Presentation of our Lord (Luke 2:22-40)  2/02/2014

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Last Sunday we were called by Jesus to drop our nets and our daily entanglements and follow him – “I will make you fish for people,” promised Jesus. Later that same day, I read an interesting news story about a fisherman who spent his entire life fishing in the Mediterranean Sea.^[i] The man had died and left behind several pieces of pottery he had pulled from the sea. The relative who received these items called the Antiquities Authority to obtain guidance regarding the disposition of pottery retrieved from the sea that she thought might be a hundred years old. The experts arrived and after a careful inspection informed her the pottery ranged in age from 1000 to over 3000 years old, likely fished out of ship wrecks from the ancient past. All this talk of fishing starting me thinking of a memorable fishing story I experienced as a young boy during a summer trip to Maine with my grandfather and brother. After a full morning of pulling lobster pots, we gathered up our fishing gear and headed back to sea to try our luck fishing for dogfish. Now, other than a few trips to the local river fishing for brook trout, I really had no idea what I was doing and I had no idea what a dogfish even looked like. An hour of working our drop-line fishing gear proved to be completely disappointing, so we called it a day and started to bring in our lines. As I retrieved my line I began to feel a strong tug and I quickly become worried that I had hooked my line on some underwater growth. Everyone encouraged me to keep pulling, and with the assistance of my grandfather and his friend, the line slowly pulled a large grey object in to sight. And as I saw the three foot dogfish below the water I did the only reasonable thing anyone would do if you had never seen a dogfish before…I yelled “SHARK! There’s a SHARK in the water!” As I continued to yell “shark” and did everything in my power to not drop my line and lose the fish, everyone else in the boat found great joy in my terrified amazement. Continue reading →