Letting Go of the Nets

Jonah 3:1-5, 10 & Mark 1:14-20

January 21, 2024; 3rd Sunday after Epiphany

Rev. Dr. Ritva  H. Williams

Do you remember the first time someone asked you, “What do you want to be when you grow up”? Somehow, even as very young children we know that questions really means what do you want to do for a job or career? Our granddaughter in junior kindergarten declared she wanted to be a mermaid and take care of underwater critters. At one point in my childhood I wanted to be a flight attendant so I could travel to different places in the world (then I discovered motion sickness). 

We live in a world where what you want to be when you grow up is a big deal. Economic security, financial independence, social status, and self-worth are all tied to work and career. This may be okay for those who are successful in their work, but what about those who are not, or once were but are no longer, or those who cannot work? As Cole Arthur Riley writes,

We cannot help but entwine our concept of dignity with how much a person can do. The sick, the elderly, the disabled, the neurodivergent, my sweet cousin on the autism spectrum — we tend to assign a lesser social value to those whose “doing” cannot be enslaved into a given output” (This Here Flesh, p. 11). 

What do you want to be when you grow up is a question can help us see where our lives are enmeshed and tangled up in the values and interests of other people, companies, or institutions, and social structures. Consider this wisdom from John Lennon: 

When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down, ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment; I told them they didn’t understand life.”

This morning we meet Jesus passing along the shore of the Sea of Galilee where he sees the brothers Simon and Andrew net-fishing. A little further along Jesus comes upon James and John mending fishing nets. No one ever asked Simon, Andrew, James or John what they wanted to be when they grew up. Career-choice was not a thing in the ancient world. Your job, your career was to do what your parents were doing now and what your grandparents had done before them. 

Like their ancestors, Simon, Andrew, James and John were peasants working the land. In the off-seasons they fished. The Sea of Galilee belonged to the Emperor, which was why it was also called the Sea of Tiberias. The Emperor’s agents sold fishing leases to family-based co-ops like the one run by Zebedee and his sons. Most of the fish caught were salted or turned into fish sauce and exported to Greece and Rome, with Caesar’s agents collecting taxes at each step of the process. Not only did fishers live at a subsistence level, but fishing was regarded as one of the most shameful occupations, even lower than butchers, cooks, and poultry-raisers. Hence, it probably should not surprise us that these brothers were willing to leave their nets and even their father behind in order to follow Jesus. This may have been the first choice they were ever given, the first chance to do something meaningful, maybe even happy. 

Jesus’ first words into today’s reading are also the first words he speaks in Mark’s Gospel. That makes them very important. They are the thesis, the main point that Jesus makes here and throughout this gospel. Jesus declares, “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the good news.” According to Pastor Steve Garnass-Holmes:

The [Kingdom or] Realm of God is the reality of God’s rule, God’s desire for fullness of life for all living beings, God’s realm of infinite grace, unconditional, and open to everyone … To repent is to …  stop cooperating with systems that pretend to regulate God’s grace, that claim blessing for some and not others. To believe the good news is to shuck off our blinders of fear and shame, to shed the sword and shield of having to be good enough, and, empty-handed, trust the grace given us. Everything Jesus did, every word and deed, was to connect people with God’s life-giving grace, to heal the wounds of separation, and to undermine systems of exclusion. When Jesus says “Follow me” he means to do this. (Steve Garnaas-Holmes, www.unfoldinglight.net)

The good news is that God is here, all around us, and within each one of us. Our dignity and self-worth are rooted in God’s image planted deep within each of us. When Christ calls us to follow him, he calls us into a lifelong process of learning to trust that is true, to see God’s image in the people around us, to affirm and celebrate God’s image in them and in us.  Christ calls us to follow him in resisting people, companies, institutions and social structures that say differently. 

All too often, Jesus’ calling of the disciples has been interpreted in ways that enforce the idea that we are not good enough or faithful enough because we can’t or won’t walk away from our jobs and families like the disciples did. But does it have to be an either/or choice? Can it be a both/and thing?  To be honest, I spent the first two decades of adulthood trying to keep everything I already had AND follow Jesus. But we still ended up moving to a new country. Everyone’s journey is different, but rest assured:

Sometimes the call is to stay. Not to head off on some new adventure but to work through where you’re at, to make peace, to mend a relationship, to endure a struggle, to fulfill faithfulness. Sometimes Jesus needs you most crucially right where you are, to be his vessel in exactly what you’re doing, with new love, to accompany him where you always go, to do the same old thing with new light, to bear grace, even at home.(Steve Garnaas-Holmes, www.unfoldinglight.net)

Regardless of whether we leave or stay, we are all called to become “fishers of people.” That doesn’t mean catching and hauling people into our boat with some evangelistic net, capturing and manipulating them to think, speak, act and be like us. No rather, as Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes suggests Jesus wants us to change our focus from fish to people — from the work we do to the relationships within which we work and live. Jesus calls us to become more attentive to people, to center our lives around them and their well-being (www.unfoldinglight.net). It might require changing the way work is done. 

Andrew and Simon left their nets behind, turning their backs on work that benefited only the elite, and let ordinary people worse off. James and James left not only their nets behind but also their father and the hired hands, turning their backs on toxic family and work relationships.  Jesus still calls all people, from the last, the least and the lost to the first, the mostest, and the absolutely certain. The questions for us to consider are these:

Am I radically open to your nudging, ready to go an unexpected way? What entangling nets must I let go of, what habits and comforts must I leave behind, what familiar safety net must I forgo, what that I thought I knew will I have to cease to know? What nets have me? (Steve Garnaas-Holmes, www.unfoldinglight.net)

Let us pray:

Jesus Christ, light of the world, help me to see where and how my life is enmeshed and tangled up in values and interests that are not yours. Set me free from the thoughts, words and deeds that harm me and hold me back from following you in the way of light. Amen.