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Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is like a net." And he wasn't talking about just any old fishing net; he named a very specific kind of net. In fact, this is the only place in the entire New Testament that this particular word is used. The Greek word, “sagene”, is better known to gulf fishermen as a seine. A seine is a very large net with weights on the bottom and floats on the top which is dragged between two, sometimes three boats. It's a huge dragnet which picks up everything in its path.                I checked all of this out with a member of this congregation who is also a commercial fisherman. He confirmed that seine nets are illegal inside the seven [12 miles today] mile limit, and that there is a move on to ban them in the entire Gulf of Mexico. There's a good reason. A seine, a dragnet, is totally indiscriminate. It picks up everything in its path; not just the tuna you were trying to catch, but dolphin, seaweed, old life preservers and the beer can that jerk in the boat next to you threw overboard last week. And that's exactly the point of Jesus' parable. God's dragnet, the seine of the kingdom, gathers up   everything. And that means everything. In fact, the word "fish" never appears in the original language. The old King James translation was literally correct when it said, "gathered of every kind." The kingdom of God, Jesus said, is like a gigantic dragnet, which gathers everything together under the rule or reign of the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. God's dragnet gathers all things: good things, true things, beautiful things, but it also gathers up   broken things, ugly things, painful things, the leftover rubbish of our human failures and sins -- and in ways which go beyond our comprehension, draws them under the influence of the love of God in Jesus Christ. There is no thing of any kind in your life and mine which cannot be gathered into the loving reign, the gracious    authority, the redemptive purpose of God in Jesus Christ. God's kingdom, Jesus said, is like a huge dragnet which gathers things of every kind.
--James A. Harnish, "God's Dragnet,"

Friends and Family of Lakeway United Methodist Church-Pottsboro. Grace and God’s peace to you and yours in the name of Jesus, the Christ. Amen. There are 287 references in 76 verses, in the New Testament, of the phrase “Kingdom of God.” So I scrolled through my references and did not find a literal reference to the "The kingdom of God is like a net."  And because he put this in quotation marks, he gave himself some literary freedom. Okay. Back to the article. For a year of my life, while in my 20’s, I was a commercial fisherman and shrimper in Corpus Bay. I worked with Buddy Salazar, the Captain. I was his deckhand. I was a crew of one, low      person on the totem pole. We did not use a seine while fishing. We used gill nets. [Google it] Now, while shrimping,  although we used “shrimp nets,” they acted as a seine. And we dragged up a   variety of shrimp, fish, stingrays, squid, crabs, seashells, small sharks, everything that swam, and a variety of trash. You gathered everything. Seagulls followed our shrimp boat, since we cleaned out the nets for shrimp and marketable items, the rest of unwanted stuff went overboard, where the gulls feasted. I concur with Harnish. We are gathered up. The Kingdom of God is a present reality and future event. We rely of the grace of God. God loves us. We are made in His image. We are of sacred worth. God has a plan for our lives: to know Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Amen. Blessings from Pottsboro, Pastor Frank (alegria@lakewayumc.org) C U in church!