From: JORDAN MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS

To: Jesus, Son of Joseph 
Woodcrafters Carpenter's Shop, Nazareth

Dear Sir, 

Thank you for submitting the resumes of the twelve men you have selected for management positions in your new organization. All of them have now taken our battery of tests and have undergone personal interviews with our psychologist and our vocational aptitude consultant.

It is our opinion that most of your nominees are lacking in background, education, and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise you are undertaking. They do not have the team concept. We would recommend that you continue your search for persons of experience in managerial ability and proven capability. Simon Peter is emotionally unstable and given to fits of temper. The two brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, place personal interest above company loyalty. Thomas demonstrates a skeptical attitude that would tend to undermine morale. We feel that it is our duty to tell you that the tax-collector Matthew has been blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau. James, the son of Alpheus, and Thaddeus have radical leanings. One of the candidates, however, shows great potential. He is a man of ability and resourcefulness, ambitious, and responsible. We recommend Judas Iscariot as your controller and right-hand man. All of the other profiles are self-explanatory. 

Sincerely Yours, 

Jordan Management Consultants 

Well, aren’t you glad Jesus didn’t hire them?  Where would the Christian Church be today?

If you’ve been to church regularly since the start of the year you have hopefully spotted the developing story in Luke’s Gospel.  In January we read the start of Jesus’ ministry at his baptism; a couple of weeks ago we were present at his first miracle at a wedding in Cana; and then for the last two weeks we’ve followed him to his home town where he preached in a synagogue and declared his personal mission statement.  So we’re still very early in the story of the teaching and works of Christ.  What now?  Well, he’s begun his ministry, he has declared his aims and intentions, now he needs a team of disciples, to support him in his work.  People he can teach and train in preparation for the day when he would no longer be physically around.  And so this morning Luke places another piece in the jigsaw.  Jesus calls his disciples.  The Twelve men (OK, make that eleven) who were to carry on his work after he had gone back into heaven and who were to become the founders of the Christian Church.

Now in the four Gospels Jesus issues two calls to the Twelve.  First, he calls them to follow him.  To be his disciples.  To do the things he did, think the things he thought, say the things he said, and have the same attitudes he had.  Just to be followers of Christ.  And that call to be in Christ must come first.  But in today’s Gospel reading we have the other ‘call’, the secondary one.  And this is a call not just to ‘be’ but to ‘do’.  (You know those quotes: “To do is to be” – Socrates; “To be is to do” – Plato; “Do be do be do” – Sinatra.)  And the ‘doing’ that Jesus calls them to is fishing.  Jesus tells Simon Peter and the brothers James and John that they will be fishermen.  He says, “You are going to catch people.  Just like when you let down your nets into the Sea of Galilee just now and caught loads of fish, so you’ll do the same with people.  You will proclaim your faith in me and people will respond.”  And, of course, Jesus was right.  They did proclaim the message of Christ and many people did respond.  The book of Acts says that in the early Church people were being added daily.  Three thousand on Day One of the Church alone – the Day of Pentecost.  Those were heady, exciting days.  And this fishing expedition was so prolific and fruitful that within a couple of generations the Christian Faith had spread as far through Europe as to reach those cool, damp, inhospitable islands off the north coast where the natives painted themselves blue and 1400 years later would bring the Church of England to this continent. 

Now when you hear the world ‘fishing’ I want you to try to get out of your heads images of the kind of fishing we’re familiar with on the lakes and rivers of West Michigan.  Jesus was not talking about sitting on a bank or in a boat with a rod and a line with a hook on the end of it, with a maggot on the end of that.  He was talking about trawling.  The kind we’re familiar with on the east and west coasts of the US.  Trawlermen going hundreds of miles out into the Ocean sometimes for days on end.

I remember six years ago when I preached on this passage I brought in a fishing net that I picked up on the beach on the Northeast coast of England to illustrate the kind of fishing that Jesus had in mind.  Now there are three things about this kind of fishing.  It was uncomfortable, it was inconvenient and it was risky. On the lakes and rivers of West Michigan there isn’t much of any of those things.  Fishing is a relaxing pastime, a nice, peaceful day out.  You might come home with a salmon or a steelhead or two, but that’s not the be all and end all.  It’s about relaxation.  If you want discomfort, inconvenience, and risk in a hobby, then try golf.  I regularly experience all three of them.

1.    It was uncomfortable.  The fishermen first had to wade out in the water and clamber into the boat, so they’d be wet before they even set sail.  And these boats weren’t exactly cruise liners.  They weren’t the luxury speed boats people fish for marlin from in Florida.  They were small, basic and Spartan.  Then they had to haul in a heavy net, hopefully, with fish in it.  So a fisherman had painful joints and aching muscles.

2.    It was inconvenient because there were much easier jobs.  Being a fisherman meant going out to sea at night and mending your nets during the day.  It was a tough life.

3.    It was risky. The Hebrew people were poor sailors, and the Sea of Galilee was prone to storms that could be violent and unpredictable.  The Sea of Galilee lies 680 feet below sea level. It is surrounded by hills that in places are 2000 feet high. So it’s in a deep bowl. You get cool, dry air descending the hills to reach a warm sub-tropical body of water.  And so the air undergoes a huge change in temperature and pressure, and the result is strong winds at the surface of the sea.

Uncomfortable, inconvenient, and risky.  And that’s the image that Jesus is using when he calls the disciples to be fishers of men and women.  Now let me show you how the Episcopal Church has traditionally done its fishing.  (Produce a bucket)  And we put this on the beach and wait for the fish to jump in.  Now it has its advantages – it’s not uncomfortable, it’s not inconvenient and it’s not risky.  There’s also one other thing it is not – and that is productive.  Occasionally we do get one or two fish who somehow find their way into the bucket, but that is usually as a result of their hard work rather than ours.  But that kind of fishing can never produce a large catch, and in a local church the number of fish caught that way can never in the long-term exceed the number of members who die or move away.  And that is one of the main reasons why our denomination has declined to the point where just 0.76% of the nation are members of the Episcopal Church, and only one third of them attend worship on an average Sunday.  Less that one third of one percent of Americans will go to an Episcopal Church today.  One out of every 300 people.  (Actually, if you do the math, St John’s is punching above its weight on average for a town of 4,500 people!)

For churches to grow it usually means they have to go out of their comfort zones.  Growing churches regularly stop and ask themselves, “what are trying to do, and just as importantly, who are we trying to do it for?”  You could say that’s easy.  We exist for God.  And sure, we do.  But then who?  Who’s next on the list of who we exist for?  Do we exist for ourselves or for people who are not yet members?  I suspect that growing churches answer with the latter.  And that, of course, was the thinking behind the building of the Mission Center.  We didn’t do all that for our sakes, to make us more comfortable.  No, we did it for our community.  It is a bridge to the world, or the part of it that surrounds us, and to whom God sends us.  That is one of the nets with which we are to go fishing.

A few years ago I was walking through London and I passed a church and, out of interest, stopped to read the noticeboard outside.  And the noticeboard gave the times of Sunday services and told you how to get hold of the pastor, and it also said something like, ‘everybody is welcome to join us for worship’.  But there was something about that noticeboard that made me think their message of welcome to everyone was not really sincere.  You see, it was written in Welsh.  Now London has a population of 5 million people and I’d be surprised if 500 of them speak any Welsh.  English people just don’t know the language.  The vast majority of Welsh people don’t know any Welsh.  So there was this church which assured everyone of a warm welcome, but which really only gave a welcome to about 0.01% of the city.  How do I know the noticeboard said ‘everybody is welcome to join us for worship’?  Because they all say that.  I’ve never come across a noticeboard that says ‘visitors are unwelcome, please go away’.  But so often that can be the unwritten message that people hear when they visit a church.  Because it’s all set up for those who are members and it runs for the benefit of members.  Those churches have no awareness that there are people in their neighborhoods whom they are called to share the message of Christ with. 

And so that makes us think about our welcome to visitors.  One of the great strengths of our parish is that we are a family, and so we all know each other well, and we know generally what is going on in each other’s lives.  And that’s a great blessing and a strength.  But that strength can also mean that we can be less attentive to the needs of those who are not members, who are either visiting or who are on the fringes of the church and trying to feel their way into belonging.  We have a good number of visitors in the space of a year, but our success at helping them find a spiritual home here is patchy.  I suspect we aren’t as sticky as we could be.  So for example, a great strength is our announcements – they’re informal and newsy and we all appreciate it.  But to a visitor the family news of the parish is not very interesting.  They can feel excluded.  So when we have visitors there’s an onus on us to be good hosts to consider their needs and tailor our worship experience accordingly.  Part of the vision we have to present Jesus as the Bread of Life has been to invite visitors to lunch afterwards.  And that’s a wonderful thing, as is any little gesture that we can make that assures a visitor that we care about them and that our family is worth joining.  So I challenge us all this morning to think about how we can be better hosts.  And more than that, how we can go fishing in our neighborhood.

Jesus said to Peter, James and John, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”  They did and they did.  Out there away from the shore in the discomfort, the inconvenience, and the risk.  Our mission is the same.  May God give us grace to carry it out.