"Do not be afraid;
from now on you will be catching people”
As is true for many of you here, I grew up in a
household where eating fish on Friday was the norm. It was at that dinner table that I developed
my love of seafood: flounder, halibut, cod, shrimp, lobster, fresh sardines and
tuna, smelts…I especially loved those little critters…. salmon, trout, bass,
and herring in cream sauce. It never seemed like any kind of depravation to
skip the meat on Friday and enjoy homemade fish and chips, fried flounder fillets, creamed salmon on
toasted points, or the occasional lobster bisque or a cold shrimp cocktail with my Father’s tabasco and
horseradish laced sauce. I looked forward to Friday night dinner and was
actually disappointed that the Church loosened its insistence of meatless
Fridays in my teen years. One of the jokes in my high school days was what was
going to happen to all those souls who were doing time in purgatory for eating
a hot dog on Friday? I just figured they got paroled to go inside the pearly
gates.
Into my married years, my husband brought along
with his pool cue and train set, a full complement of salt water fishing gear.
I actually think his love of fishing in the bay and ocean was a genetic
throwback to his Swedish ancestors who, we found out later, owned a fishing
business in Sweden. He would go fishing with his work buddies several times a
year. Now you need to know that Bob only caught the fish. He did not eat the fish, okay maybe some
broiled scallops, but in his book they were not fish. And, most importantly, he
did not clean fish. So one hot August day when I was five months pregnant with
my first child, my husband came home from a fishing trip with a rather large
blue fish. Now he knew that I liked fresh bluefish cooked on the grill with
olive oil, garlic and lemon, so he thought he was doing a wonderful thing when,
instead of selling the fish to the fish mongers who waited for the fishing
boats to return to Sheepshead Bay, he thought it would be a lovely gift to
bring the fish home surrounded by packed ice…and it was the whole magilla:
innards, scales and fins. He then opened
the refrigerator and took out a cold beer and made himself comfortable firing
up the grill so I could enjoy the fresh fish he had so lovingly brought home to
me…the five month pregnant wife who could not even look a dead fish without
feeling more than a tad nauseous. I held my nose, wrapped that sucker in a plastic
grab age bag and gingerly tossed it into the garbage and brought out a nice
steak to grill instead. He never came
home again with a whole fish. He
actually was happy to pay the deck hands to fillet the fish for him. It was a teachable moment, and he was somewhat teachable.
In today’s Gospel we have a fish related story as
well. Peter and his fishing crew are
about to pull into port after a very disappointing fishing day. They caught
nothing. They were tired and sore, ready
to call it a day and go home to sleep. Jesus instructs them to drop their nets
again….nets that had returned empty. When they did, on faith alone, their nets
became so full that they needed other fishermen to help them bring in the haul.
Peter then exclaims: "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
Then Jesus says with all authority, “ Do not be
afraid, from now on you will be catching people”. Now I have to admit to you
that I like the older translation “…fishers of men”, but I digress.
And that is still a role that as thoughtful Christians we are called to
be. We are called to be the conduits of
the Good News in our community, our workplace, our families and the world. We know we have a
message to share with others, and today we can review and renew our commitment
to become those fishers in our neighborhood.
