Drop Your Nets

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, January 26, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Here we are at the start of the year, and here we are at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel with the calling of Peter and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee, James and John. Their decision to “Drop their nets” and follow Jesus is one of those paradigmatic test cases for conversion. It’s deeply ingrained in our understanding of the Christian life. We hear about people “making a decision for Christ,” in a single, all-consuming moment. Sometimes, people can even tell you the exact time, place, and date of this moment. 

I’m not denying the reality of these sudden moments of conversion. They are well-attested in scripture through the likes of Peter, Paul, Isaiah, and Samuel. A dramatic experience of the in-breaking otherness of God reveals itself to the person and is followed by a radical change in the direction of the person’s life. But the trouble comes when we think of this paradigm as the only way conversion happens. We might get stuck with the idea that we haven’t really been converted yet, or that we’re second-rate Christians because we don’t have a date and time stamp on our decision to follow Jesus.

Here’s where St. Benedict might be useful to us. Benedict talks about conversion not as a single moment, but as a continual process, a turning, and re-turning, to Jesus as the source of all beauty, goodness, and truth. In Benedict’s mind, conversion is a day by day practice--even a moment by moment practice. My Rector in Philadelphia used to joke that he need to be converted every morning before his feet hit the floor! But the question we have to ask is what does it mean to turn, to repent? What are we turning from and what are we turning towards? Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO talks about conversion and repentance as, “changing the direction we look for happiness.” In his understanding, human beings are made for happiness, made for union and communion with God. 

The trouble is, we come to fully-developed self-consciousness without an experience of God’s love and so we start looking for it in all the wrong places--in fame, in power and control, in seeking approval and earning esteem, in sensual pleasures. We start seeking for happiness in all the familiar places, all the wrong places as the cowboy song goes, and can’t seem to shake the sense of something missing. We can’t shake the feeling of skating across the surface of our life, of the happiness for which we are made always eluding us and being around the next bend.

Keating tells us the spiritual journey is all about learning to look for the happiness for which we are made in the right place--in God as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Repentance in this model is not about whipping yourself in a frenzy of self-castigation and self-blame, but being clear-eyed about where that happiness is to be found, and our habitual tendency to look for it in the wrong places. 

One of the ways this shows up in our lives is through “if only” thinking. “If only it weren’t so cold and dreary, then I would be happy.” “If only my health were better,” “If only the political situation weren’t so fraught,” “If only I had a better relationship, a better job, a nicer apartment…” Spend a little time thinking and believing those thoughts and you’ll discover that the beauty of the present moment, the only place where we encounter the presence of God, is quickly obscured behind a scrim of thinking. We trade what is for what we think it should be and suffer miserably as a result.

So repentance is really just another way to say stop struggling with what is; stop being at war with your experience. Repentance is surrendering, saying “yes” to life just as it, even if it’s not what we want, even if it’s unpleasant and uncomfortable. We leave the virtual reality of our constantly changing thoughts, feelings, preferences, and come home to the physical reality of the present moment. Maybe we feel our body sitting in a chair for a few moments. Maybe we connect with our breath. Maybe we tune in to the body and sounds outside the window--birds chirping, snowplows growling past, the neighbour’s dog barking at its shadow. We repent, or let go of, the ways of thinking that keep us feeling like life is passing us by and come home to sacrament of the present moment. We come home to the gift our being that our “stinking thinking” tricks us into forgetting. We surrender to the present moment just as it is. We surrender to God in whom we live and move and have our being. “I've experienced a great deal of pain and suffering in my life,” Mark Twain is reported to have said, “most of which has never happened.”

Now if you are a human being with a brain that produces thoughts, you’re going to have plenty of opportunity to catch yourself thinking that this moment at the interminable stop light, this moment of illness, this moment of loss, isn’t IT. God, our life, is happening somewhere else. But no, the Gospel proclaims,  it’s here, now. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Now is the time of salvation as Paul says.

Michel Evdokimov in his book To Open the Heart tells the story of, “ A bishop [who] was once asked the following question: "What is the moment, the place, or the person that is the most important of my life? He answered: "It is the present moment I am living, the place where I am, and the person before me with whom I am speaking. If that person is there, is it not because the Lord has placed him on my way, and has made this meeting possible?"

That’s how, then, this process of conversion can be an on-going journey of inquiry and discernment and not just a one-time affair. The call is always to see the ways we trick ourselves into pursuing substitute forms of happiness that fail to sustain us, and return, to recollect ourselves in Jesus as the fountain of life, the ground of all being. We can do it in the supermarket. We can do it in the middle of the night when we’re fretting over finances. We can do it on the airplane when the person behind  us is kicking our seat, or in our hospital bed surrounded by beeping machines blaring a ticker tape of bad news. 

Every moment of our lives, in fact, presents us with the opportunity to choose the heavily rutted road of our habitual thoughts and preferences, or the effervescent aliveness of God in this moment. And what we find as we keep turning and returning is that freedom and freshness are always on offer, no matter who we are or what we are experiencing. I see this a lot in people of faith at the end of their lives. The game is up. The cancer is going to run its course. And after the anger, the struggle, the sadness, the denial of “Why me?” comes the acceptance. “Why me?” turns into “Why not me?” and peace, and sparkling joy floods that hospice room and the air seems charged with something I can only call love dancing.

Repentance, dropping our nets and turning to the source of life, is really a practice of learning how to step into the unknown—following after Jesus down the Way of Love that we might become a little more like him, more vulnerable to that love that it  might come to live itself in and through us on terms we can’t predict and barely understand. Nets are all those ways we try to capture, contain, and control life on our own terms. Dropping the nets means realizing that our life is not about us but that we are about life. We drop the storyline of our lives and follow Jesus empty-handed just as life presents itself to us. We turn, we let go of the controls, and realize that God does a pretty good job at things without us micro-managing everything according to our desires. 

But dropping the nets has another dimension--it can also be about releasing all the ways we trap others in our ideas about who they are and how they should be. Dropping the nets can point the way to welcoming the stranger just as they are without imposing our agenda on them. Dropping our nets can be a sign for us learning to love others as they are and not how we’d like them to be. Dropping the nets can mean acknowledging that the person in front of us is a bottomless mystery whose riches can never be exhausted, whose depths can never be plumbed. Dropping the nets can be a way of seeing each person as gushing fountain of life new in each moment. I joke in every Wedding sermon I preach that I love my wife best when I have no idea who she is. So often we see and experience only our ideas of the person, what we think we know about them, and their freshness, their ceaselessly unfolding newness gets obscured and goes unappreciated.

That’s really what Paul is getting at in the opening of his First Letter to the Corinthians. The Corinthians have traded the gift for arguing about whose baptism is more valid. They are picking sides and measuring themselves against others. It’s as if all the folks who were baptized on the Easter Vigil started putting down as “not real Christians” those who we baptized on Pentecost. It’s ludicrous! But we do it all the time. And Paul is telling the Corinthians to drop those nets too, to stop measuring, ranking, and picking sides, and instead to seek only the Lord’s face.

And the amazing thing, when we stop trying manage the world according to how we think it should go, is that the Lord’s face starts to flicker behind the face of everyone we encounter--the gas station attendant, the professed enemy we can’t stand, our spouse, the whining child throwing a fit. His face radiates through every face and we bow in humble worship to all we encounter.