God who calls us to action, abide with us in our fears as you move us to faithfully fish for all of your people. Amen.
Good morning. It is good to be with you again. When I last preached to this community, I was just about to embark on my first semester at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California, which I am attending by distance. It has been, in many ways, a challenging experience, but genuinely rewarding. I have formed deep connections with my classmates, despite many of us working full time and pursuing seminary education by distance. I am also very proud to be part of this community that has brought up and is so keen to support its three seminarians, what I consider to be an ELCIC record, especially in this day in age. I know I speak for all of us when I thank Pastor Lyndon for sharing the pulpit with all of us in this time after Epiphany. It being Super Bowl Sunday, I’ll admit to trying to force some kind of sports analogy about the three of us preaching, but decided I wouldn’t wade into that territory too much.
This fall, the seminarians at PLTS collectively embarked on courses that would form the foundations of our spiritual and biblical formation. We wrestled with the Old Testament, embraced an expansive understanding of Christian Spirituality, and tried to figure out just what exactly ‘Methods and Hermeneutics’ was. It’s this last class, friends, where I want to start as we dig into our Gospel text this morning.
As I alluded to earlier, our first challenge with hermeneutics was simply to understand what it was. Our professor, a fellow Canadian, Dr. Sheryl Johnson, explained that the class could be better understood as ‘Interpretation, Hermeneutics, and Methods’. Interpretation is, of course, taking in information, but more controversially, we worked from the premise that there is no capital-T truth. Everything is interpreted through the lens of our lived experiences. Hermeneutics is then the study of how we interpret, for example, the bible, theology, and the world. Methods, then, relates to understanding how different thought communities systematically interpret things. For example, liberation theologians are concerned with issues of power, feminist theologians are concerned with issues gender, and queer theologians are concerned with issues of what is “normal.”
I’ll admit early on to you all that I made a critical error that almost all seminarians make. I had gone to seminary, in part to understand and study the capital-T truth about God’s work in the world. Imagine my upset when, mere moments into seminary, I was coming to appreciate that maybe there wasn’t a singular truth, and this experience was about to be an exercise in finding answers in uncertainty and better questions. I share this with you to give you a window into my studies but also to hold space for other interpretations of Luke than what I’ll provide.
In our Gospel reading this morning, we hear an account of Jesus calling the first disciples. Appearing to a group of fishermen who laboured all day and caught nothing, Jesus becomes the apparent cause of a sudden bountiful catch. The story concludes with a promise by Jesus that Simon and the others will soon be “catching people,” which is compelling enough for them all to leave everything and follow Jesus.
This is a story that many of us have heard many times, and it is often taught through the lens of evangelism or Christs call to spread the Gospel to others. To be a “fisher of people” can be interpreted as inviting people to church, or, while not practices of this community, justification for more “forceful” forms of evangelism. Our call, however, is seemingly much more complex and more difficult, if we consider the historical context of the Gospel account.
At this time, of course, the geographic area of Jesus’s ministry was under Roman occupation. As Leah Schade explains in her commentary on Luke 5, the fisherman who are Jesus’s first pick for his first disciples were unlanded, forced to pay both for the right to fish and to sell their fish, and worked a dangerous job that, at the best of the times, would not provide for their families. These factors placed them amongst the bottom of the socio-economic hierarchy in ancient Rome and made a catchless day all the more devastating.
Of course, this context makes Simon’s testy response to Jesus’s request that they take the boats out deeper and try again all the more understandable. A modern reader may see Simon’s admission of his sinfulness as his recognition that Jesus was testing his individual worth. Drawing on the work of T. Wilson Dickinson, Schade concludes that Jesus’s reply “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people,” is a reference by Jesus to the prophetic tradition that they will conspire to overturn imperial domination and societal hierarchies. Said differently, Jesus says the sin is not yours, Simon, but the system’s. With this interpretation of Luke, our modern-day call is not as simple as inviting people to church but rather to be a prophetic voice against injustice and a people who take meaningful actions to make things on earth as it is in heaven. Leaving everything and following Jesus seems all the more incredulous now.
Speaking for myself, and depending on the day, this call can seem overwhelming. On other days Jesus’s call comes easily because it soothes the parts of me that are, or at very least feel disempowered at times. I recognize, however, that I occupy a space of significant privilege and, perhaps not philosophically but certainly viscerally, there is a sense of unease with the Gospel. Christ is not setting out to affirm me but rather to affirm the marginalized. Our call as individuals and as a Church is to use any privilege we hold to work towards justice as opposed to for the systems that have or continue to advantage us. I urge you to not feel overwhelmed but rather take heart in and be inspired by the ways in which this work is already happening all around us.
In the course of our studies, Dave, Boston, and I are reading Christian Ethicist Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s, Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage. In this book, Dr. Moe-Lobeda, guides readers from “heartfelt longing for more equitable and Earth-honouring economic lives to realizing them.” In the chapters that follow she engages with the stories of those “creating more equitable, ecological, and democratic societies.” This initial chapters invite us to consider “economies as webs of relationships”, “economic life as a spiritual practice”, and economic transformation as an act of healing. Not shying away from the fact that it is often easier to maintain the status quo, one is left with the feeling that, much like the disciples leaving their boats, nothing worth doing is ever easy. To do nothing, however, shies away from our very clear call as a community of modern-day disciples of Christ. I wonder how we might keep this in mind in our proceeds of sale discussions.
Several weeks ago, in the days after Trump’s inauguration, Church of the Cross included an excerpt of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s Inauguration Prayer Service sermon in the bulletin. Bishop Budde calls on the President to have mercy on LGBTQ people in the US who now fear for their lives, for hardworking migrants, who occupy essential jobs at the bottom of our modern-day socioeconomic hierarchy who fear deportation, and those seeking refuge from war and persecution. Her words were met with condemnation from the President and many more have disavowed her words as a political statement that overstepped her office and the Gospel. As the outsider looking in, I believe that Bishop Budde had very little to gain personally from her words. She could have very easily chosen not to make waves. Throughout it all, however, Budde has stood by her words knowing that standing up for the least of us is what must be done by all of us. In closing, and to quote Bishop Budde, “May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people.” Amen.
