January 26, Epiphany 3A (Matthew 4:12–23)

My fishing adventures in recent years have been relegated to twice-yearly possibilities when visiting family in northern Minnesota: once when the lakes are frozen and we shiver in shelters on the ice, and once in the summer when we’re more concerned about sunburns than we are about catching our supper.

During these warm-weather outings when my son was younger, my dad would maneuver the boat to a theoretically good spot, and my role in the whole operation was to bait my son’s hook, repeatedly. This involved not only retrieving the worms from the bait box but also dividing them into smaller pieces. It was often less of a fishing expedition than a fish feeding outing, as the small sunfish often nibbled away the worms before we could hook them. In my attempt to stretch the bait, I divided the worms with my fingernails. Sadly, all of my dissecting was in vain: the largest fish we caught on a particular outing—the only keeper—was snagged using a piece of leftover deli turkey from our sandwiches. We all knew that, thankfully, eating dinner that night—let alone any livelihood—­wasn’t dependent on what we caught that afternoon.

These early fisher folks that we read about Jesus calling, though, are in a family business—not a family pastime. Simon Peter and Andrew, the first set of brothers we encounter, aren’t with their father, or at least he’s not mentioned, but we can imagine that they are fishermen because their father was before them and his father before him and so on. They rely on the fish they catch not only for food on the table but also for trade in the marketplace and money in the purse. They are fishermen, working the nets, in the same way that we’re pastors or teachers or project managers or account executives. Fishing is what they do, day in and day out.