February 6, 2022

 Too often, this Gospel story has been used as a excuse to go out into the world to capture people for Christ and in the quest for saving souls, Christians have sometimes lost our own.  The conquest of the New World was justified because of saving the souls of so called savages whose humanity the invaders could not see or honor and whose ways of loving Mother Earth and living sustainably, we still refuse to learn from.  This Gospel story was used as an excuse to capture people into slavery, to convert people from distant lands to Christianity and exploit them as free labor and property rather than honoring them as God-created siblings in Christ.  Our country was built on the blood and suffering of these souls captured and bought and sold like a catch of fish, with no regard to life.  You and I still benefit from the free labor of enslaved people so long ago—so much wealth passed down through families, endowing Universities, even the White House was built by slaves, souls caught in nets to benefit so called Christians who lost their own souls when they behaved so cruelly to God’s beloved weeping children.  And we still benefit from systems that disproportionately imprison black and brown bodies for longer, harsher sentences for exactly the same crimes, which employ people and prop up the economy of our state and provide many of the goods we purchase that are made in the USA.  In more recent times, we have sadly guilted and frightened people into conversion and used our religion as a weapon especially against people who are gay and lesbian.  For these reasons, people are rightly disgusted by Christianity and have renounced the evils of organized religion. I’m not really fond of the notion of tricking people or trapping them for Christ, which is how this Gospel often gets used.  But I don’t think that was ever the intention.  We’ve corrupted the meaning to suit our own purposes.

 I do think this Gospel has a lot of other things to offer and that’s what I’d like to focus on today.  This is a story about Discipleship.  It is about encountering Christ and being permanently changed by that encounter.

The story begins with a crowd longing for teaching from Jesus.  He is compassionate.  He is available.  These are ordinary people, wanting to hear Good News, wanting to hear the parables, the promises, stories of long ago re-interpreted and held up in the light.  They are so eager, they back Jesus to the lake.  So he teaches them from a boat.  There he is, bobbing up and down in the boat, calling up to the crowd, the water below him, uncertain, clear, deep.  It calls to mind the separation of the land and the waters in the Creation story.  There is Jesus, on a border, crossing lines, finding inventive ways to cope with the needs of so many people.  Whenever we draw lines, we find Jesus crossing them to continue in ministry and we should also expect to cross lines and go unexpected places.  We, too, can cultivate a curiosity and a love of learning so that we seek out ways of hearing and understanding Jesus.  These days we have multiple tools for learning.  We can take virtual tours of museums.  We have access to every kind of book.  And I hope we don’t forget the most important chance for learning and that is to be curious about people around us.  Ask people around you for some time set aside to learn about each other or explore a topic together.  Being a curious learning, open to teaching is being a disciple.

After this teaching, Jesus heads out into deeper water.  He’s going out farther from shore.  It is risky there.  A storm can come up at any moment.  It’s a little harder to swim that far if the boat capsizes.  But people risked it every day because it was their livelihood and their way of getting food for themselves and their community.  Jesus is tired from a day of teaching.  These fishermen are tired from a night of fishing, even though they hadn’t caught anything.  They still spent hours throwing out the nets and reeling them back in.  Jesus asks for a demonstration.  Their work is important to him.  He wants to see what their job is like, what they do all night.  Jesus is learning.  He is a teacher and a learner.  Jesus is teaching us that no matter how much you know or powerful you are, there is always more to learn.

The fishermen have very low expectations, because they’ve been working all night with nothing to show for it.  To me, this relates to us at church.  We often have low expectations of ourselves or each other.  Sometimes somebody asks for something or has a suggestion but people have already made up their minds.  We’ve tried that.  It didn’t work.  Forget it.  But here, the fishermen go ahead and throw out the nets one more time.  Who knows?  Maybe Jesus just looked so excited and expectant they gave in.  Or maybe they just wanted to prove to him that they were right.  In any case, they went a little deeper.  Something changed.   It wasn’t surface stuff.  There was something happening behind the scenes, under the water, out of sight that couldn’t be perceived.  And all that was hidden was brought to the surface.  Going a little deeper can be a very effective strategy.  Sometimes we aren’t sure people want to go a little deeper.  Are they willing to take a risk and be vulnerable and share a personal story or be asked about something personal?  But if you approach them with respectful curiosity and if you’re willing to meet their vulnerability with some of your own and also go deep, you never know what you might pull up from the deep. Being a disciple means trying again, it means going deeper, it means changing our expectations.

This is a Jesus’ abundance moment, much like the changing of the water and the wine.  Jesus couldn’t just do it part way.  He’s overflowing the boat, then another, now the nets are ripping, now the boats are sinking.  It’s too much, Jesus!  But that’s how Jesus does things.  They overflow!  And you can bet everyone in town ate that day, even the dogs and cats, and maybe everyone came together to clean the fish and hang them up to dry or however they processed and preserved this much fish.  It was over and above expectation and all practicality.  Think of times in your life when you had low expectations but someone encouraged you or something drove you and your catch was over and beyond anything beyond reason.  I find this with every congregation I serve, a completely net-breaking load of life and ideas and hope and faith.  I find this in parenthood, my cup constantly overflowing with love and new learning, and challenging heavy nets.  Jesus meets the low expectations with this complete avalanche of life and goodness and destruction, more than enough to share and to last.

Peter falls to his knees at this point.  He sees the gap between himself and Jesus.  He is feeling unworthy.  He has low expectations of himself.  He knows his own limitations.  He’s put out the net.  He’s tried to supply life and it’s hit or miss.  Next to this miracle-worker, this man whose first fishing trip almost breaks the boats, Peter feels tiny, unworthy.  He tells Jesus to get away from him.  He doesn’t want to contaminate Jesus with his unworthiness.  This story echoes many call stories from the Bible.  Moses resisted the call because he had a speech impediment.  Samuel didn’t feel worthy because he was just a little child.  The prophet Isaiah this morning says, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”  We are all unworthy.  We are all woefully inadequate to serve God. But let’s not forget the second part of Isaiah’s sentence, “Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”  God is more than enough to make up for our shortcomings.  We shouldn’t fool ourselves that we are powerful enough to undo the love and grace of God. 

 Jesus didn’t come to separate out the worthy and unworthy.  Jesus came to mix us all up together, to adopt us into God’s family as unworthy as we are.  Jesus came to name the hurt and the shortcomings and the unworthiness, not to throw us away since we’re nobodies, but to rub shoulders with the nobodies, God and humankind mixing.   God comes near to us in Jesus so God’s love can rub off on us, so God can help us use our strengths and weaknesses to bear witness to God’s love and light and hope as God comes to redeem and save a people, a creation groaning and longing for community and wholeness and fulfillment and life.  . 

God is an artist, bringing beauty and wholeness out of what has been separate.  Think of a painter with a palette full of different colors of paint.  No one color is going to make the painting.  God mixes the colors and spreads them around so they play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses to illuminate a reality that was unknown until the painting takes shape and the individual colors get lost in the bigger picture.  Think of God as a dancer.  No one move is going to tell a story on its own, but combined with different movement, there is a beauty and unity that is born.  I’m especially struck by the movement in this story.  The crowd is pressing forward.  Jesus climbs in a boat and pushes out a little from shore.  He goes out even further.  The nets are lowered.  The nets are raised.  The boats are unsteady.  The boats are sinking.  Peter falls to his knees.  Peter gestures away from himself.  They bring the boats to shore.  The fishermen all follow Jesus.  What a dance!  And the height of emotion of this dance is Peter, falling on his knees.   That is also the height of emotion in the song “O Holy Night.”  I always get goose bumps when I hear that part, “Fall on your knees! Oh hear the angel voices.”  Remember all the times you’ve danced this dance with Jesus, these movements to the depths, to the heights.  Every time you’ve fallen on your knees, either in body or Spirit—at the beauty of nature, at the bedside of someone who is dying, at the birth of a child, in terrible grief at your own shortcomings and helplessness, in disbelief at the kindness of a stranger.  Many of you have expressed a longing to walk up to the altar for communion.  I know for me that has often been a fall on your knees moment.  It is certainly part of the dance of worship that we’d like to experience again.  A disciple falls on their knees in humility and wonder.  A disciple finds themselves lifted up by the generous love and abundance of God. A disciple dances with Jesus. 

We come to this moment of the mixing of Divine and Human utterly unworthy, and yet Jesus calls us.  He made the connection between the profession of the fishermen and their life of discipleship by saying they would be fishing for people.  What gifts and skills of yours is Jesus going to repurpose?  What will you leave to follow?  The disciples leave broken nets.  What broken systems are you willing to abandon?  What ideas about the brokenness and unworthiness are you willing to leave behind?  Are we willing to leave behind our views of the world and what matters like money and recognition, and take on God’s priorities of serving the least?  Are we willing to leave behind our assumptions about who God is and what God desires—that it isn’t that people live in purity and strength, but that in reaching across borders and chasms we might find we are part of something bigger?  Are we willing to leave behind our disgust for other people, and realize that other people are God’s children, too, and that we are all one family?  All these are harder to leave behind than houses and mothers and fathers and spouses and jobs.  These are the ideas we’ve built our whole lives on.  They are sinking sand.  Jesus says leave your old belief system behind and believe in me, believe in love, believe in compassion, believe that God is enough and if you can’t believe in it yet, take steps forward to learn a new way bit by bit, exercise those faith, hope, and love muscles in your newfound identity as disciples.