What's on the other side of the boat?

 

These are all chickens, but they are being chickens in new ways.

Text: John 21:1-19

There’s so much in this story of the resurrected Jesus and a group of the disciples. There’s the news that the disciples finally came out of that locked room. The demonstration that Peter is kind of a goofball who fishes naked and swims with his clothes on. The fact that Jesus likes to grill out. The conversation between Jesus and Peter around the charcoal fire, and that’s a big one - Peter has stood around a charcoal fire one time before, and it was the time that he denied Jesus three times. Now Jesus gives him the chance to walk back those denials, one by one, so that the denials go up in smoke. The response of Jesus that if you love him, you are to feed his sheep, to provide the kind of abundance to the people who are in need that Jesus has provided in his life. The fact that Jesus can still provide life-giving abundance after his death. These are all worthy subjects for discussion and exposition.

But today, I’d like to focus on the fishing trip.

The disciples have come out of their locked room, no longer frightened for their lives, thanks to Jesus coming to them last week and bidding them peace, or as Dale put it in his sermon, wishing them the wholeness of God. And what do they do when they come out of their isolation and confusion? They go back to doing what they did before. They were fishermen, so they go fishing, because that’s what fishermen do, right?

And they fish in the same way they have fished before, all night, off of one side of the boat.

And, sadly, they didn’t catch anything.

And then Jesus, incognito, comes walking along the shore and calls out to them, hmm, you guys aren’t having any luck, are you? How about casting your nets on the other side of the boat this morning? That’s where the fish are. 

And of course, they do what all us church people do. We immediately respond, “But this is the way we’ve always done it!” 

Even when the old way doesn’t work any more. 

Still, the disciples humor him. Ok random guy, if you say so, we’ll try that new way, they say, perhaps with gritted teeth or false smiles. And you can bet that they are saying under their breaths as they haul out the nets again, “We don’t think this will work, we haven’t done it this way before, we know what we are doing and what has worked all this time, we are fisherman and who is this new person coming to tell us how to do things?”

And then they haul in so many fish that they can’t even get them on board the boat. That random guy on the beach was right. They did a new thing and came up with a generous, abundant, life-giving yield.

The stories of Jesus appearing to his disciples after God had raised him from the dead are not just stories about Jesus. They are also stories about the future of the faith community, that which would become The Church. The stories address how the community will experience Jesus, and how they will live out their faith and carry Jesus’s work forward. The stories feature abundance, forgiveness, reminders of teaching about ministering to others in love, and to provide abundance - in fact, the stories tell us that the church is about the traditions that Jesus already showed and honored in his life - loving God, loving neighbor, receiving abundance and providing it to others, the traditional traditions if you will.

But they also show that these traditions now need to be translated into new ways for a new age. In today’s story Jesus affirms that fishing is still important. But how you fish sometimes needs to change. Sometimes it’s time to let the old way go and try on the new way.

This is hard for the church. We remember and value our traditions and our traditional ways and how they both shaped and fit into our worldviews and the culture around us. 

But we can change. At one time, faith stories were circulated orally, and then they were written down, but many people could not read, and then they were able to be read in church and then at home and then performed in plays and then in movies and the Gospel was the Gospel, but it was told in new ways to reach new people as the world changed.

And the world has changed again, is still changing, and will continue to change, and the Good News is still Good News but we have to find new ways of living it out, of telling it, of sharing it, new ways both of receiving and providing abundance that connect with the people who are living in new ways. In this new world, people text instead of calling, and don’t carry cash, and listen to podcasts and books through ear buds and get news on video and have access to the whole world 24/7 via the internet just to name a very few “new ways” of the new world. Money and stories and news are still important, but people access and use them in different ways. 

So, the fish are still out there, but they might be on the other side of the boat. And when we are stuck in “why can’t we just go back and do things the way we always did” which some people call “the seven last words of the church,” and when our response to the new world is that it is just wrong or dumb and people ought not to have the values they have (because, it’s really not attractive to denigrate the people we want to be part of us), we are not proclaiming the Good News and we are not providing abundance any more. We’re just stuck.

So let us heed Jesus today. Be open to change. Think different. Try something new. Welcome the new world - and grow with it.