I love the title of this sermon: "When the Fish Catches You." But I can't take credit for it, I'm sorry to say. It comes from a little book I bought a year or so ago in self-defense. I had come to know several of you and your passion for fly-fishing. I thought I should learn something about it and I found this book that seemed to combine your interests and mine: All I Need to Know About Ministry I Learned from Fly Fishing. The author is Myrlene Hamilton, a Presbyterian pastor. She dedicates this book to her father, "who taught me to fish with worms and a bobber," to her husband, "who taught me to fish with flies," and to God, "who is still teaching me to catch fish for the Kingdom."

Chapter 3 of the book begins like this: "When you catch a fish, it's great sport. When the fish catches you, you'd better hang on, because you're in for the ride of your life." You see, we are each called, all of us, to fish for other people and bring them into the Way and the Truth and the Life that is Christ Jesus. But first, we must get hooked by something that catches our imagination and warms our hearts and changes our lives and awakens in us a passion for God's realm and God's people. When the fish catches you, you're in for the ride of your life. And you can't help but want to bring others into the life and the joy that you've found. That's what hooked Jonah, and Simon and Andrew and James and John. The fish caught them and turned their lives upside down and inside out.

Let's start with Jonah to see how this works. It would be worth going back and reading the whole story, but let me offer this synopsis. Jonah is a prophet, almost a caricature of one. He's a comic figure through whom God works a mighty deed. This story is amazingly instructive in our time. God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh and he doesn't want to go. Why? Nineveh, the largest city in the world at one time, was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. It was the enemy. It was full of foreigners. And it was very powerful and frightening. God calls Jonah to go and prophesy to Nineveh, and Jonah turns and goes the other way, trying to flee from the presence of the Lord. "Not me, not me, God. I'm not going there!"

He gets on a ship to flee back to Tarshish, but God isn't done with him. God causes a horrible storm to come up and all the sailors are afraid. They try to get back to dry land but cannot. The waves are too large. Jonah says, "Throw me off this ship and you'll be spared," and they finally do. They throw the reluctant prophet overboard and they are saved.

But what of Jonah? God is not through with him. God sends a big fish to swallow him up and after three days spits him out onto the dry land. "Now will you go to Nineveh?" God asks. Jonah goes this time and preaches to the Ninevites and they relent. And that, Jonah can't stand. "How can these awful people, our sworn enemy, get close with you, God? How can you love them?" The book closes with God teaching Jonah another lesson about the encompassing all-inclusive-ness of God's love that is so large it even embraces this enemy, too.

Maybe this is the best fish story ever told. Jonah so wanted to be let off the hook-caught and released! But Jonah has been caught by the biggest fish there is. His life is turned upside down and inside out as he begins to catch a glimpse of God's new realm of love and justice. When the fish catches you, you're in for the ride of your life.

The great analytical Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, purportedly said, of the kind of change people experience in therapy, "Some go willingly, some are pushed." Well, if Jonah was one of those who had to be pushed, the fishermen we hear about this morning-Andrew and Simon, James and John-apparently went willingly.

The preaching of John the Baptist had set the stage, in the line of the prophets, calling the people back to their covenant relationship with God. It's summed up at the opening of the passage we hear this morning, with all the sense of immediacy and urgency that permeates Mark's gospel: "Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.'"

You see, the fish that catches these four fishermen, the first disciples, is in large part their own longing for that New Kingdom of God. They're already yearning for things to change. They're eager for God to break into their world and make everything new. They were the people who had walked in darkness and they were eager for the light. They had been waiting. The prophets had been waiting. The Magi had been waiting. Simeon and Anna had been waiting. John the Baptist had been waiting. They were ready to be caught up in the new net, God's in-breaking Kingdom. And when Jesus called, they, indeed, went willingly.

"Come," Jesus said. "Follow me. And I will make you fish for people." Immediately he called them and immediately they left their nets and followed. They immediately became part of something new happening on the face of the earth-the next of the biggest fish stories ever told.

There's an interesting, crucial detail I want to tell you about this story, and it requires us to know the original Greek of the text. We see Jesus passing by, walking by the Sea of Galilee. That verb translated into English as "passing by." is actually the very same word used for manifestations of God's glory. And you remember that our word "epiphany" means "manifestation." This is a little epiphany happening here, a manifestation of God.

This isn't just a story about some guy walking down the road calling a couple other folks over to chat. This is a story of a manifestation of God. That's what they so immediately respond to, Andrew and Simon, James and John. The fish catches them, and when the fish catches you, you're in for the ride of your life. They leave their livelihood and their families and everything familiar to join Jesus in the work of bringing others into the New Kingdom of God. The first Christians have started down the path of discipleship following Jesus.

Discipleship, you see, is not something we take upon ourselves. It is God's initiative. It is a call to us, that may come in many forms-a voice, a feeling, a conviction that comes to us in a dream, during prayer, when we are with friends, or on a mountaintop or in a beautiful stream fly-fishing, or when we are involved in mission serving God's people. The call comes. The fish catches us.

I want to share another person's story about being caught by the fish that might surprise you a bit. I've been reading a wonderful new book about the life of Florence Nightingale. Most likely, we think of her in that stereotypical image of "The Lady and the Lamp," from the stories told of her during the two years she worked in the Crimea as a nurse to wounded soldiers. But did you know that to get to that point in her life, to take up her life's work serving others, she first received a call from God and pursued that call and, in spite of everything insisted on following that call?

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820 to a very wealthy English family. When she was only seventeen, she heard the voice of God. "On February 7,1837, God spoke to me and called me to His service," she wrote. At the time, there was an influenza epidemic in England and she nursed members of her family and others back to health.

For Florence, it was that call coming in the midst of that service that changed her life. But several things worked against her being able to respond. First, there were, at the time, rigidly set practices and norms for how the more affluent members of society were to treat those of lesser means. They were to offer limited acts of charity and kindness, but no more. They were to share small parts of themselves and their wealth with others less fortunate, but most of their life was to be spent in leisure pursuits, in entertaining, in travel, in domestic life. And all this was strictly prescribed. Secondly, even more than for men, women could move only within a very limited sphere of pursuits, beginning with a suitable marriage and the proper management of a household.

Florence was frustrated and anxious. She had heard God's call to serve, but then was prohibited from responding. In order to pursue her call to not only serve God as a nurse, but through establishing institutions of training and reform, Florence had to break with her family, turn down offers of marriage, and leave behind the privileged life in which she had been raised. Living to the age of 90, she went on to become the world's expert in addressing health conditions in India. She was consulted on military hospitals during the American Civil War. She wrote the suggestions for the British delegation to the Geneva Convention that established the initial guidelines for the Red Cross.

Florence Nightingale understood the whole of her life and her life's work as living out her call from God. She wrote: "God has led me by ways which I have not known. . . . I feel as if I was quite in the infancy of serving God. . . . I think I seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. But I'm sure I don't succeed in being filled with his righteousness. And so I suppose that I regard too little Himself and too much myself. I should like to try and listen only to His voice as to what He wishes me to do, among all his Poor. . . ."

The call of Christ, being caught by the fish, radically alters the purpose of one's life. Ordinary people-a fisherman, a nurse-act in extraordinary ways. Epiphany is not something we observe, but something we participate in. The call comes. The fish catches us. And we open ourselves to transformation. For now we belong not only to ourselves, but to the body of Christ. We belong to the New Kingdom of God and are now part of the mission of Christ. When the fish catches us, we are caught up in something much, much larger than ourselves.

"Follow me," Jesus says. "Follow me. Together we're building God's Kingdom, and I need you to go out and bring in a catch larger than anything you ever imagined."

NOTES:

1. Myrlene L.J. Hamilton. All I Needed to Know about Ministry I Learned from Fly Fishing. Valley Forge: Judson Press. 2001.
2. Gail Ramshaw. Treasures Old and New: Images in the Lectionary. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2002.
3. Dianne Bergant, with Richard Fragomeni. Preaching the New Lectionary Year B .Collegeville. The Liturgical Press. 1999.
4. Val Webb. Florence Nightingale: The Making of a Radical Theologian. St. Louis: Chalice Press. 2002.

© Patricia E. Farris, 2003. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.