Not long ago, I entered an abandoned church for the first time and felt an odd combination of emotions: sadness at the seeming absence of life there, but also hope at the possibilities for future life in that place. The most poignant scene during my tour of this vacated building, was in an upstairs room, which had been partially frozen in time. In that room, there was an empty paint bucket, with a brush stuck in it, fossilized in congealed paint. It was as if the painter heard the church was closing, stopped painting, and fled.
In my mind, I tried to visualize what had happened there. What would have caused the painter to flee, leaving his or her bucket and not even bothering to clean up? Did they finish their painting and just not care about leaving the cleanup for someone else? In an otherwise largely empty building, why would there still be a paint bucket with a brush stuck in it? Surely, it wasn’t a modern art exhibit. Or was it?
I couldn’t help but wonder if the painters in that church had fled out of anxiety or fear that they were in over their heads, trying to spruce up a building that was rapidly deteriorating. And I also wondered if those who closed up shop, without even bothering to wash their paintbrushes, knew what they were being called to. Or did they only know what they were running from?
If only we could have been flies on the wall—or more accurately, barnacles on the boat—just a few minutes after Jesus called his first disciples. What a poignant scene that must have been!
On one part of the lake (because the Sea of Galilee really is just a lake), a few minutes following Jesus’s call to Peter and Andrew, there is an abandoned boat with a net attached to it, floating aimlessly, a bit lonely there all by itself, with no reasonable explanation for why it was vacated. The call of the first disciples occurred so suddenly and the disciples’ response was so hasty—you might even say impetuous—that the casting net was not even drawn in.
It must have been a strange sight, accompanied by many questions. What happened to the fishermen in the boat? Why did they leave in such a hurry? Did they know what they were being called to? And what about those poor fish still trapped in the net, the catch waiting to be pulled in?
And then, just a little farther down the shore, there is an even more heartbreaking sight: a man named Zebedee is sitting in the middle of another boat surrounded by a bunch of nets that are still in need of mending. Some of them are freckled with gaping holes after years of hard use. Others are frayed in various places. And this father is sitting in the boat, all by himself, still in disbelief that his two sons James and John have abruptly left him alone with mending that must be done and work left to be accomplished. They up and left him, all in order to follow a stranger who invited them on a journey.
Unlike Luke and John, nowhere does Matthew suggest that Peter, Andrew, James, and John had a previous encounter or relationship with Jesus. We have no reason to assume that they had even seen or heard of him before he walked by their boats and summoned them. And so if we let only the details that Matthew provides speak for themselves, this call of Jesus’s first disciples is bizarre indeed.
The Gospel passage we are handed today is really a series of three discrete scenes: Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of heaven that has drawn near, the call of the first disciples, and then the real beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee. The calling of the disciples is the center scene of this dramatic triptych.
On a literary level, Matthew focuses our attention on this centerpiece by shifting from the past tense to the present tense with Jesus’s powerful words to Andrew and Peter. We don’t get this startling effect in the English translation, but in the original Greek, it grabs your attention. Let’s hear it in that version.
“As 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. And he says to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him.” Now, no English teacher would accept that use of tenses!
But as Matthew shifts to the present tense—or the historical present—with his narration of the calling of the disciples, we, disciples in 2020, are drawn right there into the boat with them. It’s as if Matthew knew that millennia later, readers of his Gospel would still be stuck in the boat.
We might say that this story of the call of the first disciples is a parable for us, the church. We are, after all, disciples of Jesus, and so Jesus’s call to those Galilean fishermen is likewise a call to us, to be fishers of people. And we might very well assume that we have left our boats and are following Christ—and in some ways we have.
But the real question is whether a part of us is always stuck back in the boat from time to time. Have we really and completely left our nets or boats or paint buckets to follow Jesus’s call? Or are we often unable to leave the boat, and the casting and mending or the painting in a lonely church room?
If we’re honest with ourselves and survey the landscape on the shore where the church gathers and engages in ministry, it can seem like we are very much still in the boat. Like those first disciples, before Jesus’s call to them, we in the church are doing the same old things: hanging out in the same old boat, casting the same old nets into the same old water, and drawing back in the same old catch.
Sometimes the catch includes new kinds of fish, but often, it’s the same kind. And the nets we’re using, well, they’ve seen better days. More often than not, they are filled with gaping holes. In some cases, these nets have become too loose to hold any fish. They are stretched beyond effectiveness when some in the church lose their nerve in boldly proclaiming why God’s good news is indeed such good news. In other places, the church’s stretched nets betray a state of embarrassment, perhaps, about who she is or where she has been as a community of disciples.
Some of these nets make no demands and expect nothing of the people we hope to catch. The fish are constantly slipping out of our grasp, because the nets just don’t work. In order to keep things going, we find ourselves, like that first class of disciples, constantly going back to the boat to mend the nets. Maybe if we just patch up the hole a little better this time, all will work out. If we spice up our worship with more gimmicks and fresh expressions, the nets will catch the fish we so desperately want to reach. If we simply focus on the nets, we will eventually fix the problem.
Not a few disciples find themselves anxiously tightening the nets in their mending in order to patch up those vexing holes. Or they renew the vigor with which they cast their nets into the lake, or they try for another part of the lake.
The tragic history of the church and her nets has, at various times, been ineffective at its best and disastrous at its worst. The nets that the church has cast into the sea in attempts to catch people have been tightly drawn and solid, with no holes or room for air. And the fish have been suffocated because of rigidity, lack of creativity, and a narrow zeal for what is assumed to be the Way of Jesus. Christians have proved unproductive as fishers of people because with their constricted nets, they have actually, inadvertently, squeezed out the love of God.
And so, our quest as a church of disciples constantly vacillates between different ways of casting the nets or maverick ways of mending them. Or on a more apathetic level, we keep our nets in good order, and we simply keep casting them into the lake, day after day, yes, with faithfulness, but with no real confidence that we will yield a catch. Or we cast with facile ignorance of the fact that there are hardly any fish in the nets when we draw them in.
So, it might be that we are indeed still stuck in the boat, trying to spruce up our fishing business all by ourselves. But that’s a recipe for burnout. And so we are desperately in need of a call out of our mundane, tired existence into a reinvigorated life of discipleship.
The problem is that the casting and mending business is so comfortable. The basic mechanics of casting and mending nets are not all that difficult to grasp, even if they don’t produce the results we want. Much scarier, though, is the voice of Jesus calling to us on the shore—yes, here in the present—an abrupt summons to leave everything and follow him. If we pause a bit from our restless mending and compulsive casting of nets, could we, like those first disciples, hear Jesus calling us to some specific place or task?
If instead we continue to focus only on the boat, we might find ourselves missing the voice of Jesus on the shore, beckoning us to drop our nets and forget about our mending and leave the boat to follow him.
A call from the boats doesn’t mean we don’t return to the boats from time to time to cast and mend again. In some sense, those practices need to be a regular part of our existence. But Jesus’s call to Peter, Andrew, James, and John extended their experience in the boat into new territory. They were invited out of the boat, out of the regularity of their predictable lives into the world. They were called to get behind Jesus and follow. They were called to be closer to Jesus. We are called to be closer to Jesus.
Jesus did not ask his first disciples to abandon their vocation. He sharpened their vocation as catchers of fish into catchers of people. So he does with us. This way of fishing doesn’t happen only from the security of the boat or from trying new tactics or mending the same old nets. This fishing happens when we put ourselves closer to Jesus, right at his back, and as we follow him into the arms of God.
What might that look like for us? What is going to put us closer to Jesus in our response to God’s call? Our work as discipleship is not so much about casting or mending the nets but about following what Jesus wants us to do, not what we think we need to do.
The challenge is knowing exactly where we are being called and to what Jesus is calling us. The call of Christ can easily be mistaken for a call to flee from a place of uncertainty or anxiety. I have a hunch that this might explain the abandoned paintbrush and bucket I saw in that abandoned church. In other cases, disciples have deserted their boats because they are tired and have just given up. The casting and the mending have come to be too much work for very little return. Or at times, they jump ship because the boat seems to be sinking. Does this at all sound familiar in the church today?
But God’s call to his beloved disciples is a call to something, not from something. It’s not a call to endless work or insatiable production or easy gimmicks to attract numbers of fish. It’s a call to get closer to God’s desires. And by following Christ, we find ourselves fishing for people.
And when we are in the boat, and when we are listening, and when we are open to being changed, transformed, and to having our vocations honed, we finally see Jesus walking by on the shore of life, calling to us as if from the past, but speaking directly to us in the present, and he says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” And we find ourselves leaving it all—the casting and the mending, even the painting—because we know that the only way to fish is to follow him.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
26 January 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia