Go Fish
A
sermon delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson
January
22, 2017
at
Gordonsville Presbyterian Church, Gordonsville, Virginia
Matthew 4: 12-23
Let us pray,
Help us to see despite our eyes
Help us to think outside of our minds
Help us to be more than our
lives
For your eyes show the way
Your mind knows the truth
Your being is the life.
Amen.
12Now when Jesus heard that John had been
arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. 13He left Nazareth and
made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and
Naphtali, 14so that what had been spoken through the
prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: 15“Land of Zebulun, land
of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the
Gentiles— 16the 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.” 17From that time Jesus began to proclaim,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
18As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two
brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net
into the sea—for they were fishermen. 19And he said to them,
“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” 20Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of
Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending
their nets, and he called them. 22Immediately they left
the boat and their father, and followed him.
23Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in
their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every
disease and every sickness among the people.
So at this point in the Gospel of Matthew, the wise men have come and
left, Joseph and Mary ran away to Egypt to avoid Herod, and then they returned
to Nazareth, Jesus came to age and was Baptized by John in the Jordan river,
and then directly from his baptism he headed out into the wilderness to fast,
faced the devil and his temptations, and now has wasted no time, beginning his
ministry by calling his disciples to follow him. So out on the sea of Galilee
Jesus walk is walking by, and he calls to some fishermen, Simon and Andrew.
. . and he says follow me, I will make
you fishers of men, and then it was born. The idea of discipleship and then
this metaphor about fishing for people. What does it mean that as disciples we
are to be fishing for people. Is it that we are to lure people into the church?
Is that what it is all about? I’ve seen the church signs, and I’m sure you
have, too, the ones that say, ‘gone fishing, we hook’em and Jesus cleans’ em”
which is based on that simple idea. . . or as I’ve had conversation with many
church people about using this very verse to describe the basis of
discipleship, as evangelism, going out and finding people and bringing them
into the church. . . and the definition of success then for a church is to be a
vibrant, growing, healthy enterprise. . . but is that what is going on here?
Because that seems to be an easy understanding of the metaphor, and the one
most commonly accepted, but I can’t help but think that there is more to
fishing than just catching fish because my Dad has said that to me before. . .
well do you like to fish, or do you like to catch fish, because there is a
difference. . . could it be that some of the best days of fishing don’t feature
a single bite, or that fish are caught, but none are cleaned and fried up for
breakfast, or that there was a fish, and a fight, and that fight didn’t result
in a trophy, but instead a broken line. . . let’s look at fishing a little bit,
this morning, and seek to send our hook into the deeper waters and see what
turns up. . . Let me start here, listen to this:
He
was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone
eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had
been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told
him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst
form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which
caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come
in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry
either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled
around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked
like the flag of permanent defeat.
The
old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The
brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection
on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of
his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on
the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in
a fishless desert.
Everything
about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and
were cheerful and undefeated.
~ from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
How old are we? How long have we been fishing? Almost 2000 years, right
being, fishers of men? Or us here, in Gordonsville, since 1845, that’s 172
years of fishing. . . are there connections between this Old Man, Santiago,
from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and
ourselves? Are we old and wrinkled,
with great lines of experience, great cancers of year being out in the sun, thin
and gaunt, blistered and scarred, and above all unlucky? Do we sometimes feel
our age, and has the world given us up for past our prime, sent their kids
instead to the newer models of church, simple and easy, new equipment, updated
simplified messages, starbucks and guitars and drums, because they seem to have
all the luck. . . Hemingway tells us that everything about Santiago is old,
that is except his eyes which were the same color as the sea, cheerful and
undefeated. . . everything about this church is old, except for our hearts
which are the same color as the blood of Christ on which our foundation lies,
leaving us forever cheerful and undefeated, too. Undefeated, for we are still
fishing. . .
And he says. . . man is not made for defeat, a man can be destroyed but
not defeated. . .
Do we like to catch fish or do we like to fish? Because there is much
about fishing that is not catching fish, and to some extent has nothing to do
with catching fish. . . and many of the stories about fishing have to do with
the great draughts of fishing. . . like the disciples whose nets are empty, and
Jesus comes by and fills them. . . fish on the other side of the boat. . . this
wouldn’t resonate so much with us unless we knew what it was like to fish on
the wrong side of the boat and not catch anything. . . or remember the movie,
“The Perfect Storm” where George Clooney is a captain who used to be able to
bring in the fish, but lately hasn’t had the luck. . . but this is going to be
the difference. . . so they head out, earlier than they had planned, for the
big score, going further than they have before, further than is safe, and of
course out farther, deeper, beyond the normal waters, find the fish, but then
the ice machine breaks and they need to head back or risk losing all the fish,
but then the storm, the perfect storm, is directly between them and home. . .
they don’t make it. . . it is such a part about fishing to have periods of no
luck. . . there is another story, this one from the 1001 Arabian Nights, called
the “Fisherman and the Jinni” the fisherman, like Santiago, the Old man, and
like the captain in the Perfect Storm hasn’t caught fish in many days. . . he
prays to Allah, fishes once, nothing, prays again, fishes again, nothing, prays
a third time, casts that final third time, this time saying it will be his
last, that he will quit, and he feels something, and hauls it in, but it is not
a fish, but rather a lamp, he rubs it and out pops the Jinni, saying “There is
no God but Allah and Solomon is his prophet,” which of course is the main
pillar of Islam, except Solomon is in the place of Mohammad, you see the Jinni
and the lamp is like a time capsule, and the story is claiming that Islam is
not a new religion, but a new understanding of an older one, that if the Jinni
was put in the bottle at another time, the Jinni would have come out saying,
“there is no God but Allah and David is his prophet, or Moses, or Abraham, or
even Jesus. . . but you can see that this idea of the unlucky fishermen
transcends culture. . . there are even
superstitions around it. . . . I remember being out fishing and having no luck,
and dad telling me that I must not be holding my mouth right, or that I was
letting my hind foot slip. . . Fishing is a pastime fraught with failure. Is
discipleship as well. . . are there times of plenty and times when it doesn’t
matter what you do, what bait you use, how you hold your mouth or how slippery
the footing is under your so called hind foot. . . are there times when the
disciples of the Bible are told to “shake the dust off their feet” and move on?
Depressing, but again, do you like to fish or do you like to catch fish? What
is it all about?
Another fishing book has to do with this connection between fishing and
life, and may just give us another insight. . .
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and
fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana,
and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own
flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen,
and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class
fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite,
was a dry-fly fisherman.
It is true that one day a week was given over wholly to
religion. On Sunday mornings my brother, Paul, and I went to Sunday school and
then to "morning services" to hear our father preach and in the
evenings to Christian Endeavor and afterwards to "evening services"
to hear our father preach again. In between on Sunday afternoons we had to
study The Westminster Shorter Catechism for an hour and then recite
before we could walk the hills with him while he unwound between services. But
he never asked us more than the first question in the catechism, "What is
the chief end of man?" And we answered together so one of us could carry
on if the other forgot, "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy
Him forever." This always seemed to satisfy him, as indeed such a
beautiful answer should have, and besides he was anxious to be on the hills
where he could restore his soul and be filled again to overflowing for the
evening sermon. His chief way of recharging himself was to recite to us from
the sermon that was coming, enriched here and there with selections from the
most successful passages of his morning sermon.
Even so, in a typical week of our childhood Paul and I
probably received as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all
other spiritual matters.
After my brother and I became good fishermen, we realized
that our father was not a great fly caster, but he was accurate and stylish and
wore a glove on his casting hand. As he buttoned his glove in preparation to
giving us a lesson, he would say, "It is an art that is performed on a
four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock."
As a Scot and a Presbyterian, my father believed that man by
nature was a mess and had fallen from an original state of grace. Somehow, I
early developed the notion that he had done this by falling from a tree. As for
my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he
certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms
were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often
used the word "beautiful." . .
.
Well, until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod
too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and
loses all his power somewhere in the air: only with a rod it's worse, because
the fly often comes so far back it gets caught behind in a bush or rock. When
my father said it was an art that ended at two o'clock, he often added,
"closer to ten than to two," meaning that the rod should be taken
back only slightly farther than overhead (straight overhead being twelve
o'clock). . . .
The four-count rhythm, of course, is functional. The one
count takes the line, leader, and fly off the water; the two count tosses them
seemingly straight into the sky; the three count was my father's way of saying
that at the top the leader and fly have to be given a little beat of time to
get behind the line as it is starting forward; the four count means put on the
power and throw the line into the rod until you reach ten o'clock—then
check-cast, let the fly and leader get ahead of the line, and coast to a soft
and perfect landing. Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing
where to put it on. "Remember," as my father kept saying, "it is
an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock."
My father was very
sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good
things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art
and art does not come easy.
~ from Norman MacLean's A River Runs through It
Now in that description theology and fishing are wrapped
around each other so beautifully that there are many entrances and exits, and
points of interest you could point to,
but I am drawn to the end. . . “grace comes by art and art does not come easy”
and he says that after describing a process of becoming connected to the
“rhythms” the natural god made rhythms of the universe. . . and also man’s own state
of being a complete mess. . . I’ve fly fished, and I’ve turned the line into a
rats nest, and I’ve caught the tree branches behind me, and I’ve spent more
time untangling knots then fishing, but then again, I wouldn’t trade any of it.
. . If the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, there may
be more to this fishers of men stuff than just bringing in folks to church. . .
There is a oneness and a connectedness between the person and
the stream, the rod and the fish, the connectedness of it all. . . . and of
course one cannot really hope to catch much fish standing on the shore. . . at
least not as a fly fisher. . . wading out in the stream is a part of it all. .
. and of course that fits the metaphor for entering into the living waters, the
Jordan river, to Wade in the Water, children, waiting for God to trouble that
water. . . I think of this story:
He
stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his
legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold
shock.
Rushing,
the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, the water
was over his knees. He waded with the current. The gravel slipt under
his shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water below each leg and
tipped up the bottle to get a
grasshopper. The first grasshopper gave a jump in
the neck of the bottle and went out into the water. He was sucked
under in the whirl by Nick's right leg and came to the surface a
little way down stream. He floated rapidly, kicking. In a quick
circle, breaking the smooth surface of the water, he disappeared. A trout
had taken him.
Another
hopper poked his face out of the bottle. His antennas wavered.
He was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. Nick took
him by the head and held him while he threaded the slim hook under
his chin, down through his thorax and into the last segments of his
abdomen. The grasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet,
spitting tobacco juice on it. Nick dropped him into the
water.
Holding
the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of the
grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his left
hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little
waves of the current. It went out of
sight.
There
was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was his
first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he
hauled in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the
trout pulling against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He
lifted the rod straight up in the air. It bowed with the
pull.
He
saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against
the shifting tangent of the line in the
stream.
Nick took the line in his left hand and
pulled the trout, thumping tiredly against the current, to the
surface. His back was mottled the clear, water-over- gravel color,
his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his right arm, Nick
stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held the trout, never
still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from
his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream. - from Hemingway;s "Big Two-Hearted River, part 2"
That story of course being Hemingway’s
“Two-Hearted River” about the power of fishing to calm the unnamed pain of his
post war world. . . there is a healing
piece to fishing as well. , Could the fishing of men business be about the
disciples themselves as much as those men who are to be caught?
I have my own fishing story as well, a
poem that I wrote last summer that has found its way into my latest collection
of Poem’s Life Matters, this poem
entitled “Three Old Fishermen” describes a pelican fishing out on the eastern
horizon as the sun sets behind us, and the second fishermen is a man, seated by
the shore with his rod stationary in the sand. . . and then the third fishermen
is only suggested. Let me read that: “Three Old Fishermen”
They were both fishing in the evening as
the sun set to my back,
And I watched, trying to figure out for
myself who was the more
Successful, that is if the definition of
fishing success is actually
Catching fish because from my experience
it may not be the case.
I never saw either catch any fish, though
the pelican could have,
Being so far away, certainly been packing
them away in his beak,
For it was made for him special to hold
more than his belly can,
But I couldn’t see, and so, set my mind
imagining his failure in
Tandem with the man to my right. I watched
him for hours, sitting,
Beer in hand, line extended out into the
surf, waiting, so patiently
For exactly zero bites. Though I didn’t
know for sure, I imagine,
He was so patient because the rest of the
world moved so fast,
This extended moment was a break from it
all, to sit, with nothing
More to do, than to get to sit and wait,
and that somehow the reel
And rod made it active enough to be
considered doing something.
He couldn’t simply say, “Hey Honey, I’m
going to the beach to do
Nothing,” and it had been years since
heading to the beach to drink
Beer (as the only attraction) was an
acceptable pastime, and fishing,
Therefore, was somehow something enough,
and so there he was
Sitting and waiting. In the time I watched
him, I never saw him cast,
Nor did I ever see him reel. In fact, I
never saw him raise the rod,
Jiggle the line, or bring in the slack
enough to check for a bite. No,
He just sat, and waited, taking occasional
sips. He didn’t even drink
Aggressively, but rather seemed to wait
for that, too, with no need
To rush the buzz. Like an Old Bull,
sauntering slowly down a shady
Hill, knowing that what he sought awaited,
so he must seek other fruit
Than fish. I wonder if the pelican shares
such silly notions, for his
Fishing ritual, is at least as ancient as
ours, if not more. Could he,
This avian symbol of insentient freedom,
fish to escape, to pass time,
To rewind, to clear his mind, to seek and
find, something sublime,
Like we do? His inherited ritual is much
more active, gliding, this way,
Then that, just above surface of the
water, when something flashing
Beneath, catches his eye, just enough, and
he rises up, just enough.
He gets that perfect angle, and dives,
disappearing for a moment,
A fish for a split second, before emerging
back to the surface, floating,
Wings tucked, like a duck, perfectly
still. Is there something to turning
Into what you want to catch, for a moment?
We don’t do that, instead
We send our surrogate to lure our prey, a
little wiggly worm, or squid,
Or some plastic fish replica, shiny and
bright enough to hide a hook.
I wish I could have seen whether he hid
some fish in his beak because
Then I would prove my preconceptions about
birds, like other animal
Species, that they do not fish for fun,
but for food. As fun as it looks,
The flying and the diving, alone and part
of a V, it’s necessary to life,
And tied directly to surviving. Do we feel
that when we fish, despite
The sport, the escape, or is the escape
just that, an escape from life’s
Imposters, for a moment of the real? I
don’t think my fisherman, beer
In hand, was seeking such things, but I
was—when I headed to the beach
As the sun was sinking behind me, facing
my shadow stretching ahead,
Watching a bird and a man fish, seeing
with much more than my eyes,
Allowing my imagination to soar, to sit,
to dive and to ponder—seeking
A sense of the sublime, and found it in a
connected empathetic moment
Of place in my mind, and I will take it
with me the next time I go fishing.
The first two fishermen
are obvious, the pelican and the man on the beach, and you may have guessed
that I, the poet, the voice of the poem, am the third, and that I was seeking a
sense of the sublime, a sense of truth, an insight into the world, God, the way
it all comes together, and I found it in what I call an “empathetic moment,” in
other words a moment when I look outside of my own pain, struggle, point of
view, and think, feel, notice, and seek to understand someone else’s. . . . and
I found in the Pelican’s fishing, an insight into our call to be “Fishers of
Men,” and how it is connected to this idea of empathy. The pelican dives into
the water, and becomes a fish, if only for a moment, rather than sending out
his surrogate to lure, instead he goes into the water, becomes like a fish,
tries to be fish, feel what it is like to be a fish, before catching a fish,
and that his fishing is necessary for our survival. . . is it possible that our
call to be fishers of men is also necessary to our survival, not because we
catch fish, but that the idea of fishing sustains us, and is connected uniquely
to what it means to be human. . . is this what Santiago knows regardless of the
results? Is this what the unique 4 count rhythm between 10 and 2 is, the art
that does not come easy but is inextricable connected to grace? Is this what
the healing action of the “Big Two Hearted River” points to. . . and if so,
fishing is connected in this way to life, and that fishing requires becoming
the other, rather than merely sending a surrogate to lure in your stead, isn’t
this exactly what Jesus does, by becoming one of us to save us. . . it would
then stand to reason that the work of his disciples would be no different. . .
may we never seek a cheaper definition. . . amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment