Rooted
“Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men,” we hear in today’s Gospel reading from Luke 5. In Matthew’s version, Jesus says: Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Was Jesus comparing human beings to fish? How are we similar to fish? Fish are wanderers. Christ’s apostles fish for people who are rootless, swimming with no direction, adrift, and open to the dangerous traps of the world.
Sheep and fish are images/metaphors Jesus uses to speak of people who are lost, wandering, rootless. Jesus is the Shepherd, the Apostles are Fishermen! The church is the body of Christ and it is apostolic, so the church shepherds those who have been found and rescued from being lost. How have we Orthodox been doing? Not very well for many centuries, as we relied on infant baptisms to fill our churches. But those days are gone. Now we definitely have to go out and fish. That’s the double mission of the church: to fish and to shepherd. Other churches have been better than us in fishing for people, though usually they just steal them from other churches. But how good are they at shepherding? Maybe not so well, and that’s the reason why many are finding their way to Orthodox churches.
We Orthodox have not been good at fishing, but we are better at shepherding: through our deep spiritual and theological traditions that are the backbone of our pastoral care; strong moral teachings along the ancient lines that have held for two millennia of Christianity; our support and promotion of family values; the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and Confession; the Liturgy and worship that involves the whole person; the example of Saints and spiritual elders to inspire us in our struggles; and the knowledge that a person belongs to something that is bigger than the self.
Our society has become more and more rootless. Young people especially grow up without roots in anything that is true and lasting. How do we fight this rootlessness, how do we find and shepherd those who are lost? We start with ourselves, as Paul tells us in today’s Epistle reading: “as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger; by purity, knowledge, forbearance, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”
“As having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” Everything? Yes, because we have the bread of life! Jesus called himself “the bread of life,” “the living bread,” “the bread of God” in chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. Six times in this chapter he calls himself the bread that came from heaven. And he said words that the Orthodox Church continues to treat as fundamental truth: ”If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” All of this in chapter 6 of John! And it is bread that we receive as the body of Christ at Communion. He told us: “Take eat, this is my body….Drink of this, this is my blood.” Yes, bread and wine, the simple stuff of daily existence, are the roots of our new existence as men and women redeemed by Christ, brought into his nets of safety from the powers and principalities that aim to destroy us. And let’s call those powers and principalities by the one name that Paul Kingsnorth calls them: the Machine.
We resist the Machine, but only as the men and women Paul describes in our reading today: “as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed (unless you’re Charlie Kirk); as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” And it is when we have nothing that we possess everything and become fishers and shepherds worthy of Christ’s name. And that’s a message that’s sadly lacking from churches and even among some who speak for the Orthodox faith.
Simone Weil was a French intellectual, a secular Jewish woman, who was drawn to Christ in a mystical way. She did not convert to the Catholic faith, perhaps because the Church had stopped fishing for people like her? Her brief life ended in 1943 in London as an exile from her home country. She literally starved herself to death in solidarity with the people of France who were suffering under the Nazi occupation. She was only 34 years old, but has had an immense impact on thoughtful people of all types. A most remarkable woman.
In her book “The Need for Roots,” she wrote: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.” That is a brilliant statement, and it is what the Orthodox Church should be. We are rooted in a past that is still alive, and which motivates us to a definite vision for the future. Do we have a vision? More fundamentally, do we want a vision? That’s the question if we want to be fishers of men.
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