153 Fish...Mystery Solved!

The congregation I am serving in Charlotte, NC (St. Luke's Lutheran Church, 3200 Park Road) is more obviously diverse than any congregation I have yet served. We are a multi-colored, multi-language, multi-orientation, multi-aged, multi-income, multi-education, multi-health/or lack of health/physical or mental, multi-faith, multi-everything congregation. We are active in the Room in the Inn Ministry of Charlotte (and were actually instrumental in beginning that ministry of shelter for the homeless). We have an intentional outreach to the mentally ill of the community. We welcome folks who are actively in recovery from addiction and those who continue to try to "find their sobriety" (as one recovering addict/friend states it). There are brothers and sisters in this place who have served time in jail and prison. There are folks who are conservative that share pews with folks who are liberals. The diversity is a true glimpse of the Kingdom of God, where all are embraced and all are loved.

Now, I've only been here slightly more than 2 years, which means that this is my third Easter Season, which means that this is the first year that I have dealt with John 21:1-19 since I've been here (we follow a list of "assigned readings" which is in a 3-year cycle). Left to myself - if I am honest - I would not likely choose to preach on John's gospel very often. He can be so dualistic and heavenly minded that he sometimes seems to be "no earthly good." He comes across as an anti-Semite (which he is not. Unfortunately the anti-Semites of the world have sometimes exploited his gospel to their own unfaithful ends). But, assigned readings are assigned, so John it is! The significance of this has to do with John's mentioning that the disciples caught 153 large fish on their post-Easter fishing trip. Specifically, verse 11 says, "[Simon Peter] hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, 153 of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn." Maybe that's not odd to you - but it is to me...153. Weird!

Apparently others, across the ages, have also thought that the specificity is weird, because volumes and volumes have been written attempting to explain the significance of the number 153 - all to no avail. Even the most scholarly end up saying, "but we just don't know what the number means." They never asked my daughter. Ask her what it means, and she'll tell you that it means that there were A LOT of fish! Ask her if she thinks they were all the same kind of fish, she'll say, "no way. There were a bunch of different kinds!" Ask her how come the net didn't break and she'll look at you like you've just asked a ridiculous question. "Why would it break?! There is no reason it should break!"

We have several African-American families as part of our church family. They tolerate my questions about growing up black in the South. "What was it really like?" "But you never experienced that in a congregation, did you?" One black woman (who has two gorgeous bi-racial daughters) told me that ours was the first church they'd been in where people didn't openly stare at them. She lets me ask a lot of questions. We have one woman who was one of the first black children in her high school. She told me about her first day on the bus. She grew up to be a pharmacist. We have people who campaigned for Obama and others who campaigned for Romney. We have people who insist that Mary was a true virgin and others who think that God coming through the pregnancy of a teen-aged mother is every bit as miraculous an incarnation. We have openly gay couples who share pews with heterosexual married couples, with both couples celebrating their 40th anniversaries (actually, it’s longer than 40 years…but I don’t remember exactly). We have a few life-time Lutherans (but, most of us come from other "predecessor" denominations) and a couple of Jewish brothers and sisters, who feel more welcomed here than anywhere else. I tell people fairly often, "If you don't want to be part of a church where you are immediately embraced and loved, then you may not want to be part of this congregation. But if you do...we will love you."

Ask my daughter what the significance of 153 fish is..."It's a lot of different fish."

Ask her why the net was not torn..."What a ridiculous question! Why would it tear?"

The verb for "torn" is "schizo" in the Greek. It is the same root as the noun "schisma" which is always used in John to refer to divisions (schisms) among the people (cf. 7:43; 9:16; 10:19).

I think that these schisms make the church, writ large, seem irrelevant and inauthentic to those outside of it. How can we preach/proclaim "that we are one and welcoming" (cf. John 17:11) when we are constantly running away from one another. “Is it possible,” a friend of mine asks, “for the church to be composed of 153 different types of people and not break into divisions? What about 153 different views on issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, biblical interpretations, etc., and not break into factions?” It seems to be possible. Not easy. Sometimes messy. But possible.

There is a poster on the wall of our house. It’s covered with different colored hand-prints. Underneath, it says: “Children instinctively know what most adults have forgotten. Diversity is not something to be tolerated. It is something to be celebrated!”