good news that we can offer – they will mostly come to us without the capacity to do any of those things. The people who need the gospel most, are actually those who have been broken and wounded by the world and its ways. They need to do some healing and growing. In the initial phases, they will likely take more from the church than they will be able to give back.

And you know what that feels like? That feels like they are making the boat sink rather than float because they can take up a lot of the energy of the church. And if we do not act with patience and grace towards all the people that we come into contact with, they simply will not be around long enough to begin to contribute to the life of the church. They will leave or fall out and we will soon be sinking for real.

We Don’t Believe in our Message’s Power

And the final reason why we have so much trouble fishing for people has to do with Peter’s reaction when he actually saw success that he was unprepared for. His immediate conclusion was that he did not deserve it. He wanted Jesus to go away because he didn’t deserve it. And I think we fall into that error too. We just don’t believe that we are worthy of success in the life of the church. We don’t believe in the message we have to share or that anyone would respond. We need to learn to have faith because that is a lie.

Sure, we are far from perfect in the way we live out the life of the church. But we have a God of grace who is happy to send good things our way not because we deserve it but because we belong to Christ. And we do have a message that we can be confident will actually reply to the very real issues that people are struggling with. We need to believe Jesus when he says to us that yes, he will make us fish for people.

So, you see, this story is really not about how bad PJ&J were at fishing. It is about us and the challenges we have fishing for people today. I really do think there is a whole lot we can learn from where they fell short.

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The Gospel Story that Ends with a Cliff-Hanger

Posted by on Sunday, January 30th, 2022 in Minister, News

Watch the sermon video here:

https://youtu.be/Js0BtTa4UgU

Hespeler, 30 January 2022 © Scott McAndless
Jeremiah 1:4-10, Psalm 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30

Do you remember the good old days? You know, those days that were almost two years ago? I’m talking about the very early days of the pandemic and the crisis. Ah, those were the days, weren’t they? I remember walking around back then. Everything was all shut down. No one was going anywhere. And, yes, I know that people were worried, and they were scared but there was still something uplifting about the moment. You would see the messages everywhere you went. “We’re all in this together,” they would proclaim. “Let’s all do everything that we can to help each other.”

And I know that sometimes you still do see messages like that. But I’m not so sure when I see them today that people still believe them. Back then they really seemed to. There was this strong sense that we would be there for each other and that everyone would pitch in. People were forgiving of errors and lapses among others. They even pulled together behind political leaders if you could imagine that!

A Change in Attitude

And the reason that feels so nostalgic is because I don’t often get that sense these days. Today, it often feels as if we have never been so divided. We are seeing sharper and sharper partisan political divides as right wingers identify left wingers as examples of pure evil and the rhetoric on the other side is pretty much the same. We see the enmity between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and a general breakdown of civility. And I cannot help but wonder how we went so quickly from “We’re all in this together,” to “Hey, get them. It’s all their fault.”

Why this Change?

And, yes, I do understand that a big part of this is just pure exhaustion. We are so tired of this whole thing and so it is not really surprising that people have gotten cranky. But I am not sure that that is the whole story. So, I would like to explore the bigger question of how that kind of thing can happen. How, all of a sudden and seemingly out of nowhere, can you get people to turn on each other? And it seems to me that we have a terrific opportunity to study that phenomenon in our gospel reading this morning.

We actually started reading this story last week from the Gospel of Luke where Jesus returned to his hometown at the beginning of his ministry. There, in the meeting of the synagogue, he read some scripture from the prophet Isaiah and declared that it had been fulfilled. That’s where the reading ended last week, but we pick it up this week in order to focus on the reaction to what Jesus had done. And the reaction, I’ve got to say, is kind of bananas. It ends in a cliff-hanger.

Initial Positive Reaction turns Negative

Now, first of all, what Jesus has just said is the kind of statement that you might expect to inspire an extreme reaction. He has said that the ancient scripture had been fulfilled. He has strongly implied that it is his own presence at this moment that has brought about such fulfillment. And we have long been told that this is the very kind of thing that people got upset with Jesus about, for claiming too much about himself. So, you might well expect people to get upset at him for saying that this scripture is actually about him. But we are told quite the opposite. We are assured that “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

And yet we are also told that, minutes later, they were ready to throw Jesus off of a cliff. So, if it wasn’t the fulfillment of scripture, what was it that got them to turn so very quickly. Well, let’s take a look at what Jesus says next. “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’” he says. “And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And then, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”

And you can sort of understand why this might have riled them up. Here he is the famous boy from Nazareth and yet he is performing all of his wonders someplace else. That is a blow to hometown pride and might have even stirred up some jealousy in them. But it is hard to see why him saying this could have gotten them into a homicidal rage.

No, it seems pretty clear that what he said next was what pushed them over the edge – which is to say that it made them want to push him over the edge. But all he did was give them two examples from their own history. He told them about how the Prophet Elijah was sent to help a widow at Zarephath and about how the prophet Elisha healed Naaman the Syrian. It is only when they hear him say that that they are suddenly ready to kill him.

A Key Story for the Gospel

I think it is probably important for me to point out that this is not just an ordinary story in the Gospel of Luke. This is a very important story. The story of Jesus’ return to his hometown of Nazareth and the poor reception he received there is told in the other gospels. But Luke tells it very differently. He moves it, for one thing, to the very beginning of his story of Jesus’ ministry while the others tell it much later. And it is actually quite clear that the story is out of sequence inside Luke’s Gospel because Jesus refers to his having performed wonders in Capernaum already. But Luke has reported no such wonders yet. Luke is also the only one who adds this fuller story of what it was that Jesus did to make the people in Nazareth get upset with him.

So, it seems pretty clear here that Luke is doing more than just telling a straightforward story of what happened when Jesus went to Nazareth. This story is his big dramatic introduction of the entire work of Jesus. The reading that Jesus does in the synagogue is the perfect summary of what his ministry will look like. And this part of the story that we read this morning is a perfect explanation for why it is that there was so much opposition to everything that Jesus did and everything that he stood for.

The Basis of Opposition to Jesus

So, with that in mind, the issue cannot be that Jesus just said the wrong thing at the wrong time and that that was what set them off. Luke is trying to demonstrate to us in this passage what it was in general that caused so much opposition to what Jesus was doing. He’s giving us examples of the kind of thing that created that opposition.

And that is why these two Old Testament stories that Jesus mentions are so important. Basically, Jesus brings up for these people two stories, that come from their own history and from their own scriptures, of times when God sent prophets to help people who weren’t Jews. The only thing that the widow at Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian have in common is that they aren’t Jews. So, Jesus told these people about how God had sent his prophets out of their way to help Gentiles and that is what enraged them.

Think about that. The thing that made them turn on a dime from admiring Jesus and what he was saying to wanting to throw him off of a cliff was simply that he reminded them that God had wanted to help and save people who were not like them. The very idea that God would make good things happen to the wrong sorts of people, that was enough to turn them into a murderous mob.

The Problem with Grace

Jesus, you see, is the perfect demonstration and the personification of the grace of God. And what we often fail to realize is how offensive the very notion of grace really is. Oh yes, it is all very wonderful to consider how we might receive grace. But when we think of the idea of the “wrong kinds of people” being the recipients of grace and love, we often experience that very negatively.

I mean, think of how we talk and think during this present pandemic crisis. What are the things we really argue about? We argue about who is worthy to have good things happen to them. The vast majority of the people who have tried to do everything right by social distancing and wearing masks and getting their vaccinations are getting outraged at the people who are not doing the right things. They are enraged when they see them getting away with this. And they kind of want to see bad things happen to them. I’m not saying that anyone wants to see anyone getting horribly sick or dying, surely no one would wish that on anyone else, but there is a bit of an attitude that maybe it is fitting when it does happen.

At the same time, those who have refused to follow pandemic restrictions have gotten extremely upset as they see the privileges given to those who have. In many cases, this is just a matter of not wanting to see the people who aren’t like us getting good things. Nothing can enrage people as quickly as that. That’s what we see happening in this story of Jesus in Nazareth.

Facing up to who we are

And the reason why this story is given such prominence in the Gospel of Luke is because Luke is telling us that this is the very thing that created such opposition to Jesus. It was not just that he was the demonstration of the grace of God, it was also that he showed people who they really were and how unwilling they were to see God’s grace being made available to those who were considered unacceptable. It is kind of disturbing to us when we learn these things about ourselves.

I was kind of struck this morning by one of the verses in our reading from First Corinthians. The thirteenth chapter of that letter is a justly famous passage about love – an encouragement for us to have the same kind of love for one another that God has for us. But there’s one verse that seems to underline how hard this is for us. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” Paul writes. “Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

That image of a person staring at themselves in a mirror and yet only being able to see their reflection dimly stands out for me. The Greek word that is used in that verse for dimly is actually the word enigma. So, you could also translate that, as I stare into the mirror, all I really see is a puzzle or an enigma instead of myself. It is this sense that we don’t truly know who we are. And the idea is that God is the only one who truly knows our proper nature.

Jesus Removed the Enigma

And, you see, that was precisely the reason why Jesus caused such a strong reaction. Jesus removed the enigma. By so clearly showing and demonstrating the love and grace of God, he showed up that lack of love and grace in everyone else. He showed them that they were unwilling to see good things happen to people who were not like them. And they didn’t like what they saw. And they tried to throw him off a cliff, though he just passed through the crowd and went on his way.

So, what is it that, more than anything else, makes us inclined to turn against one another, to be consumed with rage? What is it that prevents us from being all in this together? It is what happens when we get a glimpse of who we really are, when we look in the mirror for a moment and we don’t just see dimly; the problem is that we don’t like what we see. We don’t like it when our failure to be loving and gracious towards those who are not like us is shown up.

And I suspect that that is what has happened to us as we’ve gone through this difficult time for the last couple of years. We have become strained and fatigued by an ongoing crisis and our defenses are broken down. We’ve been shown who we really are, and we don’t necessarily like what we see. So, yes, we have become much more likely to turn to rage against each other.

Grace is the Beginning of Hope

But it is my hope and prayer that this is not the end of the story. Yes, it is true that this time of crisis has revealed to us a little bit more about who we are. And, yes, our initial reaction to that revelation has not necessarily been good. But here is the truth: it is only once we begin to come to terms with who we are that we can start to be different. Jesus came to reveal to us who we are, but he did not just do it in order that we should feel bad about ourselves. He did it in order that we might have the opportunity to experience redemption, new hope and new beginnings.

That is what the grace is for, not to make us feel bad because we don’t have it, but to renew us with its possibilities. And this is a message we have as the Christian church, one that we can share in ways that no one else can. That is why I believe that the church can have a unique role in healing some of the division that has been created in our society over the last couple of years. We have a message that gives people the strength to see themselves for who they truly are, even with all their faults, and still have hope for change. There are few messages that our society needs more than that at this particular moment in time.

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