Fishers of People
Gospel Text: Matthew 4:12-23
From the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
As a lifelong extrovert and people person, I admit that I have fallen prey to the dangers of what is commonly known as “peer pressure” more than a few times in my life. So much so, I feel that the phrase “It’s not just a phase, Mom” could be the title of my memoir. Off the top of my head, there was the PBR bull-riding phase, the John Deere tractor farmer phase, the Derek-Jeter-is-my-hero New York Yankee phase, the wanna-be Navy SEAL phase, the next Larry Bird NBA All Star phase, and we can’t forget the hellfire-and-brimstone next Billy Graham phase. I took Paul’s “become all things to all people” teaching a little too seriously…
But perhaps the most memorable of my many phases was my wanna-be Bill Dance Bass Master fishing phase. If you don’t know who Bill Dance is, he was the professional fishing equivalent of Jesus asking the disciples to cast their nets on the side of the boat where ALL the fish were just hanging around. He also always wore a cool Tennessee Vols hat, and for that phase of my life, I couldn’t think of anyone else I wanted to be more.
Much of my fishing aspirations came from a couple summers where I spent a lot of time with my older cousins and my uncle, all of whom loved to fish. I not only wanted to be accepted and liked by my older cousins, but it truly only takes one good cast and one hooked fish for the addiction to begin. However, the intensity of my fishing phase didn’t necessarily translate into more fishing. I didn’t live next to a creek. Didn’t own a boat. And I couldn’t drive. But what I could do was obsess over fishing gear and techniques online. And that, my friends, is where I found the Banjo Minnow – or as I liked to say at the time, “The Banjo Minner.”
The Banjo Minnow was no ordinary fishing lure. It was revolutionary. It boasted a scientifically-backed approach that seemed indisputable. It was cutting-edge technology engineered to move sporadically and mimic the “vulnerable, spastic actions of dying minnows.” From the Banjo Minnow website, the banjo minnow was designed to “trigger a primal response from a predator fish: The genetic impulse to attack and consume…”
To this day, I still have not caught a single fish with the banjo minnow. The jury is still out on whether or not that is due to poor product design or user error. But regardless, I’ll never forget the primal response it activated in my consumeristic identity when I read its sales pitch for the first time: “What if the fish came to you?” At that point, I had drunk the banjo minnow Kool-Aid, and they had me – and my dad’s credit card – “hook, line, and sinker.”
It wasn’t until much later in my life – many years past my professional fishing phase – that I discovered that I was the fish of this story. In reflection, it never occurred to me that people have been catching fish since the dawn of time, but I was quickly convinced they had been doing it all wrong. The old-school way was outdated. Too boring. Too simple. And far too inefficient.
It’s unlikely that the Banjo Minnow fits as a parable for what it means to be “fishers of people” or to follow Jesus in “proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom – of God’s reign.” But I do think it fits well as a parable for our modern Christian understanding of being a missional people – at least as our culture understands it. It seems more fitting to say that contemporary, mainstream Christianity has decided that “fishing for people” has become too challenging, too slow, and too inefficient. What if, instead, “the people came to you?”
While not surprising, it is interesting what kind of theological loopholes and convenient conclusions such a question can produce. It feels as if we’ve left the murky territory of “who even is my neighbor” to the much more complicated matters of deciding if being “Corpus Christi” – the Body of Christ – is even worth the trouble when we could be a prosperous corporation.
Consequently, we find ourselves asking questions like:
What if the community existed in service of the church’s needs?
What if our music and worship could trigger a primitive emotional response in lonely people?
What if our preaching baited listeners into activating a genetic impulse to consume our product more?
What if we glamorized the gospel with less cross-bearing and more sales pitches – with less responsibility and more spectacle?
What if discipleship could become a more efficient model for church growth and we did away with excess dead weight like breaking bread together or visiting in one another’s living rooms?
I think these are the types of questions that reorder the lives – and really, the souls – of God’s people. The gods of Mammon and greed have too easily carried us downstream towards valorizing a kind of Banjo Minnow Christianity – towards superficial forms of ministry that expect vulnerable and wounded people to show up at our door for a quick transaction and then to be sent on their way. I suppose, for some, “fishers of people” takes on a whole new meaning when people can be easily substituted by data, metrics, efficiency, profitability, and the bottom line.
It probably goes without saying that Jesus’ encounter with four fishermen – Peter, Andrew, James, and John – is not a summer scene of a couple buddies hanging out on the lake competing for the biggest fish to post on their online dating profile. On the contrary, these men fished for their lives, for their survival – much as our professions serve the purpose of helping us survive the economies, wars, and taxes of Empire. The fishermen of our text find themselves at the bottom of a social hierarchy where they are not seen as people but rather as necessary cogs in the Roman economic machine. Their lives were ordered around the regulations, taxes, and exploitation of their Roman overlords – leaving them with the hope that there might be just enough surplus for them and their families to survive on at the end of the day. To offer an analogy, we might even imagine these fishermen subjected to the same long working hours, systemic mistreatment, and economic extraction to which today’s undocumented farmworkers are subjected.
For a group of fishermen not used to being treated as human beings, the call to become “fishers of people” must have been pretty radical and intriguing – so much so they left their nets to follow Jesus at once and immediately. Jesus’ invitation opened up the possibility in their imaginations that they could be more than mere instruments in the hands of the Roman Empire; they might even be loved enough to be seen by the Son of God and worthy enough to be invited to share in Jesus’ ministry of announcing the Reign of God had come.
No metaphor is perfect and breaks down at some point, but what if Jesus’ invitation to be “fishers of people” is not about translating the methodologies and practices of fishing onto people? What if, instead, “fishers of people” is Jesus’ way turning the fishermen’s lives away from an imperial economy of scarcity and reordering them towards God’s economy of abundance and neighborly love? In this way, Jesus isn’t concerned with “catching” people with marketing schemes as much as he is with reordering our lives around our neighbors and their needs.
As the fishermen encounter the Kingdom of God in their boats, these early disciples quickly learn that while the economy of God operates under a much different logic – that is, the logic of people over profit – they will still find themselves amongst the outcasts of the Roman Caste System. They, too, will go throughout the world announcing the arrival of God’s Reign and “curing every disease and illness among the people” – an obvious threat to the very imperial regime that used to order their lives.
Of course, we know that these men will go fishing again. They will get in their boats and cast their nets and do what they’ve done a thousand times. Becoming “fishers of people” doesn’t seem to mean that our professions or our hobbies or our identities are somehow amputated – never to be picked up again. But it does seem as if Jesus’ call to discipleship is one that demands an openness to the work of the Spirit to remake our ordinary lives and jobs and reorder them towards the work of renewing, healing, and loving people.
In tonight’s accompanying 1 Corinthians reading, Paul reports that “there are rivalries among” the people of God – which doesn’t seem to do justice for the tensions and polarization of our current moment. Everywhere we turn, someone – often in some other place – is demanding that we pick a side, weaponize our words, defend our ideas, and crusade against every enemy standing in our way. In times like these, the idea of being united “in the same mind and in the same purpose,” in Paul’s words, feels like wishful thinking – even amongst us, the people of God. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if such division might be the result of our propensity to exchange the cross of Christ for the comforts and convenience of a culture ordered around instant gratification.
At the very least, we come to this table each week to be reminded that the cross of Christ is our vocation and the crucified ones in our midst are our neighbors – even if someone on a throne or in an Oval Office says differently. In the sharing of his broken body and blood, our hearts and lives are collectively reoriented around the cross of Christ, and our vocations are remade in the service of loving people – of seeing them, serving them, and seeking their healing and wholeness. It is a call not only of fishing for people but of business for people, politics for people, and church for people. Detached from this Eucharistic call, we risk leading lives that validate the false reign of Empire in our communities – subjecting our commerce, our political loyalties, and our theologies to the dehumanizing whims of imperial warmongering and colonization. But if we remain open to surrendering our nets, our profits, and our politics to the power of God’s broken flesh, we, too, will find that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand…here…now…waiting for those with compassionate eyes, healing hands, and calloused feet.
Amen.