“I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well. Just then, watching his lines, he saw one of the projecting green sticks dip sharply.” And just like that, after 85 days, the old man in Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea has caught a fish.
Such is life when you fish. Long periods of empty drifting on the water, followed by a few brief seconds of excitement and adrenaline. But that excitement makes all of the drifting worth it.
Excitement when fishing is always rare, but to get that occasional big strike knowledge of bait is key. Worms for bluegill, minnows for crappie, flies for trout, plugs for bass, sardines or albacore if you're fishing in Galilee. Some bait comes in pristine packaging, some you make yourself when you fancy yourself an angler, but when you fish with nets, the bait comes slopping out of a bucket, all messy, seemingly useless.
In the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus comes across Simon, Andrew, James, and John. He says, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” All of my life, I have just assumed that Jesus means that these four guys are supposed to stop throwing their literal nets out of boats, gathering up sardines and barbels, and instead start tossing out the figurative net of the gospel, scooping in souls.
I wonder if those four guys thought the same thing. I wonder if they were thinking, “This is great! We will be followers of this amazing prophet. We will do amazing things. We will change the world!” Something like that. I wonder if any of them thought, “He’s asking us to be bait.”
But that’s exactly what Jesus asks of all these disciples that he gathers up. They will fish for people by being the bait. Each disciple has a different personality, and each personality has a different way of attracting certain people; they are not interchangeable Cybermen. Jesus picks twelve of them, and I like to think he picked each for a particular and different reason, because each will have a different story about how Christ changed that life and a different perspective on who Christ is:
A zealot whose story of the Lord can catch you up in a frenzy, making you want to rush out and change the world;
A doubter who will sit with you at a corner table of a café talking about what if’s and I’m not sure’s, but if this isn’t true then what can we ever have faith in?
A thick-witted hot head who will deny Jesus and recount his story to you with tears brimming in his eyes whispering, “And then he said, ‘I still love you, Peter.’”
Even a betrayer, who drifted too far, to a dead zone in his spiritual sea and never came back. Even this man is bait to people who know what it’s like to be alone in dark, evil places but think, “I cannot be like him. I cannot go that far. I need to find a way back.”
Different bait for different fish. Christ asks all his followers, all of us to be bait. To be thrown out there into the world, to attract others to his Gospel. To fish for people. But being tossed out there into the sea, not knowing what’s going to happen next, can be disconcerting to say the least.
What if people laugh at what I have to say? You know what – they just might. Laugh along with them and say, “It is funny! Stuff like this wasn't supposed to happen to me.”
What if people call me crazy? They might do that, too. An infinite God that loves me as an individual collection of cells surrounding a soul? There's some crazy in that, for sure.
What if I say the wrong thing? Then stop saying things and listen to what others need. Be interested in their longings and their fears and their hopes.
What if they say “no.” Well, where do you think we got the saying “there are other fish in the sea” in the first place?
But remember something about this, about being human bait: The bait is not just tossed out there, floating along aimlessly, mindlessly. God goes out there with us.
From the moment of our baptism, we are united with Christ. We are marked and sealed as Christ’s own forever. That bond is enduring. A couple of weeks ago, when we baptized the newest Christians in the whole wide world, we promised that we also will “follow Christ and obey him as our Lord.” Not only does our baptismal covenant require us to live a life in Christ, but it also means that Christ will live that life – in us.
Christ goes with us as we go into the world, out into that sea of races and cultures and genders and ages.
…fisher and bait, working as one.
We will not catch everyone every time. But if enough of us take our fishing seriously, we can touch so many different kinds of lives. Not each kind of bait attracts every fish, but just as the body of Christ has many members fulfilling different functions, Christ the Fisher has many different sorts of bait. Look around you, and you will see what I mean.
Whether we are cast into ministry at the altar; whether we are cast into ministry at the office water cooler; whether it be in a medical setting, volunteering at the community kitchen, caring for our parents, meeting friends at the food court at the mall. Wherever we are cast, we have a chance to catch fish, to show Christ to the world, to bring people here.
Ultimately, that’s what today’s Gospel reading is asking us. What can we each do, to present Christ to the world? How do we dedicate our talents and persons to this work? We go from here to love and serve the lord.
We do that by serving others. We pray for courage to live our lives in Christ openly. We pray for wisdom to express our faith in ways that touch others. And we pray that the lives we touch will be drawn into a fulfilling relationship with God. We pray that God will use us for bait.
It is hard work, being bait. It is daunting. Sometimes there are long periods with no success, and we even wonder if we should be involved in this business.
Telling people about Christ can seem so counter-cultural and uncomfortable. Yup. That is so.
But he says, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”
We say we follow Christ; it’s up to us to keep our side of that bargain. It’s time to be bait. It’s time to get wet.