Sermons
January 26, 2025 (3rd Sunday after Epiphany)
What kind of bait do you use to catch people?
Luke 5:1-11
If you spent time in Sunday school or VBS growing up, you might have learned a little song, “I will make you fishers of men if you follow me.” We would sing that song when I was a kid, and then our teachers would tell us that we were supposed to do that. All of us were supposed to be—to use the gendered language of the early 1970s—fishers of men.
(The newer versions of the Bible, like the NRSV we have in our pews, often change that to “you will fish for people,” which I personally prefer. Language changes over time, and one change that has happened in my lifetime is that many people no longer hear “men” and assume it means human beings in general. Since we have a perfectly serviceable generic word—“people”—why not just use that instead, for the sake of those of us who don’t hear “men” as referring to all of humanity?)
But I’m no fisherman. I think I have caught exactly one fish in my entire life—a catfish out of one of the water hazards at the golf course Gram and Papa took care of when I was a kid. I used to like to go fishing with my dad or Papa at the lake, but I never caught anything. (Besides, they seemed to like to go out at the crack of dawn, and I’m useless at that time of day.) So what do I know about fishing, and how would I apply that to the idea of bringing people to Jesus?
When Jesus called these first few disciples, was he actually saying that every disciple, at every time and in every place, was supposed to go fishing? I don’t know. It’s a nifty image, but is it the only option?
Perhaps we could broaden it a bit if we think about how many different ways there are to fish.
We know, I’m sure, about fly-fishing. Some of you have probably done it; I haven’t.
There’s the lazy kind of fishing we used to do at the lake, where we’d tie a bobber to our fishing line, bait the hook with a worm or a minnow, throw it in the water, and then sit down, cold drink in our hand, and watch to see if the bobber sank. We might have called it fishing, but it was really an excuse to sit on the dock and enjoy the sunshine.
Then there’s the kind of fishing my Papa, uncles, and dad did at that same lake. They would go out in our little flat-bottomed johnboat, over to the other side of the lake where it was sort of shallow and weeds grew up from the lake bottom, with lures equipped with spinners that flashed in the sunshine as they reeled them in and flipped them around in the shallow water. Papa told me that the point of that was to make the bass mad, and then they’d hit that spinner, and hey presto, you’ve got fish.
He was good at it—I think he could have caught fish in a chlorinated swimming pool. I remember one Labor Day weekend when he was up, and Barry was there, and between the two of them and my dad they caught something like eighteen of those big bass—we actually had a limit at the time wherein you had to throw back anything that was less than fifteen inches long.
I never got the hang of it.
Now and then my dad would set a trot line at the lake. That was a long string with hooks tied to it about every foot or so, which you attached to a buoy or a dock railing or something so it stayed put; he was trying to catch catfish, so he baited the hooks with doughballs made out of soggy Wheaties. (My cousin Chris once told a relative of ours about that, and that relative, who was a sheriff’s deputy in the next county over, said to him, “You know that’s illegal, don’t you?” Well, no, I don’t guess any of us did.)
A couple years ago a sea shanty went viral on social media. A sea shanty! How many sea shanties are being produced in popular music these days?
You might remember when all this happened. The song was called “The Wellerman,” and the viral version was recorded by a Scottish singer named Nathan Evans.[1]
Sea shanties are work songs; they’re sung by sailors to help people doing a specific task, like raising sails or pumping bilge, work together with a common rhythm. Sometimes the words are off-color, sometimes they have something to do with life at sea; and other times they’re based on ballads that are known on land as well.[2]
“The Wellerman” tells a humorous story of a crew of whalers (I know whales aren’t technically fish, but bear with me here) dragged endlessly by a harpooned whale. The sailors aren’t able to catch the whale, and the whale isn’t able to get free; so, like Charlie on the M.T.A. in the Kingston Trio song,[3] somebody (the “wellerman”) comes along periodically to replenish their stores of sugar and tea and rum.
The kind of fishing Simon Peter and his partners did in today’s reading was done not with lines and hooks, nor with harpoons, but with nets. They would throw out the nets, and whatever got in them they’d haul in.
You can catch a lot of fish that way, but a net isn’t especially choosy about what kind of fish it catches. Similar nets became a problem in modern times when it was found that the ones thrown out to catch tuna in the ocean too often also caught dolphins, and it was sort of hard on the dolphins and the dolphin population as a whole.
In the scene from today’s reading, Simon Peter lends his boat so Jesus can get out far enough on the lake to teach a crowd that was following him. After he’s done, he tells Peter to drop his net—even though he’s fished all night and caught nothing—and the net comes back up filled with an enormous haul of fish.
Peter immediately knows he’s in the midst of a miracle, and as you do when you find yourself in such a situation, he falls to his knees and confesses his sinfulness.[4] But Jesus says—and did you know this is the most frequently given command in the Bible?—“Do not be afraid.” Then he says, “From now on you will be catching people.”
But are we all meant to be fishers of people? It’s a compelling image, sure; but many of us don’t know the first thing about fishing for fish, much less people. Are we all called to fish?
What if these first few disciples had had a different profession?
What if they, like Jesus and his father, had been builders? Would Jesus have said to them, “From now on you will fish for people”? Or might he have said, “From now on you will build the kingdom of God”?
What if they were farmers? Maybe he would have said, “From now on you will sow seeds of God’s grace and mercy, and your harvest will be God’s reign on earth.”
What if they were teachers? Perhaps Jesus might have told them that they would be helping other people learn about God’s love and how to put it into action.
Who knows?
In his little book of offering meditations, Ray Miles, who was on staff in the Oregon Region of the Christian Church when I lived there, but had relocated to the Upper Midwest Regional office by the time I moved into that region, told a story.
An elder in a certain church was a great servant of Christ. He was superintendent of a large Sunday school, preached a great deal, and was a baker by trade.
Once when he was traveling on a train, a zealous woman passenger asked him bluntly, “Are you a Christian, sir?”
He replied that he was. After she had thanked God for this, she asked him, “What work are you doing for the Master?”
“I bake,” he replied.
“I did not ask about your trade,” the woman said, “but what service you give to him who redeemed you.”
“I bake, madam.”[5]
Here was a man who made his life’s work a ministry. Maybe if Jesus had encountered a baker like this one on that day when he called his first disciples, he would have said, “Follow me, and you will bake and serve the bread of life to all of humanity.”
Who knows?
What is your trade, your profession, your paid or volunteer work? How might it be the way you follow and serve Jesus Christ?
[1] Evans is actually a Welsh name, but that’s neither here nor there.
[2] One example is a pump shanty known as “Lowlands,” which is based on a ballad called “Young Edmund in the Lowlands Low,” in which a man murders his daughter’s lover for his money, and is found out when the daughter has a dream about the murder. According to John and Alan Lomax in Folk Song U.S.A., the “Lowlands” shanty eventually found its way to the southern United States as a cotton-screwing song.
[3] The song was popularized by the Kingston Trio but was written by Bess Lomax Hawes and Jacqueline Steiner; in the song, of course, Charlie’s wife stops at the station daily to give him a sandwich, but he is doomed to ride the Boston subway forever. I feel like if Charlie’s wife actually wanted him to come home, she could have paid the nickel it would take for him to get off the train.
[4] The Revised Common Lectionary pairs this story with the prophetic call in Isaiah 6, which contains a similar confession.
[5] Offering Meditations by Ray Miles was published by Chalice Press in 1997. This story is from meditation number 54.