The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 7, 2010
Vol. 13 no. 06

Everything But...

A battle rages every time one opens the Bible, a battle of preferred occupations. Not that anyone is actually fighting, but some tension is revealed between the hunter (Cain, for instance) and the farmer (Abel). The shepherd and cattle people must not have viewed each other all that kindly.

The Apostle Paul introduced a unique, but necessary profession of tent-making. There are companies that make tents, but the individual vocation has faded away today. Yet in the Gospels, a new profession has been introduced, that of the fisher. Of course, it could not have been new, for fish were here before human beings. Seldom is fishing mentioned in the Old Testament, but in Jesus’ neighbourhood fishing was the way of life. Jesus’ parables and teaching utilize many a farming and agricultural expression, but fishing and fish pick up most of the other buzz words.

So today we are caught. Fished. It sounds good if we are the ones being the fishers of people, but in reality you have to be caught before you can fish. That may not be so comfortable.

A long debated issue about Christianity is whether you can be born into the faith and nurtured gradually all the way up to maturity. Many of us can say that is how they have entered the Christian way of life - being immersed in the faith before we knew it. Nevertheless, Christianity is not genetic, one can even say it is not natural. You have to catch it, like a cold, and that really means it catches you. We can’t control whatever catches us.

We may have never known a time that we were not Christian, but along the way you and I have to be caught by the power and bite of the faith. It may seem to be normal to be Christian, but it is never is.