"Breakfast on the Beach" A sermon preached by Rev. Deana Dudley Christos Metropolitan Community Church Toronto, Ontario 25 April 2004 John 21:1-19

I just love this bit from John’s gospel: "Just as the day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples didn’t know it was Jesus. So he said to them, 'Children,’ – the Greek there is sort of ‘Hi, boys!’ – ‘got fish?' They answered him, 'No.' So Jesus said to them, 'Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.' Evidently they’d been fishing off the left side of the boat.

Now, mind you, this was not a huge boat. In 1986, archeologists found a first century fishing boat in the mud on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and it’s about 9 metres long, 2 ½ metres wide, and a little over a metre deep. It could have held about 15 people, but more likely held a crew of about a half a dozen when they were working. This is not the Lusitania. We’re not talking about a boat that’s so huge that there’s going to be a whole different fish eco-system from one side of it to the other. But Jesus says, try the other side.

Does this sound a teensy bit familiar? I invite you to take yourself back in time, to the evening of February 8 of this year. I preached a sermon called "Going Fishing" from the gospel of Luke. It was the one about my grandmother, and the worms and everything? Does this ring any bells? Basically, it was about the calling of the disciples. And Luke reported that there were the disciples, at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, on the Sea of Galilee, out on the water, failing at fishing. And here they are again, three years later, after all of the teaching and the journeying and the mental and physical challenges, and after all the grief and the pain and the dying and the resurrection... here they are again: out on the Sea of Galilee, failing at fishing. Is it truly as the book of Ecclesiastes says, that "There is nothing new under the sun"?

Or is there anything different going on here? What’s different? Well, once again, the disciples, who, remember, do NOT know this is Jesus, for some reason do NOT recognize the teacher with whom they have spent the last three years, do what the man on the shore suggests, and cast their nets again. And now they can hardly haul them in, for the quantity of fish. And THEN, one of the disciples, John identifies him as the disciple whom Jesus loved says to Simon Peter, 'It’s him. It’s Jesus." And Peter leaps into the water -- I love this, it says that he was stripped to work, working naked, and puts his clothes on to jump into the water – shades of fig leaf shame! -- and heads for Jesus, while the other disciples finish hauling in the fish.

Now, the common interpretation of this passage is that it’s about the power and majesty of Christ after the resurrection. Here he is in Galilee, by the lake where he often walked and talked with the disciples. They’ve fished all night, unsuccessfully -- it was before those little fish sonar gadgets -- when Jesus calls out and tells them to throw the net on the other side of the boat. They do it and hit the jackpot -- 153 fish, we’re told. St. Jerome, one of the early commentators on this passage, said that was because at the time there were 153 known varieties of fish in the world. So catching one of everything was about as inclusive as you can get. And since the net was’nt broken by all those fish, I think we’re safe in supposing that this was a symbolic picture of Jesus and his disciples drawing the whole world into the net of God's great purpose.

That's the common interpretation. Now let me suggest an uncommon one, but one I believe to be no less true. I’m encouraged to suggest it by the fact that the Gospel of John is a deeply spiritual book filled with symbolic stories and actions, and even, in places, with symbolic characters. And let's begin with the lake itself, the place where they were fishing. Lakes, in both fairy tales and sacred legends, are strange and symbolic places. Because they’re often deep and hold secrets that can't be discerned from the surface, mystery resides in them. In Jungian psychology, they often represent the unconscious, the realm of our dreams and fantasies.

And there is something dreamlike about this scene, isn't there? Halfway between night and day, with the first hint of dawn touching the horizon. Patches of mist and fog rising from the water. The gentle noise of waves slapping against the boat or dripping from the nets. The deep sighs of the fishermen, whose muscles ache from the toil of the fruitless night. And then the Divine Stranger, standing on the shore, calling to them through the mist, telling them they’ll catch something if they’ll just lower their nets on the other side of the boat, the right side.

They’d been fishing on the left side. We know a lot about left and right now, don't we? The left side of the brain is the calculating, orderly side, the side that analyzes, does figures, gives names to things. The right side is the dreaming side, the creative, artistic side, the side that responds to pictures and images. I’m a left brained person. Y’all know I love logic. I really have a deep psychological need for things to make sense. Sometimes that makes me a real fish out of water in this world, where so much doesn’t make sense, but there you have it. The best Christmas present I ever got was what Anne gave me last year, which was a class at the Royal Ontario Museum, on mosaic making. And that class got me in touch with my right brain in a way that nothing else in my life ever has, and I had so much fun. For feeling like a whole person, I really recommend getting in touch with BOTH sides of your brain.

Now, during the three years of his ministry, Jesus had had to deal with a lot of left-brained people, from some of the Pharisees to Judas. They were the legalists, the ones who thought the world was constructed by an accountant and everything could be got down in black and white. Maybe Jesus was saying to the disciples here that they weren’t to be like accountants, always trying to take the measure of things. They were to live and act out of their right brains, as visionaries and artists. They were to trust God and live nobly, generously, with their whole brains, with their whole selves, without counting the cost or stopping to dot their i's and cross their t's. Maybe if they’d do that, they’d always find their nets full, they’d live in the overflow of grace and excitement.

But suppose there is something even more personal in the text, something for each one of us, that goes beyond the more obvious and general meaning. Bruno Bettelheim spoke of "the uses of enchantment" -- the way even fairy tales serve deep and important purposes in our lives by helping us to know ourselves and interpret the messages life reveals to us. What if the story of the lake and the fishermen suggests something to us about our own stories, about the way we may have been fishing a long time without any luck, without catching any fish?

Some of us plod along in our jobs or our lives, week after week, year after year, with no sense of reward, no feeling that we’re getting anywhere. Or maybe we’ve been coming up with nothing in our personal relationships. Or maybe we haven't been getting any return on our spiritual efforts. We’ve been praying or going to church or meditating on God’s word -- or maybe all of the above -- and nothing’s been happening, our nets have been coming up empty. Now, I want to emphasize that that’s not the same thing at all as NOT praying and NOT going to church and NOT meditating on God’s word and getting no results. That one’s a no brainer. No sense in expecting results then. But it’s so frustrating to actually work hard at something and get nowhere. You see what I mean. Bleakness. Barrenness. Emptiness. Nothing in the nets -ness.

And we’re tired, the way these fishermen were tired after fishing all night. We’re tired of life, tired of trying. We can’t create a meaningful life. Everybody else seems to, but not us. Our lives are empty and unfulfilled. And Jesus says, "Cast your net on the right side of the boat, and you’ll be surprised what you can do."

How can that be? I mean, who knows more about our own lives than we do? Right? Don't we know how to do our own fishing?

But what if he's right? What if there's something tremendous and exciting down there in the deeps, just waiting for us if we make a little adjustment in where we’re letting down our nets, in who we look to for wisdom? What if it's only a matter of learning to fish in a new place? What might that mean, in our lives?

Maybe a new job -- OR a new way of doing the old one, a redefining of your position, a re-envisioning of its shape and boundaries. Maybe a new relationship -- OR some fresh ways of acting within the old ones, so that they get injected with passion again and we begin to laugh and sing and dance and look forward to being with the people in our lives. Maybe a new kind of spirituality-- or a new and different and revitalized approach to spiritual life in the old one, so that everything looks different and throbs with beauty and meaning and vitality again.

I'm not saying which it ought to be, the new or the old. What I'm saying is that life, the lake, the unconscious, is filled with possibilities. That it’s rich beyond all imagining, that God wants us to enjoy it, to revel in it, to be excited about it, to take joy in it. We weren't meant to go stale, to settle into mere routine, to lose the mystery and glamour and excitement of existence. And if we have gone stale, if we’re merely existing, then it’s time we listened to Christ calling from the edge of the lake, from the edge of our unconscious, and telling us to let the nets down in a new place.

I think of some friends who have heard this word and acted on it. From my own personal background, I could tell you about LOTS of lawyers who gave up law for something more fulfilling. I’m only one case in point. I’ve got law school classmates who quit law to become teachers and even house painters, and are SO much happier... using both sides of their brains now. Then there was a lawyer in Los Angeles, who was so bored with her life as an attorney that one day she finally quit. When her savings were about to run out, she met a man who owned a puppet factory, and he asked her if she’ like to work for him. She tried it and lo and behold, she found her niche. She’s really happy now. She says of her new line of work, "At least now I know who the real puppets are." Me, I’m just glad she met a puppet maker and not a pimp. Or I think of my daughter-in-law Eliza, who still IS a lawyer, who simply changed the way she practiced, changed jobs to one where she’s now respected and appreciated, and now practices in a balanced, life-friendly way. There are ALL kinds of possibilities... and they’re just on the other side of the boat.

You see what I mean. The lake is deep. It has far richer resources than we usually imagine. It’s never completely fished out, not for any of us. We only need to let our nets down in a new place, to rediscover the riches. And when we do -- this is the point of the story from the Gospel -- when we do, when we pull up our nets full of fish again, then we suddenly realize the presence of the divine in our lives.

This is the way real spirituality always works. It’s not something we can generate inside ourselves, but it requires our participation, our action. It occurs whenever our nets, that have been empty, begin to come up full again because we changed something about where we cast them; when life that was hard and narrow and grudging begins to be free and open and happy again. Did you see that? It’s only after the fishermen let down their nets on the right side and pull them in wiggling and writhing with fish, that they suddenly recognize Christ on the shore and realize there is a connection between him and what they’ve done. Change sides of the boat. Cast your nets. And rediscover Jesus.