"Let Go of Your Nets," the senior sermon of Anthony MacWhinnie II, Class of 2008, from the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast, given on September 19, 2007, in Christ Chapel

A few weeks ago, I walked into the library and found several of my fellow classmates muttering curses about my name. Now, this being me, that’s not all that unusual of an occurrence. But since I didn’t know what particular thing, at this moment, had caused them to disparage my name, I had to ask them “What the heck are you talkin’ about?” Then they asked me “Have you read the Gospel lesson for your senior sermon?” Again, it’s me… so of course I had not. So I said “No," to which they responded, “You got Jesus calling the fishermen from their nets to be fishers of people!” They seemed to think that this was unfair. I, on the other hand, seem to think that our God is an awesome God! My getting this lesson is akin to Edson Way getting a gospel lesson on anthropology, or James Medley getting a reading on acting, or Terri Daily getting a lesson on… oh you know, theology or something…

Our God is an awesome God! But this lesson from Matthew proves to me that the writer of the Gospel of John is wrong… The writer of John says that Jesus’ first miracle was at a wedding in Cana , changing water into wine, but I am here to tell you that his first miracle was getting a bunch of fishermen to leave their nets! Do you know what it would take to get a fisherman to leave his nets? Either the disciples were just really bad fishermen, or there should have been a Roman centurion on the beach to say, right then and there, “Truly, this was the Son of God.” Fishermen hold on to their nets…

I can remember a time when I was about 13 years old and I was setting a gill net with my father and an adult male friend of the family. We were on a shallow sand flat at the mouth of Bayou Grande in Pensacola Bay . Our net was about 200 feet long, just small enough for 3 people to tend without the aid of a boat. We were having very little luck and the reason for this was that all the fish were on the other side of the narrow channel just to our south, on another section of the flat. The fish lolled about, lazily, tauntingly… We were here… And they were there… All we had to do was get across the channel. We’d done it hundreds of times in the past. You just swim it. It’s no big deal. We were confident and experienced. We’d never done it with a gill net though… But, we were of one mind. We were unified in our assessment that swimming the channel with the net would be no problem, because it would be a lot of trouble to pull the whole net back up into the float.

We were unified, and we were wrong. We stationed ourselves at the top, middle, and bottom of the fully outstretched net and started our swim. It only took a few seconds of our swim across the channel for us to realize just what a colossal mistake we’d made. For you see, beneath the placid surface of the channel there was a ripping 5 knot current; 5 knots of friction on a 200 foot long net and 3 men swimming one-handed across the channel. But still, we pressed on. We were in trouble, but we weren’t letting go of that net. We were heading straight for the open bay. We swept down the channel. We swept past the last segment of the rock jetties and we swept past the shallow sand flat to water that we couldn’t stand up in even if we made it across the channel. There was one last bit of hope for us; a channel marker, basically a telephone pole sticking up that marked the entrance to the channel. I, the 13 year old boy, managed to snag it with my free arm. Now, I have 200 feet of net, 2 adult men, and 5 knots of friction to deal with, all while grinding my forearm into a barnacle encrusted pole. I wasn’t about to let go of that net, because my father was attached to the other end of it. The two men slowly and agonizingly hand over handed their way up the net to me. We were safe now, and we took the extra time to pull the net in and stow it in the float. We were too exhausted and battle weary from our ordeal to set the net on those fish. As we easily swam back across the channel, we could see the fish behind us, lolling about, lazily, tauntingly.

In the movie “The Mission," Robert DeNiro plays a slave trader that ends up killing his brother in a duel. He is so racked with guilt that he stows all his implements of war, of the slave trade, in a net; several hundred pounds of armor and swords. He ties this net to his body as penance and follows a priest into the jungle to the very people he’d been enslaving. He drags it through the jungle, up a mountain and finally up a hundred foot waterfall; all the while, the net catches and snags on obstacles. DeNiro can’t bring himself to cut the net away. Finally, at the top of the waterfall he falls to the ground exhausted. There awaiting him are the very people that he’d been preying upon. Instead of killing him, as he likely deserved, one of the natives walks over, cuts the rope binding him and throws the net full of war down the mountain. Instead of punishing him, they liberate him. What is it about our nets that makes us hold onto them so tightly? What is so compelling about our nets that requires for us a liberator to free us from them?

Jesus calls fishermen to lay down their nets. Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? I’ve got another oxymoron for you; “Episcopal Evangelism”. Yeah… It doesn’t seem work, now does it? Is there something about that term that scares us? Why? Why is it so scary? I want to submit to you that just by virtue of your being here, in this place, in this time, God is calling you to be an Episcopal Evangelist. Look to your right and to your left. There sits an Episcopal Evangelist. And before you scoff, just remember that someone next to you is looking at you right now. I know what you are thinking. In the 90’s in the Episcopal Church we had the decade of evangelism and it was so successful that we lost 500,000 members of our church. Why? Why are we so bad at evangelism in this church? I think we hold on to our nets… Jesus calls us to lay them aside and we hold on to them. We tie ourselves to them and we climb a mountain…

What is it that is in our collective net as a Church that holds us back? I think we have to ask each of us individually, what is it in your net that keeps you from laying it aside? Is it your father? Is it your mother? Is it pride? Is it fear? And if we do manage to lay our nets aside for a time, when we hit a bump in the road don’t we tend to go running back to them? Like Peter in the 21 st chapter of John, after the death of Jesus, when the disciples didn’t know what to do, what does Peter say? “I’m going fishing.” And with that, he wraps his net around himself like a cloak, like a warm blanket… But really, it’s cold, and it’s dank, and it smells like fish…

I think we’re the generation that can change that. Jesus calls us to lay our nets aside but I tell you cut that rope and kick down the mountain! Don’t let your nets hold you back from the mission of Jesus Christ. Because, in all reality, real fishermen know when to let go of their nets…

Amen.