Sermon for January 25th

My grandpa and I went fishing a lot during my childhood. They lived in Redfield, Kansas and summers with them meant getting up early on the weekends. The air would still be moist from an early morning Kansas shower. Grandma would have already been up an hour or two by the time I came upstairs from my basement bedroom and no doubt had cinnamon rolls freshly baked or bacon and eggs ready. I’d sit and drink my orange juice while Grandpa would tell me briefly about where we were going and why he thought that’d be a good place to go fish and I’d nod and smile ignorantly just waiting to get on our way.

Then he’d lean back, toothpick stuck in his mouth and say, “Well, I’d be guessin’ it’s about time we got goin.” We’d head off to the garage where he’d pack up the pickup truck with all our fishin gear including extra poles, a couple of old tackle boxes, a fish cleaning kit and some kind of contraption to keep the fish we had caught from swimming back to freedom. Then, we’d head off to one of the various ponds in the area to start the day.

Fishing with grandpa was wonderful. We didn’t talk much because grandpa didn’t talk much, but he has kind eyes and a kind heart. Thinking back I wonder how he ever caught any fish between showing me the best spots to cast my line and then helping me pull off the mounds of “seaweed” as I called it or helping me get my hook out of the lone treebranch above my head. We mostly fished for bass, but every once in awhile we’d catch something else. Throughout all my years fishing with grandpa, I think the biggest fish he or I ever caught was a six pound bass which we took back home to his pond and tried to transplant unsuccessfully.

Grandma and grandpa always said that I was the grandkid who liked to fish and they were right, I did like it. I pretty much fished every day that I was living at their house in the summertime and tried all kinds of ways to catch them. I’d fish off the dock, wade into the weeds, hop into an inner tube and cast out from the middle of the pond. I’d fish in the rain, in the sweltering heat, in the early morning and as late as they’d let me stay up. Grandpa didn’t have any fancy fishing gear. No pontoon boat with electronic gadgets to see the fish beneath us on a screen. The fanciest lure I ever remember using was a “trips” hook. Mostly I just fished with various earthworms we collected, jelly worms, plastic bugs and corn for carp. I was a fisherman, at least in my own eyes and in the eyes of my grandparents, but as time went by I found that there was a lot more to do with my life than just fish.

In the gospel today, Jesus was passing along the Sea of Galilee and he saw a man named Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen and he said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” The old sexist way of saying this gets the nuance of the phrase better, Jesus tells the fishermen, “I will make you fishers of men.” Now, I have fished a lot in my life, though probably not for over ten years at this point, but this passage has never made any sense to me. Or, it’s not so much that it doesn’t make sense to me, I get the point, the irony and all that, but it doesn’t really DO anything for me. It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t make sense to me why Simon, Andrew and then James and John follow Jesus instead of just continuing with their work. Was Jesus’ voice magical or something? Were they really hard up for something else to do? Why did Jesus’ words have such an affect on them and absolutely no effect on me?

Perhaps, because I am not much of a fisherman. I like to fish, but I certainly never considered it as a career. I like it, but I’m not really that good at it. It’s certainly not one of my gifts. If someone had told me to go to seminary so I could become a “fisher of men” I would’ve smiled politely and said, “No thanks!” and gone on with my life. But God didn’t call me to be a “fisher of men or of people or anything like that.” He knows that wouldn’t mean a hill of beans to me.

Martin Luther is known especially for his teachings on two subjects: justification and vocation. He taught that God forgives sinners because of their faith in Jesus alone and not because of their works. And, he taught that since you know how much God loves you, you can stop trying to earn his love and spend all THAT time serving your neighbor instead. Today we are talking about vocation. What has God called you to do? He doesn’t call you out of the world and away from your gifts; he calls you to Jesus and uses your gifts to serve others.

In Luther’s day, within the Roman Catholic church, there was a hierarchy of holiness so to speak. On the bottom rung of the ladder were people like you and me, then, above us, a little higher up on ladder, were priests and nuns. Above them was the pope and then Jesus at the top. This kind of attitude might not bother you, but it might change how you live your life.

I’d like to read to you something that Luther wrote from his essay on “The Estate of Marriage.” It’s certainly patriarchal in its language, but it reflects how a misunderstanding of God’s calling can change your viewpoint on life, “Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason, takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labor at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful, carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.”

In contrast, Luther argued that God’s call, your vocation, means becoming completely human with all the dirt and grime associated with it. Why? Because, as the Lutheran theologian Gustaf Wingren said, “In one’s vocation one is not reaching up to God, but rather bends oneself down to the world and the neighbor.” Loving people involves doing very unspiritual looking things like changing diapers, mowing the lawn and cooking dinner. God doesn’t call you out of the world but into the world to serve others.

There was and still is a propensity to believe that religious folk are in a so called “higher calling” than others. The problem is compounded today not only because we think our jobs aren’t “holy” enough but because we often don’t believe God is alive enough, active enough or authoritative enough to call us anymore. We don’t think he has a voice or a vote when it comes to what we do in our lives. We think he is outdated when we hear stories like today’s gospel reading about “fishing of people”. Maybe you don’t want to “fish for people”, maybe you don’t even like to fish!

Take a moment and, in your own mind, consider what you are good at. What excites you about life? If you could have an afternoon to do anything you wanted to do, what would it be? If you could be paid to take any job you wanted, what would you do? That just might be your calling, your vocation and, you might be upset, that you aren’t doing what you feel you were “meant” to do. Well, now that you’ve given voice to your inner calling, the next step is to pray to God for his voice to come as an external call. This is the part most people skip, but it is the most important part. Maybe it’s not that we think it is a silly exercise, but that we’re afraid God actually will talk back and take us away from something we love. But trust that while God might call you in a direction you don’t understand or agree with, he will always call you to Jesus Christ, into the world and USE your gifts. And he won’t make you rely on discerning whether that inner feeling you have is the Holy Spirit or an undigested piece of hamburger. He uses his external word, a voice from outside you, to call you into the world. He might use your uncle Larry or a homeless beggar off the street, but you can count on God calling you into service.

Most of the time when we talk about vocations, we are talking about how we are going to make money for ourselves, our families and our future. But a vocation, a calling from God, is not about serving yourself—it is about serving others. This is how God uses you as a tool in his hands, to protect, serve and love your neighbor. In fact, this is also how God is going to kill you eventually, by pouring you out for your family, for your friends, for the complete stranger in your midst. You can see how everything got mixed up in the monasteries. People would come out of the world and join a monastery to solidify their own personal salvation when God was calling them into the world to support the lives of others. Your personal salvation has already been promised to you by Jesus Christ himself. Now you’ve got the time to serve.

God calls you into your family, into your community and even into your church. This isn’t about the church “needing” you. This is about the church not really being a church without you. But God isn’t just going to call you all to fish! That’s how he called four disciples, but your call might be very different. He’ll use the gifts he has given you. Teachers may called to teach children or lead Bible Studies. Business owners may be called to lead projects or start new ministries. If you love to talk, you might find yourself inviting your friends to worship with you. If you like time by yourself, you might enjoy praying for the sick. If you are obsessively organized, maybe God is calling you to sort through my office! What is God calling you to do? The possibilities are endless and there’s a lot more to do than just fish. Amen.