Epiphany 3A - 1/23/11 Grace St. Paul s. In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly

Transcription

1 Epiphany 3A - 1/23/11 Grace St. Paul s In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ s disciples being fisherman, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fisherman and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman. Those are the opening words in Norman Maclean s evocative book, A River Runs Through It. I am not a fisher person, but it is impossible to not be moved by Maclean s exquisite prose and feel the deep connection he discovers linking God and creation with a fishing line. The language and artistry of fly fishing cannot help but stir the imagination and warm the soul. Maclean s novel stands with other classics of American literature that capture the romanticism of a solitary experience in the wilderness standing in a trout stream. I remember as a youth reading Hemingway s Big Two Hearted River and aching to have an experience of my own in the solitude of a 1

2 wilderness fly fishing experience. There is no doubt in my mind that God is felt just as profoundly in the poetry of a single fishing line touching the water in the back of beyond as God is right here in this sacred space. All of us know better, of course, but it is difficult to not think about this romantic image of a fly fisherman on a secluded stream or lake when we hear today s Gospel. Because God is so obvious to us in this vision, my sense is that it is not just Mr. Maclean s family that pictures individual disciples out with their fly rods catching trout when Jesus tells them that he will make them fishers of people. Perhaps it is not historically accurate, but it certainly is an affectionate and warm way to imagine the disciples. The fly fishing imagery also helps us deal a bit with the fact that Jesus is asking something of us today, something that we would rather not hear. It is, in fact, the one thing that absolutely terrifies us beyond description. Ask us to give up our favorite thing during Lent. We can handle that. Ask us to make a pilgrimage to a foreign land. We can do that too. Even request that we chair the stewardship committee, for heaven s sake. Go ahead Jesus, tell us to walk over a bed of hot coals. 2

3 Throw us in an arena of hungry lions if you have to. But Jesus, please, not this. We will do anything. But please don t ask us to knock on the door of someone we don t know and ask them if they know you. Don t make us ask someone if they have ever heard the word Episcopal. Please, please, Jesus, don t ask us to fish for people. Yes, there is no way around it. Jesus is definitely calling us to be the E word. You and I are asked point blank to be...evangelists. Fear not, however. Because the Gospel, the Good News, is that maybe we have misunderstood this call the entire time. Could it be that the beautiful fishing imagery of Maclean and Hemingway has also led us down the wrong evangelical path? As much as I love the way it has helped us see God in creation, we do need to remember the type of fishing that Jesus was really talking about. The goal in fly fishing is to choose the right fly and the right location and to make the right cast so that one can catch a particular variety and size of fish. From this perspective, we might understand Jesus s call to be evangelists, to fish for people, as a process of locating a specific kind of person and pitching them the right ideas to reel them in. But of course, first century Mediterranean fishing was done with nets, nets that never 3

4 differentiated among species. Every color, every variety, even creatures other than fish, were pulled up in those nets. Herein lies Jesus s metaphor for evangelism. We are not taught to hook the kind of people we want into believing, but rather it is an invitational approach that gathers a diverse group in a single net. It is indiscriminate. Our call as evangelists is to bring people together in their difference. I believe it is also helpful to bust up another myth that we have often taken from today s Gospel. We hear that the disciples immediately drop their nets to begin their new careers fishing for people. We might imagine them walking away from the sea forever as they begin their new occupations with Jesus. But as we read on in the Gospels, we hear that the disciples have not abandoned their careers at all. They return to the sea and their jobs. This also says much to us today. Jesus is not necessarily asking us to give up our lives or our job or our passion to fulfill our call as evangelists. Most often, it is through our own life calling and passion that we have the best opportunity to reach out to others. The stuff 4

5 that makes us tick is our vehicle to connect with others and bring them into the net of diversity. All of this gives us a general idea of the nature of evangelism as Jesus taught us. We are called to bring people together in their difference. We are also called to do this through our own passions and our own life s work. As Francis of Assisi is said to have put it, evangelism is all about preaching the Gospel every day, sometimes using words. Through the example of our lives, people are called to faith. But stopping there is a cop out. Jesus also most specifically calls us to direct evangelism, to sharing our faith experience with everyone. Does that mean we are called to convert people of other faith traditions to Christianity? That does not seem to be the vision of Jesus. But we are called to share our experience of Christianity with all and also to learn from the religious experiences of everyone else. So what does a 21st century evangelist look like? I think the best way to capture the specifics of our calling today is through another fishing story. A couple years ago, Jean and I fulfilled a lifelong dream of going to Alaska. It was the best trip of our lives and the highlight of that 5

6 wilderness adventure for me was our experience at a place called McNeil River State Game Sanctuary and Refuge in the southwest region of the magnificent state. McNeil River contains the world s largest concentration of brown bears, commonly known as grizzlies in the lower 48. The bears congregate at McNeil Falls to do their own fishing for salmon. Human visitation is limited at McNeil River to a two and a half month period from June to August. Only ten people at a time can visit the sanctuary for four day periods. The sanctuary is 100 miles from the closest town, a town that cannot be reached by highway. To choose who gets to visit the site, the state of Alaska runs a lottery. You have a 7% chance of winning a spot. Our friend Stan Burman, a national park service administrator, applied nine years in a row before he finally got selected. But by some wild twist of fate, Jean and I were selected on our one and only chance to go. Each day, we walked two and a half miles from our campground to the falls. On the first day, it was just Jean and I traveling with our guide, the only person who had been at McNeil River all 20 years since it was opened for visitation. Whenever we reached a section of trail 6

7 with a blind spot, our guide called to the bears by name. Hey Susie, is that you Betty? At first, we thought he was just kidding around. But we came to realize that he personally knew these bears and recognized 90% of them. When we were about 200 feet from the hill above the river, Jim said to us, okay, anytime now you will start seeing them. Jean said to him, What happens if we have come all this way and we don t get to see one? And Jim said, I ll take that bet right now. Just at that moment a gigantic mass of brown fur lumbered up the slope about 100 feet to our right. In his mouth was an 8 pound salmon. He ran behind us at a speed that made our heads spin. A second bear crested the hill right behind him, chasing after bear number one. Bear number two quickly ascertained that the fastest way to reach the other bear and that fish was to cut him off at the pass. So rather than run around the same direction the first bear went, he ran directly at him. The only problem is that we were centered directly between the two bears. He acted like we were not even there. His massive claw missed my foot by no more than 12 inches. I smelled his fish breath and I felt his hair on the top of his back as he charged past me. 7

8 For the next four days, we sat there at the falls mesmerized by the bears. We also got to know them well enough to call them by their name. There was Plunger, the adolescent who caught his fish by swimming for them like a scuba diver. There was Methusaleh, who was so old his hair was white. He stood on the bank, never got wet and picked out one fish after another. The bears would wander up within ten feet of us, quietly eating their fish while we ate our peanut butter. They responded to us the same way they did the bald eagles that flew past them. We were part of the natural scene. They made absolutely no association between humans and food. In the 20 years since it has opened, there has never been a single incident between a bear and a human, other than one almost stepping on someone s foot. Jean and I also saw bears all over the state at places like Brooks Falls, the place that you see in the National Geographic specials with the bears catching leaping salmon. At each of those places, gigantic efforts are made to separate people from bears. But the bears at McNeil River are different. They have seen people their entire lives 8

9 and they have never been hurt by a person. Though they could have ripped Jean and I apart in a matter of seconds, they did not. McNeil River is a bold experiment. It goes against everything that we know about nature. But because someone had the audacity to try it, we have have learned something amazing about the relationship between humans and animals. We can be in relationship with each other on an intimate level. We can respect one another without hurting one another. We can get to know each other s names. Apparently, the lion can lie down with the lamb. Beloved, this morning I would like to suggest to you that this is our calling as evangelists in Tucson today. We are here to boldly suggest that our entire understanding of how we relate to one another can change. We are called to create a relationship between animals and humans that allows us to coexist. We are called to bring together humans who previously could not walk into a room at the same time and have them embrace one another. We are called to change the natural order of our society and bring it to the vision of Jesus, a vision where all of us are happily together in the same net. 9

10 This past Thursday, we began the McNeil River experiment right here at Grace St. Paul s. We hosted a gathering of local clergy as we talked about how we could move into the future together. Weeks ago, an interfaith group also met at the office of Bishop Kicanas of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. It was an important meeting, but as some big mouth at that meeting pointed out, everyone in that room was the same species of fish. Yes, it was an interfaith gathering, but all of us were mainline religious folk. But this past Thursday, right here in McBride Hall, 80% of the clergy were Evangelical Christians. We planned together, we prayed together and we laughed and cried together. We also vowed that this was only the beginning. As we come together after today s worship for our annual meeting, it is this vision of evangelism that I ask each of you to embrace. Being a church where diversity comes first is not easy. We are going to disagree with each other often. But beloved, disagreement is not what kills churches, like mindedness is what kills churches. When we are all trout, we cannot possibly live into the vision of Jesus. We must disagree if we are going to have any chance to create the realm of God. Only in our diversity can we turn Grace St. 10

11 Paul s into McNeil River. So let us be bold enough to live into that experiment today. Then let us leave here with an eye to turning Tucson into McNeil River. Let each of us be willing to sit with the grizzlies and discover how much they have to teach us. Let each of us never be afraid to share our faith with those we have previously feared. And he said, Follow me and I will make you fish for people...and you will bring the kingdom of heaven to the world. Amen. 11