Luke 5:1-11 / January 21, 2007
John R. Hilley
“Deep Water Fishing”
(preaching notes)
The disciples had been fishing all night. They had caught nothing. Jesus tells them, “Put out into the deep water, let down your nets for a catch.” Peter informs Jesus, “We’ve worked all night but have caught nothing…But if you give the word, we’ll give it another try.” In verse six it says, “And they caught so many fish that the net began to break (Luke 5:6)
“Verse 6, this seems to be a good stopping point” I thought to myself this past Wednesday while getting ready for today. “Stop at verse 6, they’ll love that verse about how many fish Peter and friends caught after they had the good sense to listen to Jesus after a night of fishing failure.” Listen, well we should. Because, every time the church gathers, we’re here to listen to Jesus. “If you say so, Lord, we’ll let down the nets.”
Each Sunday we gather here, when much of the city is off reading the paper or sleeping or flipping channels on TV. Especially on a rainy winter morning like this. Many find what we do quaint or irrelevant. We gather. We sing. We pray. We listen. At the heart of who we are, as Presbyterians and Christians, is the Bible. We gather around the Word of God each Sunday to hear it read, to hear it interpreted, to hear it set to music. We are here to “listen to Jesus”, gathering in order to disperse, in order to let the Word of God live itself out in the mysteries of our lives, in the full rhythm of human community. This is an odd thing that we do, coming to “listen to Jesus”, because for the remaining six days and 23 hours we probably do little of this. We email and drive and race around, change diapers, sit in the doctor’s office. During those hours we talk, even read, some of us. But I suspect we rarely listen. “If you say so, Lord, we’ll let down the nets.”
Peter and company had been fishing all night long. Caught nothing. They’ve come back onto shore. I’ve been to the place beside the Galilean lake where historians think this scene took place. It’s like a natural amphitheater as it slopes down to the water. The landscape funnels right to the water, a natural bowl for the crowd to be pressed down upon Jesus by the lake. It was Peter’s boat Jesus commandeered and put out a few yards and used as a kind of pulpit to address the crowd.Now, with the teaching over, Jesus tells Peter and company not to put their nets away but to get their nets ready and go out into the deep to the very place where they had experienced fishing failure. Peter was on his way home for breakfast and a nap. But Peter listened and they went out and they had such success, they could hardly pull the catch into the boat.
Verse 6, yes it seems like a good place to focus. First there is faithful listening and then there is persistence….if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. On Wednesday, I’m thinking: “this is what they need to hear on this January morning.” Especially with the annual meeting today. If we are just persistent as a church, things will work out. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.
But the story – what is called the periscope, the whole of the story, continues on. The overflowing nets in verse 6 is not the end of the story. It takes a very odd turn when we stumble across verse 8.
But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees saying, “Go away from me, Lord, I am a sinful man! For he and everybody with him were amazed at the catch at the fish that they had taken.” (verse 8)
Here’s the question: Why would Peter have said, “Get away from me, Jesus, I’m a sinful man!”? You’d think he would have been delighted, danced a little jig what with this huge catch of fish after a futile night. I think he said it because Jesus scared Peter with the mystery of the bountiful catch. Jesus was no stranger to Peter. He had heard Jesus’ teachings before. When Jesus spoke to the crowd that day, I imagine Peter learned more about what he didn’t understand of Jesus’ teachings. When there were other things he didn’t understand, like, when his mother Rachel was sick, Peter went to Jesus. There was a lot about health and disease Peter didn’t understand. He was glad Jesus could take care of things Peter didn’t know how to address. I am wondering as miraculous as that healing was, that didn’t scare him like the full nets scared him.
When you think about it, the one thing Peter DID understand was FISHING. Fishing was one area of his life Peter understood; what is more, it was a place where he was in control. Sure, he sometimes had bad nights out fishing. But Peter understood fishing and he understood the sea. He was certain at this time of day, in this part of the lake, after a night like last night, the fish were gone. But you say: “Fish here!?” Full nets. I can just imagine Peter saying:
“Go away from me Lord. You’ve taken away my certainty about the one thing I know – fishing. Go away, and take God and all God’s mysteries with you and leave me with my fish and my friends, leave me with my boat and my lake, and my old comfortable certainties still in place. Take away your mysteries, they are too frightening.
There are a lot of fishing stories in the Bible. This story, right at the beginning of Luke’s account, is about something more than just fishing – it is about God being bigger than our experience, it is about God stretching our comfort zone, and it is about our looking at our traditional way of understanding and of doing things and seeing fresh possibilities. This story is about the experience of something that cannot be explained and the reverence it evokes as Jesus took Peter out in the deep waters of the mysteries of God.
“Depart from me for I am a sinful man” was Peter’s response to this experience of a power, a reality that simply didn’t fit into his worldview, which, after all, was based on a working man’s common sense and worldly wisdom. Things like this just don’t happen.
In the Bible, the first human response to the presence of God is awe, fear, terror. Isaiah’s experience in the temple is a prototype. The temple is filled with the smoke of incense and Isaiah sees God and his response sounds a lot like Peter’s: “Woe is me! I am lost . . . yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.”
Awe in the face of mystery, humble acknowledgement that there is more to reality than we can comprehend, reverence for God and God’s creation, is the heart of religion and, in the Bible, the essence of our own humanness. In the Bible, it’s as much of our humanness as the need for food and water.
Let’s be honest there’s something about us which knows how to handle fishing failure, which wouldn’t mind if this story ended in fishing futility. Something about us is downright comfortable with fishing all night without a bite. What’s the definition of failure?....In situations where what we are doing isn’t working to repeat the same behavior over and over again and expecting different results. We are good at casting the net in the same way, in the same place, and in a way that does not work, and we come up wanting. There are many who would say that this is what the current administration in Washington is doing with the war in Iraq. There are many who feel like the church is throwing their nets out and coming up empty…after all, we say, “we’ve always done it this way.” And, in the people we care about, we are good at repeating the same behavior that only serves to isolate us from the very people we care about.
There’s something about the church being comfortable with being church all day with little to show for it…there is something in you…there is something in me content with the depths of Good Friday but scared out of our wits by the mysteries of Easter. We can handle the disappointments; we have come to expect them. It’s the threat of full nets, it’s the new life of Easter, it’s the deep waters of unmanageable, mysterious, grace that scares me, makes me want to say, “Get out of here, Jesus.” I don’t trust it.
The writer Anne Lamott was being interviewed one time about her writing and her faith. Anne Lamott, a Presbyterian who lives in San Francisco, and who I have talked about before, said the two best prayers she knows are “help me, help me, help me” and the other is “thank you, thank you, thank you.” Help me is said in the morning and thank you is said in the evening before we drift off to sleep. Anne Lamott says she has added a third prayer that she tries to say at least once a day and that prayer is in the form of the word “WOW!” She said we need to have a sense of wonder and reverence for God’s handiwork in our lives and in God’s creation.[1]
Session and Pastoral Nominating Committee, do you remember when we met during the retreat and over all of the strategic priorities that are listed in the annual report, you insisted that you wanted to listen for God’s plan rather than be focused on your own agenda. What I think you were saying was:
God’s plans are much bigger than our own understanding and that we want to have an experience of awe and reverence. The challenge is how we turn over all of our certainties to the God who wants to do new things. Put another way, “How do we say, ‘Wow!’”?
One of the familiar pictures of Jesus that adorns the walls of thousands of Sunday school classrooms comes from an image in the Book of Revelation. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” The picture is of Jesus, with a lantern in his hand, knocking on the door of a neat little cottage, probably somewhere in the Cotswolds of England. The message is that Jesus comes and knocks on the door of every human heart. But in light of this text, maybe we ought to be careful about answering the door. Maybe we ought to think a little bit before inviting him into the home that is our heart. If you invite him in, he might start rearranging the furniture, might clean the place up, might discard some old worn-out pieces and add some new ones, might give the place a whole new look and feel.[2]
Maybe that’s not what you want. Maybe you’re perfectly satisfied with your life as it is. But maybe somewhere in the depths of your own spirit that’s exactly what you want and know you need: a rearrangement, new look, a new direction.
Peter’s first response to the reality and power of God as it came to him in the person of Jesus was to back away. The invitation to be a follower begins with a sense of God’s mystery and transcendence and our own smallness and inadequacy. That is as it should be for to be a disciple is no small matter.
I love the fact that Jesus pretty much ignores Peter. “Depart from me,” Peter says, expressing the human experience of awe and reverence and fear in the face of the holy. And Jesus doesn’t do it, doesn’t depart from Peter, stays with Peter, furthermore changes Peter’s life, transforms him, commissions him thereafter to fish for people, gives him a new life, gives him a truth big enough and good enough to live for and die for—which is exactly what Peter would do.
WOW!
Luke 5:1-11
5Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, 2he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3He 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. 4When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” 5Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” 6When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. 7So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. 8But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” 9For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; 10and 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.” 11When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
The Benediction from
Blessing the Boats (Lucille Clifton)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
1
[1] John Buchanan in his sermon, “Reverence” preached February 8, 2005 at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago uses this illustration.
[2] ibid