Catching Fish and seeing the Lord

Unappreciated Tips

Some things try your patience. Maybe its your job, maybe you own your own company. Maybe your employees try your patience. Maybe people not paying their invoices tries you. Maybe its the bureaucracy or the laws that makes this or that difficult. My father would always speak of the difficulty of getting permits from the building dept. when I was growing up. But worse than any of this, the thing that is most annoying is when I hear from the tee box, a golfer person that I do not know says, “See, what you’re doing wrong is you’re too steep on the downswing….or your grip is wrong…. or whatever.” A coach is given certain permissions. Johnny golfer has not earned that authority. With what our Lord did in the Gospel today, not only is my example relatable, imagine the out of touch person not only has these swing tips, but then says, “now the last thing you should do is go and play from the black tees!” Go out into the deep or in Latin, Duc in Altum!!!

We have a fishing story in the gospel, I imagine anglers have similar experiences to my golf example! So we can imagine Peter and Andrew, James and John, professional fishermen, washing their nets and listening to Christ speaking and being intrigued/entertained. Then, they hear the odious words, “Let’s go boys, set out from the shore a ways and let your net’s down.”

I’ve been fishing with friends before, “Try and throw your line between those rocks, yea over there in the shadows, here on the shoreline….shhh stop talking Ian….why are we here so early? because the fish rest and aren’t eating in the middle of the day.”

I imagine Peter saying, Master, good teacher, carpenter, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing… (There’s a comma in the text, but I bet it was a pregnant pause!)

“*Wait, nothing, no response?…Large sigh*… but at your command I will lower the nets.” “*typical tourists from Nazareth their first time on the sea, they want to watch us do the thing.”

And then, Peter sees God!!

What has happened to Sin?

So besides golfing, sometimes people tell me how to preach or how to priest! That’s always fun since I take much more pride in my work as a priest than as a golfer or angler.

The other day I was met with this comment:

A) “Stop yelling and slow down *fair enough

B)You hypocrite, calling us miserable sinners. Is that how the Lord would address us?”

Maybe the Lord wouldn’t address us that way, but Peter and Isaiah sure do! Listen to how they describe themselves:

Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. Luke 5:8

Then I said, "Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"Is. 6:5

I heard this the other day:

“This whole sin thing, it doesn’t exist, its just you being a human being, for a lot of people it is very difficult to allow themselves to accept that, because by accepting it, it means you are accepting yourself and the dark parts of you with the light part of you, the part that you aren’t so happy with and the part that you love, and you learn to dance with them and be OK!, that yes, I’m a human being, sometimes I’m going to be disciplined and sometimes I’m not and everything is going to be OK.” - @dannymorel on Christians REACT to WOKE Religion TikToks: Matt Fradd & Michael Knowles on #Michael Knowles.

Fishing with Peter!

WE don’t deserve this, but you and I, we have the ability to go fishing with Peter, on his boat!

And the Church has always described herself as “The Barque of Peter.” This is the vessel that Christ Himself has jumped into. And without Christ, we can’t catch anything, we can’t win a single soul for Christ

1 Corinthians 15:9–10 (NABRE)

For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God that is with me.

Look at what JPII said, "At the beginning of the new millennium…our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4).

…

He wrote, "God is opening before the Church the horizons of a humanity more fully prepared for the sowing of the Gospel. I sense that the moment has come to commit all of the Church's energies to a new evangelization and to the mission ad gentes. No believer in Christ, no institution of the Church can avoid this supreme duty: to proclaim Christ to all peoples". At the Beginning of the New Millennium, Saint John Paul II

Then [Isaiah] heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send?  Who will go for us?" "Here I am," I said; "send me!" - Isaiah 6:8

When was God enthroned?

On the cross.

This is what we are being sent to! To be able to preach the cross, to get to the cross, to stay at the cross, we must be purified, and the pilgrimage is purifying.

And to think, perhaps you’re thinking, but I’m not that bad. Jesus is nice and undemanding…no. He’s going to ask us to do things and suffer things that we do not understand and seemingly don’t make sense. He’s going to ask us to love people that aren’t obviously lovable. But the first thing He is going to ask is that we repent. “Repent! for the Kingdom of God is at Hand!” If we do not think of ourselves as unworthy to be on the boat, then we won’t have the humility to get on the boat. If we do not acknowledge our sins, then we have nothing to repent of. It says in John 15, “Without me you can do nothing!” Acknowledging our sins is the first step. Accepting Christ as the Master of our life is the second. But we still have much hunting and fishing to do from Peter’s boat that will take up most of our life. But we mustn’t ever forget our need for Christ to be on our boat, his Lordship over our lives as well as the privilege that we have to even be considered worthy to bear the name of Christian and spend our lives drawing other people to Him and the barque of Peter, the Catholic Church.