The Remedy of Love
Isaiah 9:1-4; I Corinthians 1:10-18; Matthew 4:12-23
As [Jesus] went from there, he saw
two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John,
in the boat
with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them.
It is said that in the ancient world fisherman would spend more time preparing and mending their nets than they would actually spend fishing because the truth about fishing nets is this: you cannot catch fish unless your net is whole. Now the good news for us today is that “God is in the business of mending our nets.”[1]
The challenge, however, is that many of us Christians
assume that our nets are not in need of mending. “So what if there’s a little
hole here, a bit bigger tear there? We’re not worried; our nets are good enough
to catch just enough of what we need of Jesus.”
The net that Jesus casts is not about catching people
for the local church; the net that Jesus teaches the disciples to cast is the
one that is woven and held by God’s holy hands and offers each person the gifts
of unconditional love and eternal life .
We’ve heard this passage about James and John, Peter
and Andrew, hundreds of times, and it might seem like an over-told, not quite believable,
fish story with the same old, not quite believable, message that most of us are
well-trained to disregard with secret thoughts like, “There’s no way! Drop
everything—our livelihoods, our families, our homes—immediately, like the brothers did—in order to follow Jesus? C’mon!
That was then; this is now. My life is fine just the way it is.” But is it
fine…really; is it full of the love that matters?
Holy scripture tells us that Jesus led ordinary
people, like the disciples, to do extraordinary things, like casting nets of
love upon the lost and hurting people and bringing them into the kingdom that
comes near to us in Jesus Christ. The disciples and Jesus traveled around
Galilee for three years, fishing for people by teaching in the synagogues, preaching the
gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and sickness” (v 23). Jesus’
approach was a very different kind of fishing than the disciples had ever seen
or done before.
And so it
was for a Canadian game warden who confronted a man in Ontario as he was
leaving a lake with buckets of fish. The game warden asked the man,
“Do you have a license to catch those fish?” The man replied to the game
warden, “No, sir. These are my pet fish.” “Pet fish?” the warden replied. “Yes,
sir, every night I take these fish down to the lake and let them swim around
for a while. I whistle and they jump back into their buckets, and I take them
home.”“No Way!” The game warden said. “Fish can’t do that!”
The man looked at the game warden for a moment, and then said, “Here, I’ll show you. It really works.”“OK, I’ve GOT to see this!” The man poured the fish into the water and stood and waited. After several minutes, the warden asked, “Well?”“Well what?” The man asked. “When are you going to call them back?” the game warden prompted. “Call who back?” the man asked. “The FISH!” shouted the warden. “What fish?” the man asked.
“What
fish?” Peter, Andrew, James and John must have been wondering as they cast off
everything important to them and jumped into a life of following Jesus. “What kind
of net will we use to fish for people?”
It
was, and is, Christ’s net of a holy love. Jesus came to earth to cast his net upon
the “fish” who were sick, or lost, or lonely; the “fish” who were confused, or
frightened, or lazy.
- He aimed at the ones upended, downtrodden, and dumbfounded;
- he reeled in the sin-sick, the cold-hearted and the innocent;
- and he did not forget the wayward, the belligerent, and even the evil.
People of Capernaum and beyond could not jump into Jesus’
net fast enough! Why? Because everyone
desires to be loved.
Love doesn’t cost anything and yet the soul is willing
to give everything for it. Love runs its own ad campaign. As one child said,
“Love is its own because.”
Dr Ira Byock in his book, The Four Things that Matter Most: A Book about Living, names Love
as the fourth thing that matters most. He writes, “Love is the most powerful of
human emotions. And ‘I love you’ is arguably the single most important sentence
in any language.”[2]
Expressing love is vital to making our relationships
complete and whole. Physical affection is commonly equated with sex, but there
are many forms of physical love that can be intimate without being sexual: a
mother bathing her baby; best friends walking arm in arm or hand in hand. Speaking
love is just as important; yet, how many of us come from families that “just
don’t do that.”
Gunter, a colleague of Dr Byock at the University of
Montana, and his father came from a long line of stoic German farmers. His
father was close to death, and he asked to speak with Gunter alone. Gunter
could not have been more dumbfounded when his stoic Lutheran father asked,
“Son, would you please shave me?” Knowing his father, Gunter realized that his
father was really asking his son to touch him.
Gunter said it felt a bit strange at first to touch
his father’s face in such an intimate, tender way. He took his father’s old
shaving brush, cup, and special shaving soap and worked up a rich, smooth
lather. [I remember seeing my father’s shaving cup and brush in the bathroom
closet. I remember watching him lather his face and oh, so carefully, shaving
each part of his face and neck.] As Gunter stood behind his father and shaved
the front of his neck, chills ran up his spine. He realized he was replaying a
scene from his childhood. On his thirteenth birthday, Gunter’s father gave him
a Gillette safety razor, and that morning the father showed his son how to
shave for the first time.
“He stood behind me in front of the bathroom mirror
and showed me how to scoop the later up as I shaved my neck. It was an
important rite of passage for me at the time. I realized that we were
conducting a rite of passage for my father” too.[3]
The problem of so many people starving for love in our
day seems insurmountable to me at times. Then I remember President Eisenhower
once said, “If you can’t solve a problem as it is, enlarge it.” Henry David
Thoreau stated that “the remedy to love is more love.” I think that’s another
way of saying the same thing. If love is missing in your life, don’t crawl back
under the covers and hide from it: enlarge it!
If there are painful holes in our nets, then we need
to mend them with Christ’s holy love. We’ll be good to go, so that when Christ
calls us to follow him, we won’t be asking, “What fish?” and we will not be
content just to sing about following him, but we will immediately leave our
boats on the shoreline behind us, and by Christ’s side, we will seek other
seas.[4]
That’s what I call a remedy!
January 26, 2014/First Parish
Federated Church of South Berwick, ME/The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor
