Of Fisher Folk and Unity – Epiphany 5, RCL Year C

One of the things I try to do when I read the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, when he uses an odd or striking metaphor like “I will make you fishers of people”^[1] or, as it is put in this Gospel, “from now on you will be catching people,”^[2] is to figure out if he’s referring back to Law or the Prophets, and whether it might be the lectionary’s choice for a first lesson. Sometimes that helps me figure out whether there is a thematic link between the lessons and, if so, what it’s supposed tell us, but unfortunately that’s not the case today. Jesus doesn’t seem to have had Isaiah in mind when he summoned Peter and his business partners.

So for the past week or so, I’ve been pondering what might be the reason for putting the Isaiah reading –– which, although it comes in the sixth chapter, is the story of Isaiah’s initial call to be a prophet –– together with Luke’s version of Jesus recruiting Simon Peter and the sons of Zebedee, James and John, to be disciples. The simple answer, of course, is that they are both stories of calls to ministry, but they are so different!

Isaiah’s call is a very dramatic experience of seeing the beauty of the Heavenly Court with God seated on the throne, the angels flying about singing Hosannas, the whole bit with the burning coal, and so forth. It is a vision of the fundamental unity of God: as we sang in our opening hymn, “Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee.”^[3] Isaiah’s experience of vocation is quite the contrast to Jesus’ rather prosaic “C’mon. Let’s go fish for people.” Maybe that’s the point, that the call to serve God can come in different ways, in many and varied ways, in sensational ways and in matter-of-fact ways. One never knows how or where or when it will come.

However, I think there’s another lesson to be drawn from this gospel story, because I do think Jesus might have been thinking of one of the prophets, specifically Jeremiah. You see, Jeremiah was one of the first to use this fishers-of-people metaphor to describe the gathering of God’s people. In his prophecy, we read these words from God:

[T]he days are surely coming, says the Lord, when it shall no longer be said, “As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” but “As the Lord lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.” For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their ancestors.

I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them, and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill and out of the clefts of the rocks.^[4]

 
My grandfather was a fisherman. He loved fly fishing in the mountain streams in Colorado. When I was a kid, he would often take my cousins and me to his favorite fishing spots for a few days of camping and angling, and he tried to teach us the art of fly fishing. I was terrible at it and never got the knack, but I remember those summer days with Granddad Funston fondly. When I saw the movie A River Runs Through It^[5] and saw those scenes of Tom Skerrit standing in the Blackfoot River casting hand-tied flies trying to snag a large trout, it brought tears to my eyes. And I have to confess, for most of my life, whenever I heard this story of Jesus calling Simon Peter, James, and John, to be “fishers of men,” that’s what I would think of.

I suspect that I’m not alone, that a majority of us modern, urban Americans, when we read biblical references to fishermen, picture someone sitting lazily on the banks of a river with a pole stuck in the soil next to them, a line trailing off to a bobbing float, or we imagine Tom Skerrit standing in that river. But, although hook-and-line fishing was not unknown in the ancient world, it was then, as now, a recreational sort of fishing. When God says through Jeremiah that he is sending fishermen to catch the wayward people of Israel, when Jesus tells his new disciples that they will be catching people, the reference is to a very different sort of fishing.

The image we should have is of net fishing, probably using either a dragnet or a cast net. The dragnet is one of the oldest forms of fishing dating from the third millennium B.C. in Egypt. The dragnet, perhaps 250 to 300 yards long, and varing in depth from three to eight yards, would be taken out from the shore by boat which would proceed straight out for a distance dropping the net behind it, then turn parallel to the shore for a bit, and then turn back to the shore. The bottom of the net would be weighted with sinkers, and the top would have cork floats attached. Tow lines attached to each end of the net were then hauled in toward the shore by a team of as many as sixteen men for large nets, fewer for for smaller nets. This method of fishing is described in the Bible; we find dragnets mentioned in the Old Testament books of Habakkuk^[6] and Ezekiel.^[7]

A cast net was, as the name suggests, thrown or cast onto the water by one or two men either from shore or from a boat. After it had sunk to the bottom, trapping fish within it, the fishermen would dive down to it and either retrieve the fish individually placing them into pouches, or they would gather the whole net into a sort of purse containing all the fish and bring them up together. This seems to be the sort of fishing that Luke describes in today’s lesson and that Matthew also describes in his version of this story. Matthew says, “As [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea…”^[8]

In either event, the fishers-of-people metaphor give us an image not of the solitary angler, but of teamwork. Biblical fishing was a community activity, something that required unity of purpose and cooperation in action to be effective.

And this is also true of hunting. As with fishing, we tend to think of hunting today as a solitary pursuit. Sure, people go out hunting in pairs or small groups, but when it comes right down to it, it’s one person with a high-powered rifle or a shot gun. Even bow hunting these days is a one-person activity. I had a parishioner in Kansas who was a bow hunter. He once showed me his equipment. Before then, I had conceived of a bow as basically a bent stick with a piece of string connecting the ends, but that doesn’t come close to describing this man’s bow. This thing had pulleys and counter-weights and sights; it looked like some sort of Klingon weapon from Star Trek! But that’s not the sort of bows the people of Jeremiah’s time had.

In Biblical times, hunting wasn’t much different from what we see depicted on those prehistoric cave paintings in Lascaux, France, and elsewhere around the world: a lot of men with pointy sticks surrounding a large, dangerous animal, working together to bring it down to provide meat for their community. Like fishing, hunting was a matter of teamwork.

So, although God did promise to send a single shepherd, the Messiah, God in Jeremiah’s prophecy promised to send, and on the shore of the Sea of Galilee Jesus began to assemble, a group of fishermen, a group of hunters, a team working together to gather God’s people. Therefore, I think the other thing that we are to take from the linkage of today’s Isaiah lesson with today’s Gospel story is this: calls do come in different ways, and they also direct us into different ministries. The call to discipleship is different from the call to be a prophet, and the difference is not just between the dramatic and the prosaic. There is also the difference between the solitary ministry of the prophet, to which some are called, and the corporate, shared ministry of the disciple, to which we are all called.

ln today’s epistle lesson, Paul writes to the Corinthian church about his singular call as an apostle, being, as he says, “Last of all … one untimely born … the least of the apostles.”^[9] Another person might have considered his Damascus Road experience a call like Isaiah’s, a dramatic vocation to a solitary, prophetic ministry, but with rather uncharacteristic humility Paul describes himself as merely one among many, part of a community of faith, a missionary team. “Whether then it was I or they, … we proclaim[ed] and … you believed.”^[10]

God’s fishing team is the church, the baptized. It is made up of all the spiritual descendants of the ones to whom Jesus said, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” We are the ones who are called to continue those first disciples’ work of fishing and hunting for the lost and strayed children of God.

Jesus once used this metaphor in a parable in which he compared the kingdom of heaven to the work of a fishing team. The kingdom, he said, “is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.”^[11] According to Jesus, that sorting will be the responsibility of the angels at the end of the age but, in the meantime, when we have our net full of every kind, what are we to do? Well, we certainly aren’t going to kill and eat them!

No, quite the contrary! We are to serve them. If they are hungry, we are to feed them. If they are thirsty, we are to give them refreshment. If they are sick, we are to treat them. If they are homeless, we are to give them shelter.^[12]

Jesus made it clear, we are to welcome all the different sorts “fish:” even if they are very different from us, we are to welcome them, care for them, and share the good news with them. If they join us, that’s great, but that’s really not our goal. Jesus shared a drink of water with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, but he didn’t require her to change her religion.^[13] Paul shared the good news with many Gentile communities, but he didn’t require that they become Jewish. Peter shared a meal with the Gentiles in Joppa, but did not require them to join the circumcised.^[14] Phillip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch, but did not demand that he be other than he was.^[15]

We are to do the same, to welcome our diverse catch into community without demanding conformity. “May they be one as we are one,”^[16] Jesus prayed to the Father on the night before he died. Our mission is that flexible, dynamic unity, not a fixed and static uniformity. As Bishop Mariann Budde of Washington reminded the nation a couple of weeks ago, “unity that incorporates diversity and transcends disagreement [is built on] the solid foundations of dignity, honesty, and humility.”^[17] Unity is our mission; it is also our fishing net.

We live in a broken world and in a nation sorely beset by discord and conflict; in this world, we are, in the words of one Christian author, “surrounded by an ocean of disagreements,”^[18] by what our Prayer Book calls “the great dangers [of] our unhappy divisions.”^[19] It is into that ocean that we must cast our net, which is “the captivating romance of [Christian] unity.”^[20] The church’s mission is to model and offer a unity of purpose, a community of diverse persons knotted together in faith by the cords dignity, honesty, and humility.

Isaiah’s call to prophetic ministry was a vision of the fundamental unity of God; Jesus’ calling of Simon Peter, James, and John was into the fundamental unity of the church. “From now on you will be catching people” is an invitation to enter into and then offer to the world what church planter Kayla Anderson calls “the beauty of dissimilar creatures joining together … in harmony,” a unity which “overwhelm[s the] heart with wonder” and “astounds every on looker,”^[21] a vision every bit as overwhelming and astounding as that witnessed by Isaiah.
Let us pray:

O God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, our only Savior, the Prince of Peace: Give us grace seriously to lay to heart the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions; take away all hatred and prejudice, and whatever else may hinder us from godly union and concord; that, as there is but one Body and one Spirit, one hope of our calling, one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, so we may be all of one heart and of one soul, united in one holy bond of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may with one mind and one mouth glorify you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.^[22]

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 9, 2025 to the people of St. Timothy’s Episccopal Church, Massillon, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The illustration is an etching by Jan Luyken illustrating the Parable of the Fishing Net (Matthew 13:47-48) in the Bowyer Bible, Bolton, England (1795).

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Scripture are from the New Revised Version Updated Edition.

^[1] Matthew 4:19

^[2] Luke 5:10b

^[3] Reginald Heber, Holy, Holy, Holy, The Hymnal 1982 (Church Hymnal, New York:1985), #362 (emphasis added)

^[4] Jeremiah 16:14-16

^[5] Robert Redford, director, A River Runs Through It, Allied Filmmakers & Wildwood Enterprises, 1992

^[6] Habbakuk 1:15-17

^[7] Ezekiel 47:10

^[8] Matthew 4:18

^[9] 1 Corinthians 15:8-9

^[10] 1 Corinthians 15:11

^[11] Matthew 13:47-48

^[12] See Matthew 25

^[13] John 4

^[14] Acts 11

^[15] Acts 8

^[16] John 17:11 (slightly edited)

^[17] Transcript of Sermon by the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, January 21, 2025, last accessed 24 January 2025, accessed 6 February 2025

^[18] Billy Holland, Living on Purpose: Unity is beautiful but very rare indeed, The Chattanooga Times Free Press, September 28, 2018, accessed 7 February 2025

^[19] Prayer for the Unity of the Church, The Book of Common Prayery 1979, page 818

^[20] Kayla Andersen, The Captivating Romance of Church Unity: How to Attract a Watching World with the Beauty of Christ, Take It from Kayla, February 3, 2023, accessed 7 February 2025

^[21] Ibid.

^[22] BCP 1979, op. cit.