Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
I love these Bible lessons that let me use a fishing metaphor in my sermon. Partly, it’s because I like to fish, but also because I’ve discovered over the years that fishingand being servants of the Lord have a few things in common. Plus, if a symbol is good enough for Jesus to use, then it’s probably OK for me!
Here’s one fish story that I heard from a “reliable” source—a Gloria Dei member! They were fishing for silvers on the Kenai, had boated to a bank free of people, and weren’t having a whole lot of luck. Then all of a sudden, they heard a splash followed by some ruckus in the boat—inside it they found a salmon…they neither had to fish or cut bait to catch that one!
Now I’ve never been that lucky—to have the fishing so good that they simply jump in the boat—but we have enjoyed sampling the bounty and beauty of what this great state has to offer. So let’s stay with this metaphor for a minute, and tell me—from those of you who like to wet a line—what’s the attraction? Why do you like to fish?
– It fills the freezer?
– the taste of fresh fish is a treat?
– the scenery is beautiful?
– the thrill of it all?
But I’m not sure that any of these reasons get to the core of Jesus’ invitation: Follow me and I will make you fish for people.
I wonder if we’d be closer to the truth if we thought of a different kind of fishing, the kind dramatically portrayed in the 2006 movie, The Guardian, starring Kevin Costner. He played the part of a Coast Guard Search and Rescue officer, whose job, quite literally, was to fish people out of the water who were victims of accidents.
The thing I like about this image—as opposed to that of sport, subsistence, or commercial fishing—is the fact that rescue work is a matter of life and death. And I’m pretty certain that Jesus was convinced that the work you and I are called to do as servants of the Lord is also a matter of life and death.
Now, it may not look like it all the time; in fact, the truth is that most often what we do as God’s children does not have a real sense of urgency to it. And that’s OK…thanks be to God that we live in a land where the decision to worship the Lord publicly is not a matter of life and death.
No, in this country, I believe that Satan uses the opposite approach. People don’t take their lives in their hands in order to worship and serve—our hands are often too full of life to bother with worshiping and serving. We’re easily distracted by life’s attractions. Here’s a story of how our best intentions can be turned against us.
On a dangerous sea coast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and they had only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea. With no thought for themselves, they responded to every distress call, tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and others in the area, supported the work of the station and gave of their time and money. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifesaving station grew.
Then people started to voice their concerns about their building—that it was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea.
So the members got together, went to work and enlarged the building, replacing the cots with beds, and filling it with better furniture. Now the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members. They decorated it beautifully, furnished it exquisitely, and used it as sort of a club.
As time went on, fewer members were interested in going to sea on lifesaving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do that work. The lifesaving theme still prevailed in the club’s decorations—there was even a miniature lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held.
Before long, a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews went to work bringing in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people. As you may imagine, the beautiful new club was a mess. So the property committee soon went to work and had a shower house built outside the club where those rescued could be cleaned up before coming inside.
At the next meeting, though, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the people wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities—the work was messy and unpleasant and interrupted the social life of the club. A few members insisted that lifesaving was their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. But they were ultimately voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own lifesaving station down the coast. So they did…
When Jesus says to the disciples, and to you, and to me, Follow me and I will make you fish for people, I think he understands exactly what that means for us. His invitation is a constant reminder that we are called to seek out those who are lost, to help those who are hurting and to speak the name of Christ with love in word and in deed. Amen.
Pastor Scott Fuller