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January 23, 2005 North Park Presbyterian Church Fish Stories Patricia K. Townsend Matthew 4:12-23
This week our pianist is Deirdre Murphy, like Ellen who was here last week and David who visited the week before last but hasn’t played for us yet, she is a student of the same piano teacher. Their teacher plays the organ at Amherst Community Church on Sunday mornings. That got me started thinking about my piano teacher Mabel Schuneman and the year that I was in fifth grade. I grew up in the snow belt of southwestern Michigan and went to one of the last one-room country school houses there. My classroom teacher Mabel Schuneman also taught private piano lessons in the afternoon after school. She just had a few of us piano students so our recitals were played at the intermission of the Christmas play on a Friday night at the school. I had a great part in the play that year as the Spirit of Christmas, but I was not the greatest piano student so I was dreading the intermission recital. Miss Schunemann said I played with nice touch and feeling and I read music well but I rarely played up to tempo, not being disciplined enough to practice the boring scales and exercises she assigned. That year my recital piece was a waltz, Skating in the Park. The night of the school play our dog Skippy got loose and followed our car through the snow the mile and a half to school, unknown to us, sitting outside quietly until intermission, when he heard me playing Skating in the Park and began to howl. Skippy howled through my whole performance, and Skating in the Park never seemed so long and slow to me as that awful night. My embarrassment was made worse by knowing that I could have practiced more faithfully. (Though my dog Skippy provided the evidence that I had indeed practiced my recital waltz. He didn't howl when the other kids played their pieces. This is a point that I did not appreciate at the time.) Piano students aren’t just learning facts or ideas about music, to pass a test. They are learning how to play the piano, by becoming an apprentice to someone who already knows how to play. When we say that Jesus was a teacher and his disciples were his students, sometimes we are thinking about all of the things that Jesus said: the stories that he told, almost like a really good schoolteacher. But I like to think about Jesus as more like a piano teacher than a classroom teacher. The disciples weren’t just learning facts or ideas about life, Jesus was teaching his disciples how to live the Christian life. And that takes practice.
Today's gospel reading from Matthew tells about Jesus calling the first disciples, two sets of brothers Andrew and Simon Peter, and James and John. It's one of the few stories that is found in all four gospels--though with differences of details. All four gospels agree that the response of the fishermen was to drop everything and follow Jesus. Who are you following? Whose disciple are you? To whom have you apprenticed yourself? We are all the disciples of many people in our past--parents, teachers, celebrities we have emulated. Even after all these years you probably remember as clearly as if it were yesterday who it was who taught you to drive a car or to hang dry wall or to make pie crust or play the piano. What could disciples of Jesus expect to learn from following him? What kind of apprenticeship is it? Not piano or carpentry or even fishing. It is an apprenticeship in living. Probably none of us would be here this morning if we were not disciples or apprentices of Jesus. We might protest that we are bumbling beginners, all thumbs in this matter of kingdom living; few of us would claim to be advanced students. An apprentice or disciple spends some time with the master teacher, taking lessons, watching, and listening, but most of the time we're just practicing at home with our old dog Skippy listening in, whether it's learning a waltz, Skating in the Park, or doing whatever it is we do on a daily basis at home or on the job. For me, most of my waking working time, that has meant being an anthropologist, trying to make sense of my research data and writing books and articles. For you, maybe it’s teaching school, repairing machinery, or caring for someone who is young or old or sick. Chances are pretty good that it is not something Jesus ever did. The world of work has changed a lot in 2000 years. As lay people, we need to spend more time than we do in trying to figure out how to follow Jesus in our Monday to Friday world of work. We can't, I think, rely primarily on our ministers for this. They can provide some resources, but we lay people have to minister to each other. The first step may be to figure out whose disciples we are, who has influenced us, the teachers and mentors from whom we learned to work and live. Some have said that one of the main tasks of adult life is figuring this out. (Dallas Willard, 1998, The Divine Conspiracy, p.272) We first learned to live from our parents. If we were to go for family counseling, we would ask ourselves how our family of origin shaped us. We might become aware that there were addictive patterns that we had been blind to. We need to consider whether we want to continue replicating this for another generation in our behavior and family relationships. In addition, I'm finding that it's time to decide whose disciple I am on the job, who has shaped the work I do, the way I do it. Once we've figured out whose disciple we have been, we're ready to ask, how might I do my work differently as Jesus' disciple? Once in a while, a person might decide that Jesus wouldn't do this work at all. Some kinds of work are destructive, they damage people that Jesus would have sought to heal and help. This exception aside, when we look in the gospels we see Jesus doing a huge range of tasks from the most menial, like washing smelly feet, to those requiring a huge amount of intellectual preparation and poise, like debating with the religious and government leaders of his day. As we spend time watching Jesus in motion we see how he connected with others without coming across as pious or judgmental. Turning back to the gospel, what did it mean to be a fisherman who was a disciple of Jesus? Despite the picture we have here of Andrew and Peter, James and John leaving their nets, boats, and family business partners, I do not believe they quit being fishermen. They might have taken an extended leave of absence, to be sure. But you will recall that in one of the stories Jesus appears to seven of the disciples soon after the resurrection they were already out in a boat fishing (John 21). Once when there was a controversy about paying taxes, Jesus sent Peter out with a hook and line to catch a fish. In its mouth he would find a coin to pay the temple tax for both of them. Yet despite having all these fisherman disciples Jesus didn't tell fishing stories. Have you ever noticed that? Of all the parables and teachings of Jesus that are recorded in the four gospels, many of them dealing with agriculture, housework, construction, and business investment, there is only one parable about fishing and it is only told in one of the gospels (Matt. 13:47-50). In his fishing parable Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven with a net thrown in the sea. It catches all kinds of fish. When they pull the net on shore they sort the good fish into baskets and throw out the bad. Similarly, he says, at the end of the age the angels will separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. This apocalyptic story somehow has not caught on as one of our Sunday School favorites. Why did Jesus tell so few stories about fishing? It's only my opinion, but maybe Jesus left that for Peter, Andrew, James and John. Telling fishing stories was their job. Just like my job is to tell anthropology stories. Your job is to tell musician stories or nursing stories, parenting stories or engineering stories--each of us telling our own stories of the ways that the kingdom is coming into our Monday to Friday lives. Stories that use the language of work, the jargon of our profession, to tell the good news in vivid new ways. Stories of healing and wholeness and lives turned right side up. Stories of following Jesus here and now. |
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