(Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/geralds_1311/3807444802/) |
July 22, 2012
Luke 5:1-11
Once
while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was
pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore
of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He
got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out
a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the
boat.
When he
had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let
down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night
long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’
When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were
beginning to break. So they signalled to their partners in the other boat to
come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to
sink.
But when
Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me,
Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at
the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of
Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be
afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their
boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
SERMON: “Catching Life”
I’m
going to begin this sermon with a bit of practical advice: the roof of your car
is not a wise place to store your laptop computer (while I’m at it, you might
avoid the washing machine and oven, too).
Here’s how I learned this:
Many of
you know that I like to write my sermons on Thursday afternoons in Southern
Pines at a coffee shop. There is one
particular coffee shop that has been very welcoming, not only to me, but to my
furry Associate Pastor Hayden, as well.
It may just be owned by a daughter of this church. Okay, commercial over (but this sermon is
brought to you by Swank).
Back to
my laptop blunder. As I got out of my
car, I placed my computer on top of it while I got the Associate Pastor out of
the car and gathered my things. I went
into Swank and got my coffee and, a few minutes later, two women came in asking
if someone drove a red bug. I said that
was me (not realizing why they would be looking for me). They told me that there was a laptop sitting
on top of my car. Confident that it was
not in fact raining laptops, they wanted me to be sure and get it.
I was so
grateful that I bought them coffee (did I mention how good the coffee is
there?). One of the women told me that
her laptop is so important to her because of all the pictures of children and
grandchildren on it, so she understands how important my laptop is to me. As they left, she gave me a hug and said,
“God bless you.” Because of their
intentional kindness to a stranger, God did bless me.
We do
not very often hear stories like these.
The only way this story would make headlines is if I was running for
President and my opponent had a smear campaign, “If she can’t keep up with her
laptop, how can she run the country?”
But the
kindness of those two women in actually thinking of how it would feel to lose
something precious and caring for someone they had never met, should be
newsworthy. It is nothing short of a
miracle.
Our
story from Luke centers around a miracle.
Jesus is speaking to crowds and decides to hop on a boat so that it
doesn’t have to be such a claustrophobic encounter. That boat happens to be Simon Peter’s. After Jesus’ voice gets hoarse from all that
preaching, he tells Simon to push out into the deep water and let down the
nets.
But
Simon’s had a long night. He is just
coming in from a fruitless night of fishing, he’s filthy and exhausted. He had just finished cleaning his nets, was
ready to go home for a little pulled pork and put his feet up, when this
Preaching Stowaway came on board.
Now,
after making him listen to a long sermon (is there anything worse?), Jesus
wants him to go back and fish again. And
then clean his empty nets all over again. Simon Peter gives a perfectly
petulant answer, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught
nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” Jesus must have given him one of those “do
what I say looks”, because next thing we know, those nets are in the water and
teeming with fish.
Their
glee is short-lived as the boat begins to sink from the weight of that great
catch. Simon’s anxiety rises to the
surface as he tells Jesus that he is a sinful man and so it would be better if
Jesus just left him alone. Perhaps he
really does feel inadequate. Or perhaps
he’s just trying to be a polite Southerner and give an excuse for needing this
troublemaker to leave.
Either
way, Jesus doesn’t give up that easily.
They somehow make it safely to shore, and when they do, he says, “Do not
be afraid, from now on you will be catching people,” literally in the Greek
catching live people.
I think
there was a reason that Jesus didn’t ask them to come catch live people
first. He needed to take them into deep
water, to push them beyond what they thought was possible, to have them
net-work together to bring in the greatest catch of their lives, and only then
could they be called. This wasn’t to
prove their worth to him: it was to prove their worth to themselves. And, believing that they were capable of more
than they ever imagined, they left everything, and followed him.
That is
the miracle of our tale. A boat full of
smelly fish is not so thrilling. But
people leaving everything familiar to journey into the unknown so that complete
strangers would know real, abundant life is a miracle. The miracle of letting go of their delusions
of control and following Jesus into the lives of others not tomorrow, or next
week, but today.
Frederick
Buechner writes of the power of each day, saying,
"In the entire history of
the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day
just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is
the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your
birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the
hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could
hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can
hardly be said to be living at all…
Your life and my life flow into
each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and
freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see
reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live
for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very
satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in
just this sense, love.”
“Fishing
for people” means this exact way of living: that we leave behind autonomy and
self-sufficiency to live for and in and through each other. Following their Stowaway Savior, Jesus’
disciples discovered community that transcended all barriers, and in moments of
utter miracle, they stumbled upon full, precious life, in all its glory.
Life in
a paralytic walking again, in a sermon that changed everything they thought
they understood with the simple words, “Blessed are the poor,” in a woman
washing Jesus feet with her hair and tears, in a high official’s daughter risen
from the dead.
Messy,
teary, inconvenient, startling, beautiful life.
It is
tempting to think that this sort of abundant life is something of a bygone era,
when God worked in more extraordinary ways than God does now. But that day along the sea of Galilee, there
were nothing more than ordinary fishermen, a desperate crowd, and a choice to
follow or not. They had no more or less
breaths than we do, no more or less doubts and fears, no more or less
obligations than us. And they said yes
to a journey into the lives of strangers, and there discovered the miracle of
this life: living it for others.
The same
Spirit who moved Pete to follow that day, stirred two women in Southern Pines
to seek me out and return my laptop. God
is God, always has been, and always will be.
And for some reason, God chooses to work through us humans. We have always been a bizarre mix of frenzied
and hopeful, compassionate and selfish, and so it will always be. The miraculous is shared through the ordinary
because God chooses us. The overflowing,
everlasting grace of God is experienced here on this day, because God chooses
now. The completeness of our lives found
only in seeking wholeness in the lives of others, because God designed us for
each other.
May we
follow our Savior with the foolishness of a fisherman who dared to believe that
real life—for all—is something worth catching.
Amen.