Catching and Mending

Epiphany 3A

It’s commonly been said—although evidently never by Albert Einstein—that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I’m guessing you’ve heard that saying: it’s a kind of a secular Gospel in a place like Silicon Valley, where disrupting business as usual IS business as usual.

That principle has been a powerful engine for economic and social change, and the whole world admires our well-known capacity to innovate. When I served on the staff of Trinity Cathedral in Portland Oregon, I started using the phrase “ministry incubator,” to describe new program initiatives I wanted to launch. I don’t actually know what that means, having never been part of a business incubator, but everybody would nod in respectful agreement because I had come from the Bay Area. They assumed I had some kind of magical powers for transforming systems.

But sometimes doing things the same way they’ve always been done is just fine. There are things we humans will always need—food and family and love—and over time they look more the same than not. Why disrupt a great family recipe for apple pie or pork tamales; why change the lullabies we sing to our children and grandchildren?

Which brings me to Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John, doing their usual work on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Why leave the nets their fathers—and their fathers fathers—had been casting and hauling and mending for generations? Our Gospel this morning is frustratingly silent on the question: it only lets us know that whatever compelled them to do something new, they did it immediately. One of the friends I do regular Bible study with had another quite reasonable question about the sudden response of these young fishermen: “what did Mrs. Zebedee think when her sons didn’t come home for dinner?” As a mother of two sons, I resemble that question.

But the fishermen were an exception to the rule. The rule being actually the inverse of the popular wisdom. That is, without expectation of different results, most of us will do the same thing over and over. Why innovate if we don’t think it’ll make a difference? If we have no reason to expect that things will ever change, we’re likely to go into rinse and repeat mode. Doing the same thing can be fine: holy, even. I do a lot of the same things here at Trinity every Sunday, and I think they are rather timelessly meaningful. But unthinking repetition can also be a sign of depression, or resignation to the status quo. And for the record, the status quo for fishermen in Galilee in Jesus’ time, was not a very good one.

First century Jewish fishermen—both those who had the privilege of owning boats and those who worked as hired hands—were not exactly happy industrious small business owners. They worked within a highly regulated and heavily taxed economy that was designed to benefit the occupying Romans (think Pontius Pilate) and their Jewish client kings (think Herod). Any “surplus” generated by their labors went to the ruling elites and to a whole system of brokers who were in charge of processing and distributing fish products. At the end of the day, few fishermen even took fish home to their families. What the poorer class of laborers had to eat was mostly bad quality bread seasoned with the fermented remains of fish guts and bones. And there was really no way for them to ever change that reality.

So for these, or perhaps for personal reasons unknown, four fishermen got up and left their nets that fateful morning. To become fishers of people, which—as far as this Sunday’s Gospel tells us—meant learning from Jesus about “proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” The fishermen already knew how to use their nets to catch and to mend, so—in a metaphor that rings very true—they were called by Jesus to catch and to mend other people like themselves. That is, people who were caught in social networks of survival and repetition. And in some cases, caught in the web of physical and mental illnesses that accompany that kind of existence.

Jesus disrupted their lives and their local economy, but disruption for its own sake is not what the Gospel asks of us. Imagining something other than the status quo—and being willing to act on it—is. That is to say, to imagine leaving the nets. Or in the case of other disciples, leaving behind their begging or your tax-collecting or whatever it was that Jesus’ call freed them to leave behind. He invited his followers to let go of whatever they were caught up in. But of perhaps greater importance, Jesus called them to imagine something more than the nets they already knew how to work. Hear this, people of God: Jesus’ call is always a call to imagine something more. To participate in God’s imagination, so to speak.

And this principle is equally true for the disciples of Jesus who stayed right where they were. Which some did: I’m thinking especially of the woman who maintained the households where Jesus slept and ate. Consider Mary of Bethany, who left her domestic tasks to listen to Jesus teach. Or consider her sister Martha, who could not imagine her brother Lazarus as anything other than a stinking corpse, and yet was the first woman to recognize and confess Jesus as the Christ. She was able to imagine her dear friend—the one she trusted enough even to argue with—as the long awaited Jewish messiah.

We are all called to imagine with God. To imagine something more than whatever our current nets may be: work that hurts us or is degrading, relationships that are less than loving, identities that are inauthentic, habits that don’t contribute to the health of our bodies or souls. For God’s sake, we don’t have to continue doing things that entangle or diminish us. Sometimes that requires great courage: physically leaving something like a boat and a net. More often it may mean changing deeply rooted habits. Which I well know is never easy! And yet, that is what God was calling those first disciples to do, and calling us to as well. Calling us to a ministry of curing every disease and sickness, beginning with our own. Jesus calls us to spiritual freedom: wherever we are right now, wherever we are compelled to go for love’s sake, wherever we stay and proclaim good news and practice hospitality.

Peter, Andrew, James and John abandoned their nets so very fast that it’s tempting to think of their story as unique. But God is patient, and our call is not so very different. Whether we stay with our familiar nets or move, be confident of this people of God. We who follow Jesus will always be in the business of catching and mending. So the question for each of us may be not be so much “whom shall God send?”—for we are all sent—but rather “what am I called to mend?”

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works. Amen.