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Moses said to the people of Israel: Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.[1] _________________________________
"The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame." For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" But not all have obeyed the good news; for Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed our message?" So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. But I ask, have they not heard? Indeed they have; for "their voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world."[2] ___________________________________
As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea-- for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." Immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.[3]
When I read this gospel and think about Andrew—whose day it is today—Peter, James and John and Jesus, I’m reminded of that famous old Far Side cartoon of a man talking to his dog. Panel one shows what the man says: “You chewed up my slippers again and I’d love to smack you a good one.” Panel two shows what the dog actually hears as he sits there with his tongue hanging out and his tail wagging: “Blah blah blah blah love blah blah blah.” Dogs have pretty narrow bandwidth. I imagine that the neophyte disciples, very much in the puppy dog phase of their ministry, just might have heard Jesus say: “Blah blah blah fish blah blah.” And thought: “That’s all you need? Hey, I can do that! Sign me up.” That might sound like dissing the disciples, but it isn’t. They’re dead on target. Jesus asks them to bring along everything they already know and just use it on a slightly different target demographic. These guys might not know a metaphor from a ball bearing, but as James and John sit there in the boat with their father mending their metaphors it’s not a big reach to see how natural it will be for down to earth folks like these to net lots of people just like them with only a little targeting from Jesus. So Jesus has made things really simple for them. That gives us a clue about the real question lurking here, the one that ought to jump up and bite us. The question with teeth is why didn’t Jesus go to the schools or the Temple hunting his disciples. Why didn’t he go to the people who’d spent half a lifetime learning and dedicating themselves faithfully to their God? You can’t just say that he had to play the hand he was dealt up in the Galilee boondocks—this is the Son of God. Surely his choices weren’t limited to marginal types who fished for a living. Yet if he were starting today, it looks as though he would go to Palacios or Freeport and take up with Vietnamese shrimpers rather than come to your seminary or my parish to recruit people like you and me. What’s going on? I think we get that same clue from the Deuteronomist who also wants to simplify things. This writer says that the word God wants to hear is neither too hard nor too far away—no, it’s already in you.[4] It’s in your mouth and in your heart right here, right now. One day in Galilee, for instance, we see that for fishers, the word in their mouths and hearts is “fish.” So we already know how to please God. Just do it; it’s really simple. That’s the message. Paul tries to make it simpler still by taking away even the minimal guesswork. No need to wonder what it is that’s in our mouth and in our heart. “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” Paul says. “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”[5] That’s really, really simple. No expensive animal sacrifices. No complicated theologies or creeds. No ethnic barriers to membership. Just go on record that Jesus Christ is Lord and invest your heart in it so much that eternity comes to life in you. You can’t get much simpler than that. “Blah blah blah blah Jesus blah blah blah.” That’s apparently what God hears. Jesus went to fishers rather than the guys in the schools and the Temple because the bright guys you find in places like that usually take things that should be simple and make them complicated. Let’s face it: it’s the nature of our job. Most of us in organized religion sadly justify our salaries less by the number of fish we catch than the number of words we produce. As Jed Bartlett says on The West Wing, “Why use one word when a hundred will do just as well?” Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re getting edgy because you think I’m about to tell you Jesus thinks seminary is a waste and educated clergy a liability. So take a deep breath and relax. I’m not some sort of theological Luddite who wants to smash all the complicated machines on the factory floor so we can go back to living in nature. I get just as much of a kick as any of you out of using terms like “heuristic” and “hermeneutical” and “realized eschatology.” I don’t want to take our fun away. What I want to say is that everything else we complicated people do—all of our theology, ethics, ecclesiology—will turn into idolatry if we lose sight of the simple thing at the center. It’s like my relationship with my children which has gotten very complicated at times, forcing complex theories of parenting and psychology to dance through my head. Yet at the center of the elaborate family dance must be the simple fact of love between souls or all the overheated complexities become a destructive power game. Blah blah blah blah love blah blah blah. Maybe the dog’s not so far off base. Complex systems must serve love; without love, complex systems grow tyrannical. Christianity is about love, the simple relationship at the center of things: God loving God’s creation, the relationship of heaven to earth, drawn down and embodied at any moment in time by the simple love between two souls. You and God. You and another. You and me. A simple relationship on which our salvation depends. When, therefore, is the statement “Jesus Christ is Lord” truly “on our lips and in our hearts?” It is right there at the moment we’re ready to cry out to God for that simple relationship our souls truly need if we are to come to life. “Jesus Christ is Lord,” in its simple and powerful form, is an act of relationship between a human being and Jesus Christ, between you and your God. It’s that simple. But like my theories of parenting and psychology, we make it complicated. We start clarifying exactly what Christology stands behind that creedal word “Christ” because it matters whom we believe we’re accepting as Lord. We turn Paul’s affirmation into a litmus test for belief. We look to God’s lordship as a model for structure in the church. We look askance at other people, so very different from ourselves who also claim this same sentence for themselves, and then we slide with them into complex wars of religion. The simple version of Paul’s confession—without which the complicated versions lose their mooring—is not a statement of belief but of immediacy in relationship. It does not travel far enough to separate the chosen people from the unchosen, the clean from the unclean. As Paul says, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”[6] Rather, it is a cry. It is the cry of a lonely soul seeking a companion, a wandering soul finding a home. These words are never boilerplate. They constitute a real sentence, spoken by a real human being, spoken in a real situation, spoken with unique, distinctive accents that reveal a soul touching eternity from a unique moment in time. Unique, distinctive accents, falling differently on each word of the cry: The cry of wonder by a priest with forty hard years in the parish who suddenly sees through the veil of all her labor and cries out, “Oh my God, Jesus Christ IS Lord.” The cry of a spiritual seeker who has tried everything for years, then suddenly sees and says, “My God, JESUS is Lord!” The cry of an addict who finally does a real first step, and comes to his knees crying, “God forgive me: Jesus is LORD.” Jesus turns to fishers to land souls such as these. Unlike those who try to tame the wildness of such raw moments with words and theories, fishers are the people who simply row out onto the waters of chaos, put their nets down into the dark and fearful places and bring up whatever comes as the spirit of God hovers over the deep and speaks the simple words of creation.[7] We fisher-evangelists are here in the confusion and chaos of people’s lives where they hunger most voraciously for a power that can save, and we are to draw them with our love to the recognition of their God incarnate. Blah blah blah blah life blah blah blah. Now, we need to be really careful right here. We’re not fly-fishing for trout in a gentle Rocky Mountain stream. We don’t get to pick our fish. We’re net fishing in the troubled waters of chaos with the spirit of God howling around us. You put that net down there and there’s no telling what you will pull up or what God will do with the catch. You may land circumcised fish and uncircumcised fish. Catholic fish and Baptist fish. Atheist fish and even believer fish. Red state fish and blue state fish. Male and female, as Paul goes on at this point,[8] Jew and Greek, slave and free, and, I have to add on no authority but my own, and for my own soul’s sake, gay fish and straight fish. I’m not stepping on anybody’s legitimate and heartfelt theology with all these complicated fish, because all I want is not to get in the way of any soul at that tender moment when the light of recognition switches on and he or she cries out the words of Paul, “JESUS IS LORD.” The kingdom of heaven is like a net cast into the sea that brings up fish of every kind, a net which will be sorted righteous from evil not by the fishers but by God’s angels at the end of the ages.[9] There is, therefore, a great spiritual challenge in the complex dance that is our church. That challenge is to be true to our complex creeds and theologies—whether a conservative commitment to repentance and redemption or a liberal vision of justice and community—true to them without allowing their complexities to get in the way of the simple act of recognition of a person for his or her God, even when that person is our enemy. Especially when that person is our enemy.[10] There is, therefore, a challenge for each of us. That challenge is to become great-souled evangelists. We need souls large enough truly to understand how somebody vastly different from ourselves could also cry out, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” and find on our own lips and in our own hearts the simple word, “Yes.” Such great souls of fisher-evangelists grow larger not as we elaborate our theologies in opposition to one another, but as we go back again and again and again to our own primal, intimate recognition of Jesus Christ as Lord. The souls of fisher-evangelists grow greater as we hear the simple call of Jesus spoken to us in return whenever we recognize him in our humility and in our hope. Listen to the other words Jesus spoke to his disciples at the other moments when they recognize his lordship. Listen to the way he grows their souls to greatness step by step. At Galilee: fish. At Peter’s confession much later: “Blah blah blah blah, Satan.”[11] That must have stung. At the last Supper: body, then blood, then deny.[12] In the Garden: awake.[13] At Calvary: cross. At Pentecost: Spirit. At every step, growth. Sometimes in pain, sometimes in joy. Always forward, always wider, always greater. What word does Jesus speak to you? Don’t make it complicated. Do make it personal. You come to your knees in recognition of Jesus as your Lord, and you hear Jesus speak the simple words, “Blah blah blah blah, blank, blah blah blah.” What goes in that blank? What grows your soul today? What are you called to be and to do today? What gives you heart to sail into God’s storm and bring up souls from the deep for creation?
The Rev. David Hoster Copyright © 2005, St. George’s Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Deuteronomy 30:11-14 [2] Romans 10:8b-18 [3] Matthew 4:18-22 [4] Deuteronomy 30:14 [5] Romans 10:9 [6] Romans 10:13 [7] see Genesis 1:1-3 [8] Romans 10:12; Galatians 3:28 [9] Matthew 13:47-49 [10] Matthew 5:44 [11] Mark 8:33 [12] Mark 14:22-24; John 13:38 [13] Matthew 26:36-46
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