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The
Bishop's Journal
Summer 2002
A Fish Tale
The following is an excerpt from Bishop Pryse's sermon at the Assembly 2002 Opening Service at Christ Church Cathedral, Ottawa on July 10, 2002. The Gospel Lesson, John 21:1-8, recounts the story of St. Peter and the Great Catch of Fish.
Why is this particular miracle narrative included in John's Gospel? In very plain terms, we're being reminded who it is that determines the size of the catch! It's one of those many stories where God reminds humanity who's really in charge.
The Scriptural record shows again and again and again that whenever God's people become proud and over-dependent upon themselves and their own resourcefulness, circumstances very quickly arise where they end up being chastened in some way. A messianic finger taps the side of a boat and the bottom quickly drops out from under whatever or whoever it is upon which the people have mistakenly placed their trust.
I sometimes wonder whether or not this is what mainline North American Christians have been experiencing for the past thirty years. I sometimes wonder whether we had become overly comfortable during those halcyon days of the 1950s and '60s and were in need of a corrective! Oh, the fishing was good back then! Talk about church growth! Why, in the early '60s there was a new LCA mission start every week. And you know the stats on attendance. Virtually everyone was coming to church. The Sunday Schools were full to overflowing. The Lord's Day act kept the stores closed on Sundays. There were no Sunday sports leagues, and we all prayed the Lord's prayer at school! Yes, indeed, the fishing was good!
But does that mean that we were necessarily better fishers? Or did we just have the good fortune to be fishing in a stocked pond, at the right time of day, when the fish just happened to be biting? Was the church really any more faithful, or were we simply the fortunate recipients of a cultural delivery system that had created a gravitational pull toward the churches? I don't know. But what I do know is that we can never put our trust in anything other than God - not in our own resourcefulness and creativity; not in laws that give our faith a favoured position; not in anything that even remotely challenges God's right to bring the kingdom of heaven to fuller expression in God's own time, and for God's own purpose.
Sometime we need to fish all night and catch nothing - or, to use the phraseology of another post-resurrection encounter on the Emmaus road - sometimes our "hearts need to faint within us" - before we can become open enough to receiving the blessings that God promises to bestow upon us and upon our labours. It's not that the Lord abandons us. In fact, he'll row around the lake with us all day under the hot, searing sun - he'll walk with us all the way to Emmaus - if that is our wish. But he won't allow us to rely on anything other than him. And that means recognizing that it is God who determines both the size of the catch and it's timing.
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
