Let’s Go Fishing
Reflections on John 21.1-19
RCL Easter 3
10 April 2016
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Have
you ever had the experience of committing yourself to a project or an
enterprise that promised to transform your understanding of who you were and
what you were meant to do with you life?
Have you ever had the experience of this life-changing project or
enterprise come to a crashing end? If
you have, then you have had an experience of what some might call ‘a dark night
of the soul’. It’s not so much an
experience of depression as it is the realization that our goal of personal
maturity is often only reached after experiences of loss and uncertainty.
What
helps us through a dark night of the soul is hope. If we do not have hope that our goal is at
least partly achievable in this life, then the darkness continues. Sometimes, in order to renew our hope, we
have to re-envision how we will journey towards our life’s goal. Re-envisioning the future may mean that you
and I go back to basics, go back to what we know we can do well. That foundation may give help plot a new
route towards our life’s destination.
For
three years Peter and the other apostles had set aside their familiar lives,
occupations and families to follow Jesus of Nazareth. They had experienced the excitement of
travelling beyond the limits of Galilee and encountering the crowds who swarmed
around Jesus.
Then
came that week in Jerusalem. The thrill
of the triumphal entry into the city was quickly chilled when they realized the
growing hostility of the Jewish authorities.
When they gathered for supper on Thursday night, they could not have
known what would follow: an arrest, a
trial and then an execution at the hands of the Roman authorities. Most of them had fled and only came out of
hiding Sunday morning. Their fear was
compounded by confusion and surprise when the women came to tell them that the
tomb was empty. Mary Magdalene even spoke
of meeting Jesus near the tomb.
Despite
their various experiences of the resurrection Peter and the apostles were
entering a dark night of the soul. Their
future had collapsed and their hope lacked confidence. Darkness had descended. So Peter and the apostles decided to go back
to Galilee, back to the beginning. I can
almost hear Peter say, ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going
fishing.’ And as he is fishing, Jesus
comes to meet him. Light enters their
darkness, the future re-emerges and their ministry as witnesses to the
resurrection truly begins. Hope is
renewed and a new path is revealed.
There
are times when I, as an Anglican Christian, living in Metro Vancouver, feel
that I am living in a dark night of the soul.
I have memories, as perhaps many of you have, of pews filled with young
and old, men and women, new-comers and old-timers. I even remember when hospitals provided
visiting clergy with reserved parking spaces or complimentary parking
passes. Here I am, almost thirty-five
years after ordination, facing a future that I did not imagine in those heady
first months and years of ordained ministry.
But Bishop Melissa and today’s gospel remind me that the way forward is
simple: go back to what we do best and
what is at the heart of our faith.
We
gather. Early in the third century a
group of Christians in Asia Minor were arrested and brought before the local
Roman magistrate. They were charged with
violating the imperial edict forbidding the gathering of illicit religious
sects. The magistrate asked them to
recant their faith and to obey the imperial edict. Their answer was simple, “Without the Sunday
gathering, we cannot exist.” Their execution
followed immediately.
We
can lose sight of the power of gathering together in one assembly. The most important thing we may do as
Christians is to continue to gather together for worship throughout the world,
to hear the Word proclaimed, to offer prayer for all of creation, to share in
the bread and the wine, and to be sent forth strengthened and renewed.
When
asked what was the glue that held the Anglican Communion together, Archbishop
Desmond Tutu said this, “We gather.”
Despite all the forces that conspire to prevent our gathering, we
gather. Despite all the temptations to
do something else with our time, we gather.
We gather because we know what our sisters and brothers knew in the
first centuries of the church’s mission and ministry, “Without the Sunday
gathering, we cannot exist.”
We
tell the story of God’s love. At an
early point in his public ministry Jesus travelled to Nazareth, the town in
which he had been raised. He entered the
synagogue and was invited to read the appointed reading from the prophets. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus
read, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
After sitting down, Jesus said to the assembly, “Today this scripture
has been fulfilled in your hearing.”[1]
When
the reader proclaims the texts appointed for the day, it is tempting to forget
that he or she is speaking God’s Word to us.
Like the people in the synagogue in Nazareth, we have heard all of this
before; the words roll off the surface of our minds and hearts like rain rolling
off the roof of a building. Yet, we
never know when there is someone who needs to hear the Word of God again ---
perhaps for the first time.
We
pray. When I was first ordained, it was
my responsibility to travel with the Bishop and the Suffragan Bishop of
Colorado on their parish visits. On one
such occasion, I accompanied the Bishop, Bill Frey, to a parish in which there
was considerable dissension. I joined
him as he listened to three representatives of the congregation give their interpretations
of the situation. After each one had
spoken, the first asked the Bishop, “Well, what are you going to do about
this?” “The first thing I am going to do
is pray,” responded the Bishop. At this
the second person turned to the other two and said loudly, “See, I told you he
wasn’t going to do a damn thing about it!”
There
are, no doubt, many people who share this view.
To some of them, prayer seems more like shouting into the wind rather
than entering into conversation with the living God. I confess that I do not know if prayer
changes the eternal purposes of God. I
do know that prayer changes the one who prays.
Prayer orients us to God’s purposes and opens us to God’s grace working
through us. God responds to our
new-found awareness of the needs and concerns of the world by offering us the
means to use the gifts we have. We
discover new avenues and ways that seemed obstructed are re-opened. This is God’s work, not ours, but we are the
agents of God’s purposes.
We
make new disciples. Each one of us knows
someone who needs to have a community.
Perhaps all this person is waiting for is an invitation to come
here. Each one of us knows someone who
needs to know that he or she loved and that he or she has a purpose. Perhaps all this person is waiting for is to
hear our stories of God’s love. Each one
of us knows someone who needs to have a relationship with God. Perhaps all he or she needs is know that we,
as imperfect as our prayers always are, know how to forge just such a
relationship.
So
let’s go fishing. Let’s return to doing
what we know best: gathering,
proclaiming, praying, incorporating. Who
knows whom we may catch? Who knows who
might be waiting for us on the beach?
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