Judges 6:11-24a
Psalm 85:7-13
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
LUKE 5:1-11
Sermon – February 4,
2007
Fishing. It’s a human occupation which goes back tens
of thousands of years. Over all those
millennia, people have learned a lot about how, when, where, and with what equipment to
fish. Peter, James and John were
seasoned professionals who knew all this, had worked all night and, as happens
sometimes even to experienced professionals in their home waters, come up
empty.
There was just one more thing they needed to learn: at whose command to fish.
Peter, as usual was the first to open his mouth, voicing both his
professional skepticism and his brand-new faith, both directed toward this,
this carpenter/preacher who was
telling him, him to try again.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Both boats were swamped by what all realized was a miraculous catch of
fish: the Creator had whistled, so to speak, and hundreds of fish had responded
as though they were his well-trained dogs.
Peter felt enormously unworthy of God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, God’s
commission to him, just as Gideon and Paul felt unworthy in our first two
readings: unworthy, and afraid. If Jesus could do that, there might be other things he could do as well.
And so Jesus speaks the most
frequently repeated commandment in Scripture: “Do not be afraid.”
And then he adds, “From now on you
will be catching people.”
The harvest of fish they caught is long gone. What of the harvest of people? (Arms spread.) We are part of that
harvest.
We are heirs of those Galilean fishermen who nearly 2,000 years ago
responded so readily to the call to follow Jesus Christ and to “fish for people” – to invite people to come to know
him. People did. And after that same Jesus Christ was
crucified, died, rose again triumphant from the dead and then ascended into
heaven, these Galilean fishermen – and others, including a number of women – continued to invite people to come to
know Jesus Christ, to know someone whose hands they could no longer touch but
whose transforming presence in their lives they could experience.
We are here this morning because those fishermen, and those who followed
them over the last 2,000 years, reached out and invited others to know Jesus Christ. We are not only here, but we have the
presence of Christ in our lives, the awesome guidance of the Holy Spirit, and
adoption as his children by God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth,
because of those fishermen and those who followed them.
Peter, James and John spoke Aramaic, plus perhaps a smattering of Hebrew
for religious festivals and conceivably a little Greek or Latin to deal with
their Roman conquerors, but there’s no particular reason to believe that they
could themselves read and write. As
they ran from their boats that morning they could not have imagined that the
words of Jesus they heard and the deeds they witnessed they would later relate
to Scribes who would write them down,
at length, and who would finally write them down in finished form, under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, in the language that more people in the Eastern
Mediterranean world of the first century could understand than any other: Greek.
But the process didn’t stop there.
Jesus’ followers early on decided that, just as Christ, the word of God,
had become incarnate as a human being and had adapted to our world so we could
better understand him, that the written word of God should be adapted to
the other cultural worlds it would
become incarnate in. In other words,
Christian converts would not (like converts to Judaism or, later, converts to
Islam) be required to learn the original language of the sacred texts of the
faith: the sacred texts would come to to them. People all over the world would come to hear
God speaking to them in their
languages. And this has continued, with
biblical translations in hundreds of languages, including those which did not
exist in the days of the apostles. Like English.
So in a way, having an “International Sunday” celebration like we have
today is the most obvious thing in the world for Christians. By our nature, and from the very first Day
of Pentecost, Christians are an international people, and with no automatic
superiority granted to those cultures with a longer time in the faith once the
initial debate over the inclusion of the Gentiles was won decisively by Paul
and his allies.
By the end of the First Century the Christian faith, while still shaped
by its Palestinian “womb”, saw itself as a universal
faith. In the vision of heaven beheld
by John of Patmos in Revelation 7:9, he saw “a great multitude which no one
could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm
branches in their hands.”
It seems to me that we, the people of St. Barnabas, have made a decent
start towards that vision of heaven.
You can count our multitude,
but we have five continents and 26 nations of birth in our multitude (and many more nations of ancestry), lots of
tribes, peoples and languages, and we can all say, with the vast multitude in
Revelation, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to
the Lamb.”
Heaven, as the Lord’s Prayer reminds us, is that place where God’s will
is done perfectly and all the time, and we pray that God’s will “be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So it is our task, with God’s help, to make the world more
heavenly.
We have our work cut out for us.
But we are aided in our work by the heavenly vision of universal, loving
community focused on God: a community free of violence, oppression or prejudice
or pretensions of human superiority one over another.
And we are aided, increasingly, by the discoveries of science – something not all Christians
and not all scientists yet appreciate.
There have been the beginnings of magnificent convergences between
science and biblical faith within the last 100 years. A century ago, most scientists believed that the universe was
unchanging and timeless – the “Steady State theory” – and therefore condescendingly
relegated the Creation stories of Genesis to stories for preschoolers or the
uneducated and credulous. And
then…scientists discovered that the universe is dynamic, not static, that it is
far larger than ever imagined and it is expanding – and that it had a beginning.
This is known as the “big bang” theory, the theory of the origin of the
universe accepted by scientists today.
The universe had a beginning from a single point in time and space and
since then have come stars, galaxies, the planets in their courses, and what
the American Book of Common Prayer calls “This fragile earth, our island
home.”
Of course, the “Big Bang” theory would not come as a surprise to anyone
who had read even the first three verses
of the Bible.
Now other kinds of science are catching up with Genesis Chapters 2 and 3.
To set the importance of this
convergence in perspective, you may have noticed that the passage from the Book
of Revelation did not mention the word “races” to describe different kinds of
human beings. That’s because the term ‘race’ is not in the Bible. The term “race” was invented, in fact,
rather recently, in the late 16th and 17th centuries in
Western Europe, explicitly to differentiate between different kinds of human
beings for the purpose of trying to legitimize their conquest and subjection by
Europeans.
Such an effort was – and is – unbiblical, and certainly unchristian,
though Christians, alas, invented it.
Since there was no biblical basis for race – and therefore no biblical
basis for racism, although people tried to find some, some Europeans and
white Americans tried to find a “Scientific”
basis for race (and therefore, for racism) in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. There
is, of course, no scientific basis for the concept of “race”. If you find that startling, just answer two
questions: how many “races” are there in the world, and where does one “race”
stop and another one start?
The latter question is a matter of legal
definition in different countries and in different American states, in one
of which a person might be, by legal definition, judged to be “white” and in
another the same person might be judged to be “black.”
That such laws were and are ridiculous did not stop them from being
passed – and enforced – as a means of oppression. And the absolute nadir of this thinking came in the work of
certain pseudo-scientists in the early 20th century, who established
a “ranking” of all of the “races” of the world, and of all the “races” of
Europe as well. It won’t surprise
anyone to realize that this pseudo-science was particularly favored by the Nazi
party, which used it on a monstrous scale to slaughter millions. And if they had won World War II, their
slaughter would have extended to a lot more people who also are not blonde,
blue-eyed Germans.
“Race” is bogus, but racism is all too real, though neither has any basis
either in Christianity or in science.
Christianity has begun to wake up, since the day Emmet Till was murdered
and the day Rosa Parks refused to obey segregation laws and the day millions of
people began to realize that we are all children of God and each others’
brothers and sisters. Now science is
marching side by side with this movement, as geneticists tell us more and more
about who we are scientifically even
as the Bible tells us whose we are.
Let me quote from the March, 2006 issue of National Geographic
magazine: “The human genetic code, or genome, is 99.9% identical throughout the
world.” Each one of us here has DNA
which is at least 99.9% the same as
that of everyone else in this church.
And in the world. We are all Homo sapiens, 99.9% the same, and then
0.1% adding so much marvelous variety, flavor and interest.
So we all have over 6 billion cousins.
Such a Christmas card list!
It gets better. Through our mitochondrial
DNA, we can race back the lineage of our mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, and
so on, as far as that can be traced – to guess where. “Scientists now calculate that all living humans are related to a
single woman who lived roughly 150,000 years ago in Africa, a ‘mitochondrial Eve’”. [Emphasis added.]
Eve. I’ve heard that name
before. And I recall hearing that part
of the point of the Garden of Eden story is that we are all descended from two
people and hence we are all kin, and that the story of their relationship with God – innocence, then disobedience, exile
from paradise and efforts to live in the world ever since – is the story of each and
all of us.
Genesis 3:20 calls Eve “The mother of all living.” She and Adam are described as living in a
tropical environment touched by rivers two of which have never been
located. The story was written
deliberately so that no one would try to find a literal Garden of Eden, but it
was also written to affirm the kinship of all humanity, and our shared
brokenness as sinful children of God and
the rest of the Bible tells how we now have a shared hope as children of God
who have been offered salvation.
The last two affirmations can be made only by faith, but the first one –
the kinship of all of humanity – can be affirmed by science. And it has been.
White supremacists, of course, dispute that. If they don’t believe the Bible, you can try showing them the
January, 2007 issue of Discover magazine, which notes that the gene for
pale skin may have been inherited by Homo
sapiens from Neanderthals. Interesting. Let’s hope that racists, and racism, become as extinct as the
Neanderthals are.
Meanwhile, we at St. Barnabas are about building the beloved community,
acknowledging the painful history and realities of the world but determined to
be part of making the world a little more heavenly, loving our neighbors as
ourselves. All of them.
In a world as increasingly small as this one, in which CO2 emissions
on the Jersey Turnpike can melt ice in Greenland which can bring Pacific
islands closer to being submerged by the ocean, our neighbors are everyone everywhere.
So we love our neighbors who are as close as the South Brunswick Food
Bank and as far away as Kenya, where our life-saving, life-transforming Healing
Mission Trip goes each year.
And it’s a funny thing about how we as a church connected with that
country. Theoretically, only one of our
households – the Muthoka family – calls Kenya home. But if you look at the map in National Geographic of where
“mitochondrial Eve” lived, well it looks like that area was originally home
for all of us, if we climb our
family trees all the way back to the one “mitochondrial Eve” stood next to.
“We are family.” And thank God,
God has adopted us as children of God, and made us all one in Christ Jesus our
Lord, and sent us the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, because Homo sapiens need help. So I guess we Christians really all do have
the same job as Peter, James and John: now that we know the source of all kinds
of help, Jesus Christ, let us, also, not be afraid, and be fishers of
people. All kinds of people.
(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard
St. Barnabas Episcopal Church
Monmouth Junction, NJ