I think it’s fair to say that nobody likes to be called a rookie, or being seen as an amateur. We’d much rather be seen as old hands, pros. That was true way back when I was a Boy Scout – back in the days when a blackberry was something you picked from a bush. In this simpler time, lacking Ipods we told stories, and our favorite stories were what we called Tenderfoot Tales. These well-worn legends were spun at the expense of naïve amateurs who could be easily fooled by the more seasoned, wise Scouts, who were, of course, we 14 year-olds. Favorite Tenderfoot tales included that of the poor rube who went all over Fort A.P. Hill searching for a left-handed smokeshifter, and the one about the two Tenderfeet who stayed up half the night stoking the fire, keeping watch so that their campsite would not be overrun by deadly, carnivorous snipes.

We told these stories to make ourselves feel street-smart by comparison. That’s a human inclination. It goes way back, and probably held true when Jesus, a carpenter from an inland village, showed up to dish out some unsolicited fishing advice by the Sea of Galilee. Put out into the deep water and cast out your nets in broad daylight, he told ‘em. I imagine those career fishermen exchanged knowing glances. Hearing Jesus of Nazareth – not a fishing village, by the way! – weigh in on net-casting, it’s not too hard to imagine what Simon Peter must have been thinking. Troop Chaplain Matt Crush will provide us with a dramatic interpretation: Matt?

“Oh, you want to do some fishing now, is that right, Jesus? Okay, okay - let’s go fishing. See here? These are trammel nets, Jesus. Being a carpenter, you don’t need to know this, I realize. But today, hey, you’re a fisherman! I’ve actually used trammel nets nearly every day of my life since I was a small child, so let me tell you how they work. Do you see these corks on the top and lead weights on the bottom? Well, in daylight the fish can see them, too! That’s why we use trammel nets only at night. And we don’t use them in deep water, Mr. Carpenter-from-Nazareth, because the weights are there to take the bottom of the net to the bottom of the lake. In deep water, the fish just swim under them.

Oh, I almost forgot! It takes almost an hour to put out and bring in each net, and you have to do it quietly, without splashing, because that scares the fish. But hey! Not today – today we can splash all we want, do you know why? Because the fish, did I mention, are going to be watching us (in broad daylight) the entire time! And, since we’re on the subject, Mr. I’ve-Got-Sawdust-Under-My-Fingernails, if left covered with lake silt, these nets, which cost a fortune and don’t last all that long anyway, will fall apart even faster. It is such a treat to wash the silt out of a three-thousand square-foot net - and hooOOray, because today I get to do it twice. And this after fishing all night, with nothing to show for it. But come on, Jesus - forget that my entire village is watching, including James and John, who will never let me live this down - come on. Let’s go do some fishing!

And they call this a miracle story. A miraculous catch did occur – but the fishermen could have concluded the big haul was just dumb luck. (You can always explain away a miracle, after all.) Truth is, there may be a greater miracle here than the catch of fish: these men are receiving from Jesus a summons, a calling to whole new way in life. They, seasoned experts in their field, are about to become naïve amateurs, rookies, in a movement that will literally change the world by proclaiming the coming of God’s will, the heavenly Kingdom upon the earth.

This calling of the first disciples is always ‘cause for pause’ to us today, an insistent reminder of a weird and easily overlooked reality about Jesus’ mission. Consider: a movement premised upon the transmission of the Gospel would seem to require orators and wordsmiths, those gifted and accomplished in winning debates or writing theology. According to basic common sense, what the brand new mission ought not be doing is recruiting what Luke, in his Book of Acts, calls “uneducated and ordinary men,” using the Greek terms agrammatoi and idiotai – which sound about as harsh in English as they do in Greek.

Who wants grammarless idiotai to do important work? This kind of spiritual elitism helps to explain why so many of us (who trust in Jesus to save us from our sins) have kept our feet dry on the lakeshore. We are skeptical that Jesus has much use for us, for people too busy to become biblical scholars and lettered preachers. In some ways, the Church even props up that impression by exalting its trained experts, dressing them in robes like university professors, as if the real work of sharing the Gospel were to be done by the likes of me. In fact, that’s a sad miscomprehension – even a lie. Truth is, the entire enterprise of spreading the Gospel has only worked because God prefers to use ordinary people. That’s the brilliance of our Father’s design, reaching out to us not with words alone, not with religious teaching or even Scripture of itself, but with a love that spreads out like a great net under the sun. God invites us to come and get hooked by Jesus. In choosing to fish this way, God has decided that it is not preachers who are called to transform the world, not credentialed Bible scholars who catch people up in the Good News. No. It is Jesus who does the catching, and it is everyday people who become his net.

In a way I never would have imagined, this fundamental reality of the Gospel was played out for me over the last nine days. Because in that time I went from being a Botetourt preacher, planning a sermon on Luke 5 for the bazillionth time, to sitting numb and blank-faced in the Trauma-ICU wait-room of Fairfax Hospital, wondering if my dad were ever going to wake up from his head injury. There with me in the chairs was the family of a mentally-ill young man named Ian, who appears to have been tragically and mistakenly shot by police responding to a domestic disturbance.

Now I’m a pro in hospital wait rooms – I’ve been there hundreds of times, and I expect to know the right things to say – you expect me to know the right things to say. But this past week, I was just the son of an injured father, sitting with the grief-stricken parents of a wounded son. So we talked, we who suddenly had so much in common. I held Ian’s mother when she gave up on doing anything but just crying, and I nodded when Ian’s dad asked unanswerable questions into the darkness of the night. And sometimes I cried, too, in that ICU wait-room.

Then, on my arrival yesterday morning, Ian’s father greeted me with “I didn’t know you were a pastor.” Evidently, somebody blew my cover. Yes, I admitted, I am a pastor. But the last few days, I’ve been busy being a full-time son. It just seemed right that we sat together in that wait room, all of us scared and uncertain. “You were exactly what we needed,” Ian’s mom then told me. And that’s what they were for me.

Have you been hooked by Jesus? Or are you living your life in the belief that you are on weekend-reserve duty for the Gospel, a second-string disciple, one whose feet stay dry on the shore while the supposed pros are the ones to go out? God’s does not call us to be put up dry! Jesus will put us exactly where and when he wants us, friends. What would it take, then, for each of us to leave behind this “dry net” sort of faith, this fear of being ‘amateurs in over our heads,’ and put out into deep water?

I have had the strangest, most terrible and wonderful week. I have discovered again that our Lord calls to his work seasoned fishermen, weekend bobber-floaters and those who have never yet cut bait. If we accept his invitation, we will likely get the sense at some point that he bamboozled us, and turned us all into Tenderfeet. We will sometimes feel, as Peter felt, that we do not have the right words, the right kind of faith, the right character to be part of God’s reconciling, healing work. But I believe that fishing is what Jesus does, and the catch is ultimately his miracle. He invites us to look squarely into his eyes, and to answer his call on each one of us. And so, one by one, strand by strand, we become his net, and in doing so discover the ordinary miracles made possible by ordinary people.