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 “Net Results” |
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4 February 2007 The bumper sticker that reads, “The worst day fishing is better than the best day at work” could have described my grandfather—except that he loved his work as much as he loved to fish. But he did love to fish. That love was captured by the photograph that stood on his desk. It’s an old black and white, where his 6’2” frame is posed in front of some bushes, pipe firmly clenched to one side of his mouth, and a Steelhead salmon held half-way between his waist and his chest. Once his catch was cleaned, my grandmother would cut it into sections just short enough to fit in a half-gallon milk carton with its top unglued and straightened to add an extra three inches. Then the carton was filled with water and popped in the freezer. I don’t know that we ever bought freshwater fish of any kind all the years I was growing up—salmon and trout were always in ready supply. Love of fishing must be genetic. Two generations later, our son Aaron took it up too—he even managed to fish one of his great-grandfather’s favorite spots in northern Idaho. In addition to the catch, though, there’s another element of fishing that’s as predictable as sunrise. I know—you’re way ahead of me. Fish stories. It’s like they come with the territory—even in scripture. It’s all here. The experienced fishers who’ve been out all night with nothing to show for it. Not even a bucket of minnows for bait. Like any veteran fisher, these partners know that there’s not much to be done for it midday. So they are back on shore washing their nets. They aren’t giving up, just stopping for the moment. But they’re still skilled at their craft—they care for their boats; they wash their nets. Then along comes Jesus. Unlike the parallel stories in Mark and Matthew, Luke doesn’t have Peter, James and John following Jesus and taking part in his ministry from its earliest stages. By the time Peter, James and John get on board in Luke, Jesus has already been ministering in Nazareth. He’s done an exorcism in a synagogue in Capernaum; healed Simon’s mother-in-law; extended healing and performed exorcisms in other settings; he’s and taught and preached so extensively that he draws crowds as he travels. So by the time he shows up along the shores of Gennesaret, he’s a known commodity. Luke may not have spoken of Simon yet, except indirectly in the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, but Jesus is no stranger to Simon, or to Simon’s partners, James and John. And Jesus, the carpenter’s son who isn’t reputed to have a single fishing bone in his body, teaches the crowds from Simon’s borrowed boat. When he is finished, he tells the fishers to go out into the deep water—always a metaphor for chaos, the risky, the unfamiliar. Peter does as he is told, and the catch is so abundant that it breaks the nets and Peter and his partners nearly sink their boats hauling it in. Talk about a fish story! Their luck runneth over. But Luke isn’t reputed to being any more concerned about fishing than Jesus, so this is a story about more than an amazing catch. It’s also a story to tell us that Jesus brings the realm of God into being by disrupting our established patterns and practices, a story that invites us to join him. Last summer, Stephen Leonard of Chevy Chase served at the Home for the Dying in Calcutta, part of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. And he hated it. “Every morning, [Leonard] fed, bathed, and attended to the destitute and dying, plucked from the streets of Calcutta. Not so much as a “thank you” or a smile.[1] Especially irksome was a crotchety old man whose right arm and leg had atrophied from disuse. Leonard’s job was to massage the withered limbs and then coax the frail old body into elementary physical therapy in the hopes of getting the man to walk again. There was labored improvement—despite the outright opposition of the man. At the end of the summer, Leonard was beginning work with the man, when he noticed a bad-looking cut on the man’s arm. The man asked for Boroline—an antiseptic ointment, which Leonard rubbed onto the wound. When he sat down, the man “pointed to an old scar on [Leonard’s] knee, and said, ‘Boroline.’ [Leonard] smiled and said, ‘Yeah, I could us a little Boroline.’[1] The old man then wiped off the cream [Leonard] had put on his arm, and…dabbed it onto [Leonard’s] knee. Slowly, carefully, he worked that little bit of ointment…until [it] was completely rubbed in.”[1] From that little dab of Boroline, an incredible blessing of abundance. From a hapless old man, the blessings of Mother Teresa: “do small things with great love.” When I was in high school, I remember hearing about abundance in another form that began with the ministries of one man who allowed Jesus to disrupt his life, and serve in the Philippines. The year was 1930, when Frank Laubach began serving among the Marano people. Moved by the crushing poverty and injustice he observed, Laubach became convinced that the Marano people could best solve their problems if they had the ability to read and write. So he began to teach them. And then he saw that those who were learning to read in turn were teaching others what they had learned. Laubach turned the pattern into practice: “each one teach one.” It was so successful that Laubach became its ambassador to 103 countries over a forty year span. Laubach’s guiding principle was different than Mother Teresa’s – “hunt out the deepest need you can find,” but it was no less compassionate. And no less centered in Jesus. He died at the age of 85, bearing the title, “Apostle to the Illiterates,” and making it possible for some 100 million of the world’s poorest people to read in their own language.[2] Maybe Laubach’s basic principle, coupled with the one-to-one program, is the foundation undergirding Habitat for Humanity. I don’t know. But i do know that Mother Teresa’s ministry to the dying, Laubach’s ministry to the illiterate, and Millard Fuller’s ministry to the homeless are fish stories in their own right. Each story reflects the net results of the messianic age Jesus inaugurates, the net results that flourish because these disciples allowed Jesus to disrupt and direct the patterns of their lives. This morning, as we gather around this common table to be nurtured and fed by bread and cup, I encourage you to follow their example, and invite Jesus into the boat. *** [1] Stephen Leonard, Chevy Chase, “On Faith: A Helpless Old Man Offered a Gift of Faith To(sic) a Summer Volunteer,” The Washington Post, Saturday, February 3, 2007, page B9 |