The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 4, 2007
Vol. 10 no. 05

Everything But...
           In this season of Annual Meetings, are we supposed to be reporting how many people we have caught in the last year? I know there are churches who list the statistics of how many people have been converted, baptized and so on. A measure of our faith, they often say. Quantities of faith do not measure well.
           It is not obvious at first glance why fishing became the Gospel occupation around which a number of important metaphors were clustered. Sure, the sea of Galilee dominated the geography and much of Jesus’ time is spent crossing back and forth that sea of a lake. The core of the disciples were fishermen, of course, but was that coincidental? Could another occupation have been just as holy?
           After all, the Old Testament favourite was clearly being a shepherd and all sheepy kinds of things. Some people were hunters, but Cain kind of killed that option. Many were farmers, like Abel, and while agricultural images of the sower of the seed are strong in the Gospels, it wasn’t quite as dominant as fishing. The fish became and has remained a major symbol of the Christian Church.
           We do have lots of fish in Saskatchewan, but farming and wheat would be more likely to fill those images for us. I have lived in regions where coal mining was the metaphor for every facet of life; steel workers and oil riggers in other places, forestry and paper making in yet one more. The Cotton Patch Version of the New Testament by Clarence Jordan goes as far as he can go in rendering the Gospel world into the southern way of life and culture. After all, should not the Gospel flourish in the city streets of Toronto where no cotton or wheat or sheep are raised?