Butt out and call it even.

As I said in church this morning, I'm a dreadful fisherman.  Really bad.  And the thing I don't get about it is that I can't tell what it would take to be a good fisherman.  Honestly, I can't pick up the differences between good fishing and bad, and that's the problem.  I'm sitting next to a capable fisherman, and gosh, it looks like I'm doing the exact same thing, but she's pulling fish after fish out of the lake, and I'm sitting there with a hook deep in the lake doing nothing whatsoever.  What on EARTH is the difference?  I can't figure it out!

Now, me being a garbage fisherman is good for the fish, of course, but it's bad for me as a sport fisherman.  If I go out fishing, it's like golf, where I'm happy to mess up all day, and I realize that I'm never going to get any better.  But this would all change were I to walk out on a pier, and start giving advice to people who are really good at fishing.  They would be perfectly entitled to look at me all strange, and say 'you don't know anything about fishing.  Why don't you sit down over there, and I'll handle the fishing, and you can do all the, you know, religious stuff.'

That's the sort of attitude that we'd expect from the disciples of Christ, who were professional fishermen.  Peter, Andrew, James and John, they fished for a living.  They lived and died on the seas, on their catch that they could bring in.  They were people who were beyond the hobby fishing that we typically do, the angling that we get up to, and were men who lived salt and sand, brine and fish, bringing in catches every day in order to sell them and survive.  I know the bumper sticker that says that a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work, but when they're one and the same, you can't claim that anymore.  There is no hobby fishing.  If you go out fishing, and catch nothing, you don't just pack up your cooler and go home.  You starve. 

Given that this is the case, Peter and the disciples, in their trips out fishing, must have been reasonable at the craft, else they would have been forced to stop some time ago.  Forced by hunger and failure.  But, they seem to have figured it out okay, or at least well enough to continue for the forseeable future.  And continue they did.  So when they went out fishing, catching nothing was problematic.  Unusual, and problematic.  Jesus, then, appears on the shore, and tells them to let down their nets once more, to which they respond that they've been doing this stuff all night, and haven't caught anything, but why not let their nets down and see what happens.

The attitude of telling God to butt out of what we're doing is not a new one.  Most of us in the modern age have so thoroughly compartmentalized our lives that we now sincerely believe that our faith has little to no bearing on our everyday lives.  That is, what we believe doesn't affect in any way, shape or form our lives on a daily basis.  We have a bunch of things that happen in our daily lives, and though the scriptures speak at great length about that type of situation, we treat it as though God couldn't possibly know what we're into, what our lives are all about, so we'd rather church stayed at church, and life stayed where we live.  But the scriptures have a great deal to say about how we live.  They have a lot to say about how we live, and how we operate.  Everything in our lives has hints and tips on how to do things from the Bible, and they're not hard to figure out.  When Jesus gives to us the golden rule, he tells us that we should do for others as we would have them do for us, and that's really simple.  Let that principle guide you, and you'll be in great shape, obviously.  But we, as humans, though we know this to be true, we're bad at doing it.

That should be no surprise.  Go ahead and check through the Bible, and you'll see dozens of stories of people hearing what God wants them to do, and purposefully not doing it.  Look at Naaman the Syrian bathing in the Jordan, look at Jonah being told to go to Nineveh, look at Moses being told to hold his staff over a rock, all these things should show you that people have been abundantly told by God what they should do, but they almost always say to him and about him, that they know much better than he does.  Come on, God, you don't know anything about my life or what I'm all about.  You just stay over there, and do religious things, but don't tell me how to treat people, how to conduct business, how to act at work or at home, or anything else.  But without all that, what is left?  What is it for? 

Jesus is not interested in staying in a box on a shelf, and being a compartmentalized part of your life.  He's interested in all of it.  He's interested in you, not in part of you or just you while you're at church.  He's interested in the whole thing.  And this is where we realize that the tips and tricks, the advice on what we ought to do, how we ought to behave, what we should be doing daily, that's all found in the scriptures.  Not in specifics, but in broad brush strokes, large enough to last all the way through human nature.  

It's an old problem, as old as people and their interaction with God, as old as the Garden where Adam and Eve were given only one thing that they weren't allowed to do, and they decided to do it anyway.  People perpetually saying that they know better than the Lord their God what they should be doing, and that he doesn't know what we're dealing with.  But that's the greatness of Christianity, which is that it is incarnational.  All Christianity is incarnational Christianity, and what sets the faith apart from everything else is the incarnation of Christ, God in flesh.  And his presence in the world showed
that he wasn't isolated to the Temple, that he wasn't stuck in the synagogues waiting for people to come to him, but he went to them.  He went to them where they were, and blessed them in what they were doing.  This is the trouble with being a Christian, is that God blesses your vocation, your job, your family, your home, but that means that he, his word, and his influence spill over to there too.  You can't switch this off, but he won't switch that off either.  He wants to bless your life, to go where you go, to be part of your life, and to go before you always.  There is nowhere you can go that you won't find him, because he has made everything, and then lived all the way through it.  He was born into a family, blessing families.  He showed the holiness of work by working as a carpenter, serving people through the work of his hands.  He both went to the temple and away from it, he went to that place and then went back home to live with his family, with his disciples, and his friends.  To tell God that he should just stick to his temple and not interfere with the rest of everything is to miss the point of the incarnation altogether.  It's more that just a faith where you go to where God lives and find him there, but rather the faith where God goes to where you are, and stays there always.  If you can switch him off, then you're not really coming to grips with who God is and what he's all about.  He lived, loved, grew, taught, preached, shared, died, and even descended into hell, before ascending into heaven, showing us that there is nowhere that we can go that he won't be.