“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes; the ones who see things differently…” That’s how one of the best ad campaigns in U.S. history begins: a voiceover celebrating bold visionaries who broke the mold governing whatever was the sector of human life in which they moved. Images of examples accompany the voiceover: Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Edison; Gandhi, Muhammad Ali, Amelia Earhart; Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Pablo Picasso.
“While some see them as the crazy ones,” the narrator concludes, 
“we see genius; because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” The screen goes to black, and two words appear after a moment: “Think different.”
It was the new campaign for Apple in 1997, when Steve Jobs had just returned after decade of exile that began when he lost a corporate leadership fight and had to leave the groundbreaking personal computer company he had co-founded. In the mid-90s, however, Apple began to lose market share rapidly as it failed to keep innovating its products, most notably by not recognizing the rise of multitasking and therefore the need for an operating system that could run more than one program at a time.
Weeks away from bankruptcy, the company decided that the only platform that would work for them was the one created by Steve Jobs at his new company, tellingly named NeXT, so they bought the company and brought Jobs back to Apple in an “advisory role.” Jobs quickly got to work, not advising but reclaiming his former kingdom, and in less than six months he orchestrated a boardroom coup that got him appointed as the new CEO in mid-1997. He spent the rest of the year shutting down 70% of Apple’s products and focusing it on its core offerings. As a result, Apple went from near-bankruptcy to a $300 million dollar profit in a year.
Jobs clearly saw himself in the campaign, another rule-breaking genius whom others rejected but who was vindicated by changing the world. And in terms of what he accomplished, while I wouldn’t put him in the same league as people like Gandhi and MLK, he certainly did change the world in terms of personal computing. While Jobs was renowned for his emotional abuse of employees and his penchant for taking credit for other people’s work, it’s unquestionable that his leadership was world-changing in his field: he saved Apple from destruction in 1997 and subsequently redefined personal computing through it with his vision for things like the iPod, iBook, iPad, and of course the iPhone.
At the time that the iPhone was released, BlackBerry had 50% of the U.S. smartphone market share; less than ten years later, it had 0%, primarily because BlackBerry didn’t think there was a market for smartphones beyond the corporate world, while Apple recognized that smartphones had the capacity to impact people’s entire lives: work, entertainment, family relationships, personal finance, you name it.
Martin Luther could have been featured in that campaign, as well. Today is Reformation Sunday on the church calendar of Protestant churches around the world; the last Sunday of October is always designated that way because of its proximity to October 31, when Luther posted his 95 theses about what was wrong with the Catholic church and how to make things right. In church terms, it is one of the watershed “think different” moments in the entire history of the Christian church.
Now, since we’re in Bethlehem, I should point out that our Moravian friends and neighbors are the descendants of a Protestant Reformation that happened over a century before Martin Luther, under the leadership of Jan Hus in the modern-day Czech Republic. Hus was a major influence on Luther; he just had the misfortune of starting his reform movement before the printing press was invented, and so both his ideas and ultimately he himself were easier to contain and suppress.
All the Protestant reformers, both Luther and those who came before and after him, insisted that the church needed to think different, not simply to be more effective, but to be more faithful: the corruption and superstition and hierarchical self-preservation and theological decay that had developed in the medieval Roman Catholic church was significantly impeding its ability to be faithful to and with the gospel. Luther’s theses, in effect, were about 95 ways in which the church needed to think different.
A very important part of what today’s passage from John’s gospel is precisely about the importance of being able to think different. This story comes at the very end of John’s gospel: after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, after the discovery of the empty tomb, after several appearances of the risen Jesus to his disciples. And at this point, the disciples seems to think they’re at the end of the story: Jesus has risen and therefore been vindicated, and its finally time for them to get back to the normal lives they put on hold to follow him three years earlier, according to John. “I’m going fishing,” Peter says, which of course was his profession before he met Jesus, and others agree to go with him. In other words, after all their experiences with Jesus, they’re going right back to thinking the same.
They seem to definitely be out of practice at fishing, though, as they catch nothing all night. But just before daybreak, Jesus shows up on the beach and yells out, “hey, you haven’t caught any fish, have you?” They don’t recognize Jesus, so they’re probably grumbling about him when he continues: “Cast the net on the right side of the boat,” he says, “and you’ll find some.” Notice he says “the right side” rather than the other side; that’s important, because it’s not a random switch of direction, but a rather radical suggestion to think different.
As I pointed out in a different sermon on this text a while back, the first century was pretty intolerant of left-handed people like me, so everybody was either naturally right-handed or had to learn to function that was not to be ostracized. That meant, of course, that everything was set up and done in a way that was most helpful for right-handed people. In terms of fishing from a boat, you would fish off the left side of the boat because that allowed your dominant right arm to be in control of pulling the cumbersome fishing nets back into the boat.
Fishing on the right side of the boat would have been difficult, and awkward, and even a little embarrassing; all the moves that they can do in their sleep right-handed have to be reversed and done with the other hand. It’s almost like learning to fish all over again. And yet when they finally manage to get the nets in the water and pull them up again, however awkwardly and sloppily that they do it, they find that the nets are suddenly so full they seem like they might snap at any moment as they strain to hold so many fish.
So, on one level this story is illustrating the importance of thinking different, not just in the sense of “let’s try something different,” but in the more radical sense of going directly against conventional wisdom, and established practice, and the normal, proven approach. But it’s about more than just being the crazy ones who are really geniuses. Because it’s one thing to change the world; it’s another thing to keep changing it.
Ironically, the story of Apple’s “think different” approach helps us to see that, too. Apple has always tried to position itself as the rules-breaker, paradigm shifter. But achieving world domination and cultivating an ethic of “think different” are diametrically opposed to each other. Ironically, in the process of dominating the world of smartphones, Apple has created a consumer culture that is almost the exact opposite of “think different.”
Its devices, applications, and software interact seamlessly with each other, but only in very limited ways with others, and its market share thus creates pressure for people debating over what phone to buy to “think same” by getting what everyone else has, and you get punished if you leave the one true faith, being forced to strip yourself of not just your phone, but all your apps and much of your data like some kind of medieval pilgrim divesting themselves of their possessions to make a walk of atonement.
The problem with reformations of any kind, is that they tend to become the new establishment if they are successful, and often that means they become at least as resistant to reformation as was the original system they were trying to reform. The dynamic of people or corporations or governments or faith communities becoming what they once beheld is a common and ancient one. Leaders or movements for political liberation on one day become the newest oppressors on the next. The artistic vanguard of one generation becomes the defensive establishment against the next. The technological innovators who envision something game-changing that has never been imagined before become blind to the possibilities of something new that they never considered.
You see, it’s not enough to simply “think different.” You have to continually think different, or you inevitably slide into a dynamic of “think same,” more commonly known as groupthink, and that slides quickly into refusing to think different, and then rejecting those who do. It’s why one of the primary mottos of the Reformed theological tradition, of which Presbyterians are a part, is that we strive to be “the church reformed, always being reformed according to the Word of God.”
We can’t simply be the church reformed, because a commitment to reformation can never be a “one and done,” but rather a practice, an identity of always being reformed, and not by our own hopes or fears or desires or faithfulness, but according to the Word of God. That means Scripture, of course, but even more so it means Jesus himself, the Word of God made human.
It’s why what’s important about this story in the end is not that the disciples thought differently on their own but in response to Jesus saying, “cast the net on the right side.” What’s significant is not that it’s a different side, but it’s the side that Jesus told them to fish on, even against their better judgment and established practice, but in being willing to think different at Jesus’ direction, they discover an abundance so overwhelming that they can barely stay afloat under it.
In this season of stewardship, in this world of scarcity, this is the good news for us: that if we trust in Jesus and are willing to be always reforming, continually thinking different according to the Word of God, there is nothing that God cannot and will not do to give us everything we need to faithfully respond to Jesus’ call. That is our blessing, and our calling, and our mission, now and always.