Lost At Sea

[the product of me shooting my mouth off during a conversation, that a friend said I should post; so you can blame her!]

If you read the papers and follow the religious news, and if you've done either of these things lately, you know the news isn't good. The stories that keep popping out are the breaking sexual abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic church, and the completely inadequate responses of the Vatican. Now they're saying the whole thing is a calculated attack on the church. Talk about a stupid answer to a really serious problem!

It's not just the Holy See that's fucked up: we all have. We've all failed. It's just that the Romans are the most vivid and spectacular embodiment of the failure we all share. As churches, we are broken. We live in a broken world and have become broken in it. The fact that the Church is 'made up of sinners' is neither an explanation nor an excuse. We fucked it up because of stubbornness and secrecy and an unwillingness to be responsible for our errors. An unwillingness to see ourselves as we really are.

Sunday's gospel reading had Peter and some others fishing naked on a boat all night, not having caught anything. Jesus calls from the shore and they catch a netfull of fish, and the net was not torn (hmm...didn't this same sign happen at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, at the part where he called them in the first place?). They come in to the beach - after Peter puts his clothes on and swims for it, no one knows why - and eat breakfast with Jesus.

We are Peter out on the water, and we have a broken net. We neglected the net, we used it in ways it wasn't supposed to be used, we ran it over the rocks and we used pieces of it to tie up our hair in fashionable styles. The net is broken, so of course it's empty.

We need to fix the net. We need to listen to Jesus telling us to keep fishing, and to do that we need a net that can function. How are we supposed to mend the net?

More than anything, we need to be willing to stand out on a boat, naked, and admit we screwed it up. 'Hey Jesus: we screwed it up! A little help here?' We need to stand out there with nothing hidden, admitting everything to everyone. We need there to be nothing between us and God, nothing covering over our shame. That's how we start fixing our net.

How do we catch fish with the net? How do we listen to Jesus' command from the shore? Well, he told us to be fishers of men, right? But that's a little vague. What he made Peter promise, once he made it to shore dripping wet, is to take care of the flock, because that's what loving God is. That's what being a fisher of men is. Love the flock, don't throw them to the wolves. Take care of the flock, don't wander off to write idyllic pastoral poetry and leave the sheep to their own devices. Feed the flock, don't lead them to some sort of dried up pasture where all the grass is dead.

The real problem is power. Grasping after power. It enslaves people and churches, it clothes them in iron garments that can cause a ship to sink. They think they're clothed, but they're naked; they think they're free, but they're drowning. Grasping after power is a problem, because it means you're looking after the shepherd instead of the sheep.

Feed the sheep, fix the net, and stand naked on a boat until Jesus calls you. Then we can answer his call. Then we can fill our nets, and the boats beside us will help us to carry them. Then we will not be alone. Then Jesus will feed us. Only when we, as churches, actually realize that the net doesn't belong to us will we be able to fill it, side by side, and come in to shore.