Sunday Service at 10:30am
Rev. Mark J.T. Caggiano
26 Suffolk Road
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

Fishing For People

January 22, 2023

Isaiah 9:1-4; Matthew 4:12-23

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness on them light has shined.  

The Book of Isaiah anticipates a change. Darkness is interrupted by light. And people shrouded in darkness, upon them light has shined. We might ask, what did they see? What was lost to them in the darkness? And what was suddenly revealed?

In the darkness, one might stumble about. One might lose the way. One might struggle to live.

This darkness was proverbial, the people lost but not in a literal sense. And yet that sense of being lost kept the people from something. Being closer to God, perhaps. Moving along the right pathway in life. Seeing what matters, what is important, what is real and true and right. There are many ways to understand this sudden revelation as darkness gives way to light.

In our Gospel reading, we heard an echo of the passage from Isaiah: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” The shadow of death is about them, but new light has saved them, new light has dawned over them. That is quite a change, and it comes through the life and teachings of Jesus.

Jesus begins to teach, which leads him to have disciples. Those disciples are often considered on their own as important religious figures, but here they stand at the beginning. They are tending their nets, living ordinary lives. But then, Jesus calls to them: And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” The King James Version has a bit more poetry to it, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.

The message is the same. Jesus plans to teach these new followers to teach in his stead. To reach more people, one might guess, and to continue teaching once he is gone, for we know how this story turns out in the end. Learn and then teach.

And so, the disciples or students became the teachers and the apostles. Apostle meaning those who are sent forth. In many ways that expansion of roles has continued for centuries, an ongoing cycle of learning and teaching and growing.

Which made me wonder for a moment: what was learned and what was taught? You might imagine it would be the same things, the same lessons, the same ideas. But that is clearly not the case. The lessons of Jesus are by no means the primary content of modern Christianity. They are secondary at best for many denominations and, in some cases, they are peripheral at most.

What takes their place? Traditions that have accumulated over time. Theologies and doctrines that try to reconcile the mysteries of creation and the many open questions of this life with one particular viewpoint, one particular creed. And that takes up a lot of the oxygen. Too much I would offer.

Today, is another installment in my sermon series on cultures that have influenced Christianity. This week is perhaps the biggest one, the most outsized influence of all. And that would be my own ethnic heritage, the culture of Italy. This is not a simple matter, however. When one says the culture of “Italy” it might take a library worth of books to encompass what that entails.

The Italian peninsula has been inhabited for about 50,000 years. If you will forgive me, I’ll skip over the early part, the Stone Age and all that. Even if we just look at Italy since the beginning of Ancient Rome, we would be covering 3,000 years. Rome only develops into the big kid on the block a century before the birth of Jesus.

Rome is at this point an empire, having cast off the trappings of a republic during the reign of Augustus Caesar. It is a highly organized and militaristic culture. It is male-dominated, no surprise, but it is also fairly cosmopolitan in its way. The Romans conquered and then expected taxes and other forms of support. Cultural assimilation was not a big part of their agenda, as long as they could be in charge. Of course, it was personally beneficial to adopt Roman culture and language for many reasons. For example, Saul of Tarsus famously became Paul, a Roman citizen. He became one by buying the right, which was not uncommon.

Rome was an empire and that involved a strict hierarchy in government and society but also in the household. The father was the one who controlled the family. Men could be citizens while women were only by extension. Women had some legal rights, but not always historically and never to the same degree as men.

This structure has an enduring influence on Christianity. Consider the Trinity, made up of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three elements are said to be co-equal, but note that the Father is God in Heaven while Jesus was Christ upon Earth. The Son leaves and then is subsumed into the Father. That hierarchical relationship would have been familiar to a Roman while the subsequent shift toward co-equality could be described as a later point of divergence.

But that should not be a surprise. The Roman Empire technically survived until the 15th century. Over two thousand years, one might expect some amount of change in the culture. And change it would. Ironically, the Roman Empire survived without the city of Rome for many centuries. The Italian peninsula fell into chaos while the center of the empire shifted to far off Constantinople. But Christianity remained in Italy and the Roman Church developed into one of the primary forces shaping the development of Europe and its many subcultures.

The Catholic Church was enduringly “Roman” in its way. “Pope” is a title taken directly from pagan Roman religion. Pope and pontiff are derived from pontifex, a name literally meaning bridge builder that was used to describe the role of priests, those who build a bridge from this world up to the heavens. The priests conduct rituals connecting the people to the gods. And that model would be reflected in the Catholic Church, with priests serving as intermediaries between God the Father and the people.

Italians would dominate control of the Catholic Church for most of its existence. There have been 266 popes and 217 of them were from what we know of as Italy. Because “Italy” is a fairly new idea. That list of popes from Italy includes city-states like Florence and Venice, so one might argue that this is not a single cultural influence as much as a geographic collection of many. That is a fair description. Florence would develop in ways different from Venice, and northern cities would develop in ways different from the southern areas of Naples and Sicily.

Those different centers of culture would in time help spark a new and startling change across Europe. For the Renaissance began in Italy, first in the city of Florence. Two scholars are credited with its beginning: Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch. Dante and Petrarch would encourage a revival of interest in Greek and Roman culture, literature, and philosophy. One of the resulting schools of thinking from that period was Humanism, which focused on the role of human reason and logic as the center for all creativity. Which is rather radical thinking given that Biblically at least all wisdom and knowledge are said to arise from God.

This cultural change is a puzzling result. Notice that the Catholic Church had been heavily influenced by Roman culture, which itself had been heavily influenced by Greek culture. Assuming that to be the case, how then would Dante and Petrarch studying Roman and Greek culture somehow lead to a differing result? Because different people were studying the same texts centuries later.

Imagine you are back in high school reading a bit of Shakespeare. You hear it in a certain way, perhaps glazing over for some of it. Then you might have to read it in college, with a professor instructing you in new and different ways of approaching the very same work. But then you read it when you are even older, perhaps even voluntarily.

Which was the right moment to read it? And at which time were you correct in your assessment of Shakespeare? That question may not make sense because at each moment, you were reading with different levels of experience, both academically and in life. Now imagine your parents reading Shakespeare. Your grandparents. Your distant ancestors. It is not just across one lifetime that an outlook can change but across many lifetimes and many centuries.

And Italy would keep changing. The expansive ideas of the Renaissance would collide with the tradition-minded expectations of the Catholic Church. Those intellectual tensions play across shifting borders as Italian city-states and European empires compete to control this area.

In a sense, the philosophy of humanism becomes more attractive because so many outside influences are seeking to dominate Italians. You cannot rely upon the government because it will change every few years. And so, you either rely upon the church, leading to a very traditional, religious outlook, or you rely upon yourself, leading to a very radical, humanist reaction.

Italy only becomes a unified country in 1871, when Rome was conquered, and the pope’s worldly power was eliminated. In 1870, by the way, the Catholic Church would also declare that the pope was infallible on fundamental matters of Christian doctrine.

Italy was never easy to rule given its fractured past. Which will lead in time to chaos fatigue and a desire to see order in the land. A desire to have a homogenous identity that would cement together the Italian people. And yes, that would be known as fascism, the historic form of Italian nationalism.

Again, a culture can change dramatically. Roman imperialism becomes Roman Catholicism which struggles against Italian humanism which devolves into Italian fascism. One might rightly ask which of these cultures influenced Christianity. And the answer would be all of them. Just like one country can cycle through a wide range of ideas and ideologies, so too can a religion be pushed and pulled in many directions by such ideas and ideologies. And this can change over time as well as it can change in different countries.

Have any of you ever used a kaleidoscope? It is a tube you look through, with light shining through the other end. There are sparkly, shiny objects inside that are reflected by mirrors and refract the light coming through.

You can shake or spin the tube, causing the objects inside to shift. If any of those objects move, the image you see will change. If the light grows brighter or dimmer, you will see something different. And if you hand the kaleidoscope to someone else, they will see something different, something new, some only they will ever see.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness on them light has shined.  

What will they see when that light shines for them? What would the followers of Jesus see in their time and place? What about the early Romans, the Renaissance-era Florentines, the 19th century citizens of Naples, the 20th century people of Venice? Or the millions of Italians that emigrated around the world. Those like me who barely speak a word of the language and yet draw upon the culture of that distance land and take pride in its art, history, literature and culture.

I was reading an article recently about contextual theology. Classical theology was considered a way of understanding what is ultimately true in the world. It was the highest of the sciences because it was the study of God. Through theology, we would come to know the light amidst the darkness. Contextual theology is quite different. It is how a people, or even a person, encounters God in any one moment. And to understand what one is seeing, you have to consider the particularities of those people or that person. Their experiences in life, the culture that they grew up in or have adopted.

You also need to consider their social location, meaning where they stand within a culture. If I am a wealthy Italian from Milan, my life might look quite different from a working-class person from Sicily. You can substitute someone from Chestnut Hill versus Roxbury, the Upper East Side of Manhattan versus the Bronx, or the northwest corner of Washington DC versus the southeast corner. Those are very different places from which to look out upon the world.

And then there are the social changes that we go through. Do you know someone who lived through the Great American Depression and never threw away a blessed thing in their life? Someone who fought in the Vietnam War and came back an entirely different person? Someone who grew up in the housing projects of Boston and the busing crisis of the 1970s?

Again, like a kaleidoscope, our experiences in life and the cultures of our upbringing are like the pieces of glass and metal through which the light passes. They both change the image that we see and the way we might understand what we are seeing.

Consider that light shining in the darkness once again. It is the same light, the light of God shining down and helping us to see. But what we see changes. It changes depending upon where we are standing in the darkness. It changes depending upon who we are, standing there in the darkness, or who we are standing with.

That is not to say that God is necessarily any different, but we are different. We are different when we are children, when we are in school, when we are young and carefree. We are different when we are older and acting responsibly (or maybe not so responsibly). We are different as we age and as we grow one way versus another through new experiences, new social changes, and new vantage points.

When we consider how Italian culture has influenced Christianity, we must look back over thousands of years. We even must imagine how entirely different versions of Italian culture vied with each other to influence Christianity across those centuries.

Of course, in our normal lives, we do not think this way. Our culture is what we know. The foods we eat, the music we listen to, the ideas we glean from books or television, people or online. That culture can become like the air around us, an invisible environment that simply exists beyond our conscious thought.

But please know that it changes. The culture around us changes from year to year, from place to place, from person to person. And when we sometimes struggle to understand what someone else is saying or doing or thinking, it is worth considering that they are looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, one full of different experiences and expectations. We might not see the same things even under the same light.

That does not mean it is impossible for us to work together, to see eye to eye to extend the metaphor. But it will take a bit more effort. It will not always seem obvious that what I am looking at right now might appear different from another angle, from another perspective. But if you have ever had or dealt with children, you might understand that two people can be considering the very same situation and come away with wildly different ideas about it.

It is the same for culture, the same for geography, the same for many, many things. Including religion. Different religions of course and even the same religion. Even the same church. Sitting here right now, I am guessing there are any number of religious questions we might differ over to some degree. That does not mean that we are all still sitting in darkness. But we might have different ways of viewing what is under the light.

When Jesus taught the disciples, they did not agree about everything. They did not agree while Jesus was alive and they did not agree over the centuries that followed. The goal is not to come to lock-step agreement. The goal should be to develop a way of staying in conversation with one another: in the same church and across religious lines, in the same country and across national boundaries.

That is not a question of absolute agreement but a willingness to keep talking and to keep learning. Because as we learn from one another, we might not come to the same answers, but we just might come to understand why someone has answered a question in a different way.

The light helps us to escape the darkness. But it will be patience with one another that will in time help us to truly see and understand one another. Amen.

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