Sermon 2/4/07
Deep Waters - Luke 5:1-11, Isaiah 6:1-8
(view lectionary notes for this text)
When I was little, I used to be terrified that to be a “good Christian” I was eventually going to have to go door to door sharing my faith. I’d read the Bible, and heard other people talk about ‘witnessing’, and it just seemed like everything was pointing to sharing about God by randomly walking up to strangers and telling them what I believed and why. This was petrifying for me to think about. I’m actually very shy, and was even more so as a child, and I felt torn. I was committed to doing what I had to do to follow God, but if it meant going door to door, I wasn’t sure I was up for it.
Fortunately, as an adult, I developed an awareness and an understanding that there are lots of ways to share our faith journeys with others, many, if not most of them more effective and realistic than door to door evangelism. I’ve learned that there are other ways to share God, share what God means to me, what God has done in my life, and what God is calling me to do, how God is calling me to live. But the point, the important part, despite particular methods, is that I understand and believe and act as though I’ve got something worth sharing.
I recently heard a preacher (1) talking about the importance of churches making good first impressions on visitors. He talked about his experience of going to a restaurant where the food, which took a long time to be served, and was undercooked. He and his wife had such a bad experience, they knew they would never go there again. And they also admitted that they told everyone they could think of about this restaurant, advising them not to go to it. He figured that a bad first experience at a church could have the same impact on visitors – they will never, ever come back, and they will probably recommend to others that they not check the church out.
What the preacher said works in reverse of course too, and works not just in terms of new visitors checking out a church, but goes much deeper than that – his scenario made me think about what it is that we are passionate about in general. What impassions us? What is worth telling someone about? What are the things that you are so passionate about that you share with others, and try to get them passionate about too? I’m a bit passionate about the TV show LOST. I love it. I’m addicted. And I try to get other people to watch it too. I’m pretty successful in my quest, actually. All three of my brothers now watch LOST. Still working on my mother. I’ve even managed to get to some of you in this congregation. And I’m pretty passionate, as most of you know, about being a vegetarian. I have a pretty good track record there too. Just one stray brother in my family still eats meat. I’ve recently become passionate about snowshoeing. If you’ve talked to me conversationally in the last month, you’ll probably have heard me rambling on about my new love of snowshoeing, and how I go snowshoeing several times a week. I love it, and I love talking about it. But if I can have such passion about these things, and want to share these things with others, things, especially with the TV show, that aren’t really of ultimate consequence, do I have such passion, similar passion, or, hopefully, greater passion, when it comes to my faith and my relationship with God and my understanding of God’s love and what God has done in my life?
In our gospel lesson today, we find a familiar scene – Jesus preaching and teaching, the crowd gathered, and the setting – the lake of Gennesaret, where many fishermen would be busy at work. This is a passage that I love because it is one where you get the sense that every word has somewhat of a doubly or triply-layered meaning. We hear words like fish and nets and deep and catch and get an idea that Jesus is calling us to catch on to what he’s really talking about. When the scene opens, we read that Jesus is standing by the lake and the crowds are pressing in on him in order to hear the word of God. What an image! They’re impatient – anxious – hungry to hear God’s word – that’s how excited they are about what Jesus has to say. The want the words that he’s about to speak. I’ve heard some good preachers – and I like to think I have some preaching skills myself – but I can think of but a few times in my life when I’ve been so anxious, so in anticipation of hearing God’s word.
With the crowds pressing in, Jesus sees fishermen washing their nets and their boats nearby on the shore, and he gets in a boat and asks Simon Peter to put out a little way from the shore. This way, Jesus can comfortably teach the crowds from the boat without being smothered by them in their excitement. When he’s done teaching, he turns to Simon, and tells him, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Not a suggestion – not a questions – but a direction, an imperative. Peter responds in a way that I admire, since I think most of us wouldn’t respond so openly. Jesus tells them to go out into deep water and let their nets down for a catch. Well, Jesus wasn’t a fisherman; he was a carpenter; Simon Peter was the fisherman. And Peter knew where to fish. And Peter knew that they had already been fishing all night without catching anything. But Simon Peter didn’t respond that he knew better than Jesus, or that they tried what he said already and it didn’t work, or that this new way wouldn’t work. He said instead, “Master, if you say we should try it, we’ll try it.”
They let down their nets, and begin to catch so many fish that their nets are breaking. They signal for help, and another boat comes, and still, there are so many fish that both boats are filled to the point that they can barely stay afloat. Peter falls on his knees before Jesus and says, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus responds, to Peter and James and John, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” And with those strange words, these fishermen are inspired to leave their boats and nets and everything, and they begin to follow Jesus.
I think many of us read this passage the first time through and think this is a passage simply about evangelism. In other words, this passage tells us that we have to fish for people – we have to ‘reel in’ other people, catch them on our hooks and reel them in – into this faith community, into church, into the pews. And, like I did when I was younger, we might start, at about this point, to feel a little nervous if we think we’re required to do this sort of fishing in order to be Christians. But I think this passage is about more than that – it is deeper than that, calls us more deeply than that.
Jesus asks us to go deep into relationship with God, deep into exploring ourselves, deep into unchartered, unknown waters in our lives. We can tell Jesus we’ve tried to go deep before, and he’s asking us to again. We can tell Jesus we know more than he does about the waters of our own lives, and he’s telling us we’re wrong about that. We can tell Jesus that we’re not worthy, that we’re sinful, that we don’t want to see what’s hidden in the deep waters of our own souls – Jesus tells us not to be afraid, to let down the nets and dredge up what’s been hidden there. We can tell Jesus that we’ve been searching and searching all night, all of our lives, with no results, and Jesus will show us abundance that fills us and overflows us to the point that we really don’t know what to do with all that we’ve been given. Jesus asks us to go deep. As people of faith we can spend much of our time, much of our lives, in the safety of the shallow waters, by the shore, where our feet can touch the sand below, and our heads are still above water. We can be safe, and maybe catch a little bit of what God is sending our way, even from the safety of the shallow waters. But to really swim, you have to be ready for deep water. Your feet won’t touch the bottom anymore. But in the deep waters, there is much more waiting for us, much more to fill our nets.
I’m convinced that it is when we are willing to go with God into the deep waters, and when we are willing to let God churn up the deep waters of our lives, and when we are willing to let God let down nets into our deep waters and drag up what is there for us to see together, when we’re willing to let God show us that what is in our deep waters will fill our nets beyond capacity – I think it is then that we can experience the passion I was talking about before. It is then that we will be like the crowds pressing in for more, more, more of what God gives us and asks of us. Then we will be so empowered by our experience of God, our experience of God’s love for us, that we will be transparent to others who are looking to see how and if God has touched us.
The season of Lent is fast approaching, and this Lent, we’ll be talking about passion. Passion is a word used in Lent in particular to describe the suffering and death of Christ. But we’ll talk about passion in Lent in bigger strokes – we’ll talk about people on the journey in Lent who are passionate – people in the scriptures who are passionate because they’ve had a life-changing experience. These aren’t always or even usually people who wander around trying to convert others. They’re people who simply can’t help showing that God has changed them. They’re transparent – God’s mark on their lives can’t be hidden. That is what I hope and pray for each of us – that the passion of God in our lives will be plainly visible – that God’s love for us will make us markedly different – that others will see that we’ve been swimming in deep waters, that our lives are overflowing, that God’s hand has touched us.
“Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
Amen.
(1) Adam Hamilton, preaching at the Congress on Evangelism, 2007.