Casting Wide the Net of God’s All-Inclusive Love
Readings for the Third Sunday after Epiphany
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday January 22, 2023.
In today’s Gospel, Peter and his brother Andrew are busy fishing when Jesus approaches them and says, “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” Just as John’s Gospel used the loaded metaphor of the Lamb of God in the calling of the disciples so too does Matthew use the metaphor of fishing. Now usually when I think of fishing, I picture Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer sitting on a rock, chewing on some straw, holding a fish pole with a line out in the water, just like I used to do as a kid at Beebe Lake in Ithaca New York. But that’s not what fishing was like for these men of Galilee. Their physically demanding work involved casting wide nets into the water and then gathering in heavy shoals of fish. The Gospel makes clear that Peter and Andrew were casting a net into the sea to catch their fish. Jesus sees them doing this and says, “Join me as I cast a net over the whole world; and we will gather in all kinds of different people.”
The Gospel of John uses the same metaphor of casting a net in its final chapter, in which the Risen Christ inspires the disciples to miraculously catch and gather in 153 fish. And the author highlights the fact that although there were so many fish (153), the net was not torn. According to ancient authors, there were 153 different species of fish, so the net that held 153 fish without breaking functions as a symbol of the Jesus Movement that holds a vast variety— every variety—of different peoples without breaking. That is what Jesus was calling Peter and Andrew to become a part of: a movement that would cast an all-inclusive net of compassion and grace over the whole world and gather in all kinds of different people, without breaking.
Surprisingly, the apostle who best understood the implications of this wide net was the one who was not called among the original twelve apostles (and who is therefore not portrayed by Fr. Shag in Lewis Hall), the apostle who refers to himself “as one untimely born” (1 Cor 15:8),[1] since Christ only appeared to him after the resurrection, the apostle who wrote the earliest texts of the New Testament, including the first letter to the Corinthians, which we heard from this morning: St. Paul of Tarsus.
We see evidence of the wideness of the early church’s net in St. Paul’s ministry and in his reference to an early church leader named Chloe, who appears only once in Scripture. Paul writes, “It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.” Now although this is the only reference to Chloe in Scripture, we can still gather some important information about her. First, we can deduce that she was a trusted friend of Paul’s, who refers to her by name. Second, she cared about unity and was concerned about the divisions that were jeopardizing the Jesus Movement. Third, she commissioned her people to seek Paul’s wisdom and guidance by informing him of the divisions. And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, we can deduce that she was a leader in the early church and the head of a household. This is significant, especially since the Bible has some very challenging things to say about women in general and specifically about women in positions of church leadership. Some biblical verses prohibit women from teaching or even speaking at all in church. However, at the same time, there is ample evidence in Scripture of women in positions of church leadership, women such as Tabitha (Acts 9:36), Lydia (considered the first European convert to Christianity), Joanna, Phoebe (who was a deacon), Priscilla, and of course, Chloe.
Chloe and Christ invite us to cast our nets wide and to gather all peoples (no matter how different) into the loving and forgiving embrace of God. This is how we become fishers of men and women in the world today. Paul understood this well, which is why he encouraged and supported women in leadership in the early church and which is also why he boldly advocated for the full inclusion of a group of people whom the Bible and even Jesus himself so often excluded: the Gentiles.
Paul felt a clear call to share the Gospel with the Gentiles and to include them in the wide net of God’s embracing love. The other apostles initially felt that this inclusion of Gentiles flew in the face of their sacred Scriptures and tradition, which excluded the Gentiles. This disagreement led to the first church council known as the Council of Jerusalem, which is recorded in the Book of Acts. The questions for the Christians at the council was “Do we now include and embrace those Gentiles whom we initially considered unclean and profane? Do we now include those Gentiles whom our Scriptures and our traditions for hundreds of years have consistently called unclean and profane? Is God doing something new? Is the Holy Spirit revealing to us that the wide net of God’s love includes even the Gentiles?” Thank God that the Christians at the time responded with an emphatic “Yes!” Because if they did not, then none of us here could be Christian today unless we’re already Jewish or ready to convert to Judaism. This first church council changed the course of the Church forever. And since then, the long arc of the moral and spiritual universal has been bending towards love and inclusion of all. And the Episcopal Church is still riding that wave today.
When it comes to the Episcopal Church’s full inclusion and celebration of our LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers, we did not move from exclusion to inclusion to be more socially relevant and politically correct. No. The Episcopal Church moved from prejudice to embrace because we remembered that the strong net of God’s love was plenty wide enough to include all, without breaking; and the Holy Spirit consistently prodded us to embrace and include and celebrate those who were previously condemned, just as the Holy Spirit prodded the early Christians to embrace the previously condemned Gentiles.
Christians today who continue to use tradition and Scripture to exclude others from the all-inclusive net of God’s love are repeating the same failed argument of the early church leaders who excluded the Gentiles from the church and who demanded that the Gentiles significantly change who they are by altering their physical bodies before joining the church. Those church leaders made a loud fuss at the time, but they ended up on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of God’s mission.
In the words of our Collect, I pray that we might all have the grace to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ, who calls us like he called Peter, Andrew, Paul, and Chloe to be fishers of men and women and to cast wide the all-inclusive net of God’s love and compassion and justice and peace across the whole world. How lovely are the messengers that preach us the Gospel of peace to all the nations, all the Gentiles, all peoples. Amen.
[1] The word that Paul uses here is ἐκτρώματι (ektromati), which is the dative case of ἔκτρωμα (ektroma), the same word used for abortion and miscarriage.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 