Fisher Folk

Sunday, 21 January 2018

And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they left their nets and followed him (Mark 1:17-18)

I never got into fishing. I tried a couple of times when I was in my teens but the only place to go fishing was the Coventry Canal, and as that was so polluted anything you caught was likely to have two heads and glow in the dark. I only went a couple of times. My son did it for a while - there’s a place in Moffat with a stocked lake and he came back one time with a fine brace of trout that he was very proud of. Even so, he didn’t stick with it. Neither of us, I think, ever considered the whole waders thing where you stand up to your midriff in a freezing river. I imagine that people who do that are beyond the point where fishing is something they do as a hobby: it’s a part of what they are. They are fishermen.

How much more true that must have been for Peter and Andrew. Growing up on the shores of the Galilee, a fisherman’s sons, they must have learned from their earliest days the art of tying nets. They must have learned to watch for murmurations on the surface of the water that would tell them where to put down those nets or for the shifts of windspeed and air temperature that would warn them of a coming storm. Fishing, one imagines, was their life as well as their livelihood. It was who and what they were. They were fisher folk. When they encountered Jesus, though, he made them an offer: “Follow me and I will make you fish for people”, as it has it in modern translations. And immediately, Mark says, they give up the lives they have led - the people they have been - and follow him.

I think the modern translations miss something here. The older translations say, “I will make you become fishers of people”. It’s not just a matter of changing what they do - it’s a matter of changing who and what they are; it’s a matter of them discovering a new and richer dimension to their lives, a new and richer dimension to their being. It’s a matter of giving them a new sense of purpose - they will still be fisher folk, but now they will be fishers of people.

That’s what we’re meant to be . We are meant to be fisher folk - fishers of people. We are meant to bring people to Christ. We are meant to casts our nets into the world and bring in people. In short, we are meant to spread the Gospel. I’m not sure that’s been going all that well in recent years. We can blame all sorts of things for that, and I’m not going into blaming people or institutions. Maybe, though, we can learn from fishermen to be fishers of people.

Fishing is something you can’t do at home. If there a way to do that I would have tried it instead of sitting on the cold concrete beside the Coventry Canal. If you’re going to go fishing you have to go where the fish are. We, though, tend to think of being the Church as what goes on in places like this, among people like us who have already heard the Gospel and who are already bonded to Christ and bound for glory. If we’re going to be fisher folk we have to be ready to haul on the waders and stand waist-deep in the water - we have to get out there into the big wide world and speak the Gospel to those who have never heard it.

Lots of folk haven’t. There are folk out there who haven’t the faintest idea what the Gospel is about. Hardly surprising if we’re not talking about it. While we’ve stayed politely schtum, because it’s not polite to talk sex, politics or religion, there have been others who have painted a completely different picture of the Church in the public mind. They’ve given folk the impression that Christians are “anti-science”, despite the fact that some of the finest scientific minds in history have belonged to devout Christians. They’ve given the folk the impression that religion is a control system that is about buying our place in Heaven by being good docile boys and girls, despite the fact that what we actually believe is that we are redeemed by the blood of Christ and by faith. There are those who have accepted the utter tosh that “most wars are about religion”.

Those are the choppy waters we go out on if we really want to be fisher folk; if we really want to accept the offer Jesus makes to Peter and Andrew to be fishers of people. But that’s what fisher folk do - they have the courage to go out on troubled waters to bring in the catch. Do we have that courage? Do we talk about our faith outside these walls? Do we live it? If people we knew, apart from members of this congregation, were asked, would they know that we are Christians? Are we the fisher folk we are meant to be?

“Meant to be”. Maybe that’s what hooks Peter and Andrew. Maybe Jesus gives them a sudden insight on who they are meant to be. Maybe, if we are to be fisher folk, part of what we need to be doing is letting people know who they are meant to be: No! who they really are. We live in a society  that is so often driven by money and status, where life is so often seen to be about acquiring more and more stuff and where “success” is about getting more shiny things than our neighbours. For that people work stupidly long hours where they leave home before their kids are awake and come home after they are asleep. They lie, cheat and stab colleagues in the back to get to the top. They learn to despise their neighbours who are going through hard times and need benefits as “parasites”.

All that buries the light - the light we all have inside us as children of God: the light that we are meant to reflect into this world and make it a happier, brighter, more beautiful place. So here’s the thing - I said earlier that we tend to stay schtum about our faith. Why? We have something brilliant to talk about. Here’s the other thing I’ve learned from friends who go fishing - you need a good lure. And we have the best.

We have the message that each and everyone is a precious child of God. We have the message that God himself came into this world in the life of a human being to share the life of a human being who died on a cross with nothing - not even the clothes on his back to his name. What for? To communicate this simple idea: you are precious. You are precious enough to God for him to come into this world and bring him home to you. And you are precious not because of what you own or what you do or what your status or social class is. You’re precious and special and unique because you are you. 

Can you communicate that? Can you let people know they’re special and precious and loved? Of course you can. We all can. We can do it with a smile  and a gentle reminder to folk going through hard times that we’re there for them. We can challenge the lies that get told about our faith - it isn’t hard - just be honest. And maybe that’s it: we’re at our best when we are honest and truthful about our beliefs; when we open ourselves up to those around us about who we really are. Fisher folk.

Lord, make us fishers of people. May your light shine in our lives to lure them in. May we go out on choppy waters to bring in your wandering children


Preached at Gretna Old parish church




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