JUDGES 6:11-24a

PSALM 85:7-13

1 CORINTHIANS 15:1-11

LUKE 5:1-11

Sermon – 2/8/04

“Catching People”

Peter was an ordinary man. So he thought.

He was a working man. Without pretension, probably without much education, and without time for philosophical speculations or idealistic day dreaming.

Peter had a job in which success or failure was easily measured everyday. Either he caught fish or he didn’t. Either he caught enough to feed his family and sell to cover other expenses or – he didn’t. You could tell how he was doing, each day and every day. Every day. His results were not ones he could get a “spin doctor” to “massage” or have an accountant get creative with in the Annual Report to stockholders. Either the fish were there in the bottom of his boat or they weren’t.

So when Jesus asked to use Peter’s boat as a pulpit, I can imagine Peter’s grumbling skepticism about taking time out to be the host of some wandering preacher – though maybe the calluses on the hands of the carpenter from Nazareth told him that here was a preacher who also knew hard, manual work as well as carving sermons.

And Peter’s skepticism continued when Jesus ordered him to “Put out into deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Peter told Jesus how the whole previous night’s work was absolutely fruitless – ever have times like that? – but his faith won out over his skepticism and he did it. And when he did, he caught so many fish that he nearly swamped two boats.

Peter realized this was not luck, or an accident. He was standing in the presence of One who could command the Creation itself and it would respond like a well-trained dog. Jesus whispered “Come” and hundreds of fish responded. Peter knew he was in the presence of someone holy, someone way beyond him, someone in whose presence he was not worthy to stand, someone so holy he might even be dangerous, for ancients (like Gideon in the Old Testament Lesson) believed that if a mortal stood in the presence of The Holy, that mortal might be irresistibly transported into the Divine Realm – i.e., die.

Jesus implicitly reassured Peter that not only would he live, but he would LIVE.

And Peter and his fellow hard-headed, one-day-at-a-time fishermen, walked away from the biggest payday they had ever seen in their lives and followed him. To catch people.

It worked.

This little band of Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jews from the backcountry caught people. They, and those who were caught by them, have caught people on every continent of every race, and who speak hundreds of different languages. They caught us, and a billion people like and unlike us, but like us in that this guy Jesus has some kind of special place in our hearts, heads and lives.

They left their nets to catch people because the source of all meaning and purpose in life had just walked up to them and asked them to follow him. As sinful and fallible as they were, Jesus wanted them.

They were a curious bunch, that first band of followers of Jesus. All Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jews from Galilee, yes, but beyond that their differences were considerable. They included Simon the Zealot – a member of a group which practiced guerilla warfare against the Roman Empire – and Matthew, a tax collector for the Roman Empire. Talk about political diversity. They included married men like Peter (and all the other original apostles) and unmarried women like Martha and Mary of Bethany and Mary of Magdala who, contrary to the strict social conventions of the time, were recognized as significant disciples in their own rights and of independent status without any dependence on men or relationship with men being mentioned.

They all experienced transformed lives in different ways, some by Jesus’ healing, his wisdom, his forgiveness, his courage, his vision, and all, ultimately, by what Paul in today’s Epistle calls “of first importance”: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance to the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve...”

And the community of Jesus’ followers soon learned that the life-transforming reality of Christ’s death and resurrection could not be bottled up in their little corner of the world, and in fact was not supposed to be bottled up.

“Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching people.’” Jesus didn’t say “You will be catching other fishermen from Galilee who share your ethnicity and language”, he said “people”. Slowly, as the band of Jesus’ followers morphed into the Christian Church (read all about it in The Acts of the Apostles), its members realized they had to give up a lot of their assumptions and prejudices.

Peter, the “country bumpkin” who probably had never traveled more than a few miles away from his home in his life, preached to a vast crowd of “city slickers” in Jerusalem on Pentecost – perhaps including some of the people who had shouted “Crucify him” when Pilate brought Jesus before the crowd on Good Friday – and his preaching converted 3,000 of them, who were baptized that day.

Peter, who had always kept Kosher and kept away from the Gentile oppressors who were occupying his homeland, had to respond to the call of God to go and visit a pagan Gentile in his home and eat with him – and not just any pagan Gentile, but an officer in the Roman Army of Occupation! Can you imagine a Palestinian today making such a visit to an Israeli Army Captain on the West Bank?

This was the kind of leap Peter had to make, and once he made it, the door was open a crack for foreigners, pagans to come to know the one true God, and to begin to have their lives transformed. Barnabas and Paul, the first apostles from outside of Palestine, pushed the door open wide, filled with zeal to “catch people” – different people.

So it was that while Jesus spoke Aramaic and the holy language of his fellow Jews was Hebrew, when his followers wrote letters of instruction to the new bands of followers scattered around the Mediterranean, and later when the stories of Jesus’ life were written down in the Gospels, the language used was Greek, the international language which many people spoke as a second language – you could say, “the English of its day.”

Let’s think for a moment how radical this was. What has linked Jews around the world through all kinds of challenges and centuries is and has been the scriptures, especially a knowledge of them in Hebrew at some level, and also some degree of biological relationship. Faith has been buttressed by kinship and language. What links Muslims around the world in dozens of countries is faith buttressed by reading their holy book, the Koran, in Arabic (including in countries where Arabic is not widely spoken) plus a connection to Mecca – facing it in prayer, often going on pilgrimage to it.

Christianity is different. Christianity is an extraordinary gamble: that a community of faith could be formed and sustained while not be connected by a knowledge of the language of Jesus or even by the language of his apostles and publicists, not connected by regular daily prayers facing Jerusalem and pilgrimages there, and not being connected by kinship.

Except, of course, that geneticists now believe that all of humanity can trace its genes to a few thousand people in North Africa some thousands of years ago. Gradually, science is catching up with the Book of Genesis: we are all related. And we all can turn and face God in prayer wherever we are. And God understands our language, whatever it is.

The Christian Church must have the Holy Spirit in it to some extent because the bonds which tie us together seem so tenuous compared to those which tie together believers even in the other monotheistic religions. The Christian Church must have the Holy Spirit in it to some extent because it has endured so many disasters perpetrated by Christians – the crusades, genocide of native populations, slavery and colonialist oppression to name a few – and still people emerge being found by and finding the Prince of Peace and Lord of Lords. And not only finding Jesus, but finding each other in a vast family across the globe with hundreds of cultures and languages but one Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.

So the really surprising thing is not that Christians have differences – between individuals or between churches in different regions or different countries – but that we have any kind of unity at all. Unity in diversity, unity while respecting the independence of consciences, churches and countries and, within our Anglican family, not wanting the imperial control of our churches we endured five centuries ago from Rome and two-and-a-half centuries ago (or much less) from London and Canterbury, while wanting to be united in faith. It’s difficult.

But it can be done, and should be done. And in a world where so often differences become reasons for suspicion, division and even violence, the spiritual bond we feel as Christians which connects us one to another is not an optional luxury but a vital necessity for the well being of our own souls and for the well being of the world.

On “International Sunday” at St. Barnabas, what is implicit most of the year becomes explicit. We worship today using a liturgy drawn from Anglican Prayer Books from the West Indies, South Africa, Guyana, England, Australia, Jerusalem, the U.S. and New Zealand, and we are only that limited because we’re just using English today and the resources we currently have among us in this particular place. As Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in his forward to “The Anglican Cycle of Prayer” (which we use regularly here), “The Church is held together by its shared prayer.”

May it always be so. And in the power of that prayer, let us, also, be about the business of “catching people” for Christ. All sorts of people. Just like Peter.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church