3rd
Sunday after the Epiphany – C
Luke 5:1-11
January
22, 2017
Catching People
Rev.
John Caldwell, PhD
First
United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
I
remember my first time in the German Alps. I was in the service and
was attending a training event at the Army’s retreat center in
Berchtesgaden. The valley is dominated by the mountains around it and
especially by the Jenner. I was struck by the fact that while the
Jenner was always recognizable, every view presented in essence a
different mountain. Perspective matters. Change the perspective and
you get a different view of things.
The
same is true of a story like the one that we just heard. There are
lots of positions that we can occupy within the story. We could stand
in the position of Jesus, or Simon or one of the other fishermen, or
a random person in the crowd. There is a certain pressure inside of
any story to take the position of the narrator. I tend to resist any
pressure that I notice. I’ve been called contrary.
Something
that every reader must do—and preachers are readers before they are
anything else—is to decide which of the possible positions in the
story to occupy. I’ve been trying to occupy Simon’s place.
Simon
was a fisherman. But he wasn’t any kind of fisherman that we’re
familiar with. He wasn’t a fly fisherman, standing in his waders in
the middle of a mountain stream, engaged in a battle of wits with a
wary trout. He wasn’t the kind of bass fisherman that I’ve seen
on those fishing channels who catch fish on their lures dipped in
who-knows-what and seem to hook them faster than they can reel them
in.
He
wasn’t the kind of fisherman I used to be who spends all day on the
water and comes home with nothing to show for it but a sunburn and
stories of the one that got away.
He
wasn’t like the country preacher who used to spend a good deal of
his sermon-writing time sitting on a dock on the river with a fishing
pole in his hand. His congregation didn’t mind if he went
fishing—after all, they weren’t paying him enough to live on
anyway. But they would have objected if he spent time sitting and
staring off into space. So he sat and thought and mulled over stories
and ideas and stared off into space, but he did it with an alibi in
his hand. Sometimes he even baited the hook.
Simon
wasn’t a sport fisherman. Sport fishing as we know it was invented
by the British aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Simon was not a
member of anybody’s aristocracy. Simon was a peasant without any
land who had partnered up with James and John, Zebedee’s boys, to
work the Lake of Galilee instead of the rocky soil of the Galilean
countryside.
It
wasn’t much of a lake. It was just a little over seven miles across
and thirteen miles long. There were fish, but they weren’t free for
the catching. The fish in the lakes of the Roman Empire belonged to
the Empire and it was not about to give them away. The Empire
delegated the right to fish to the governors and client kings, like
Herod Antipas, who paid for the privilege with tribute money and
goods. Herod in turn contracted with chief tax collectors who oversaw
the whole apparatus for squeezing the peasant classes of every
surplus they generated. Fishing families formed syndicates—Simon
and the Zebedee boys were one such—who arranged with a broker for a
lease in exchange for money and a percentage of the catch. They in
turn sold their fish to processors who also had to acquire licenses
and pay money and a percentage of the processed fish. It was quite a
racket and we can say with certainty that it was not arranged for the
benefit and profit of Simon and his partners. Simon and his partners
were cogs in the imperial machinery for extracting wealth from its
territories.1
But
the cogs didn’t have a whole lot of choice. Peasants who had lost
their land had very few resources. And it seemed that every year
there were more and more displaced peasants. The land itself was
producing less food, so there was a great deal of pressure on other
sources. The Lake of Galilee was badly over-fished. The only thing
that kept it from being emptied entirely was the inefficient nature
of the technology used for fishing.
Simon
and James and John used casting nets. Nets like they used are still
in use in some places in the world. The nets are usually circular and
weighted around the edges. The fisherman holds on to one edge and
throws the net so that it covers the surface of the water. The net
sinks into the water and then the fisherman hauls it back into the
boat (or into more shallow water) and sorts out whatever has been
snared in the net. Then he repeats the process. All night long.
Simon’s syndicate at least had boats to use, so they could cover
more of the lake in a night’s fishing.
At
dawn they would return to land, hauling the boats up on the shore.
They would sell their fish—if they had caught any—pay off the tax
collector, repair their nets, and perform any needed maintenance on
their boats. Then at mid-day or so they would sleep to get ready for
the next night’s work. It was better than starvation, but not
always by much.
It
had been one of those nights when the nets brought up nothing that
could be eaten or sold. Simon was discouraged, hungry and exhausted.
He was like that too many mornings, but there was no help for it. It
was that, becoming a bandit, or the slow starvation of the day
laborer. Too many more mornings like this one and those choices might
start to look better.
As
Simon sat mending his nets, along came a crowd. They were following
and pressing in on a wandering preacher/wonder-worker. This in itself
was not all that unusual. These traveling preachers broke the
monotony of peasant life. People were usually willing to share what
little surplus they had managed to hide from the landowners and their
agents. And, if sometimes when they performed their cures sick people
actually got better, so much the better. This time it was Jesus, who
had come to Simon’s town Capernaum after the near-lynching in
Nazareth. Jesus had stayed with Simon and had healed Simon’s
mother-in-law.
Jesus
was being pressed by the crowd who wanted to hear him preach. So
Jesus, whom Simon recognized certainly, but may not have known all
that well, commandeered his boat and the exhausted Simon with it, so
that Jesus would have a place to sit and be heard by the crowd.
When
he had finished, he offered payment: he told Simon to put out into
deeper water and let down his nets.
I
can just imagine how well this suggestion was received. Have you ever
been doing something that you know how to do, that you may even have
some expertise in, and have someone look over your shoulder and tell
how it ought to be done? I think maybe the narrator missed the tone
of Simon’s answer to Jesus. I think it sounded more like this:
“Fine. Whatever. We’ve fished this stupid lake all night long.
There is nothing in it. But you’re the expert. So I’ll
give it one more try on the strength of your years of
experience at doing my job.”
And
don’t you just hate it when the amateur with the advice turns out
to be right? I’m pretty sure Simon did. But he reacted as a
fisherman forced to deal with a catch far larger than he was prepared
for. There were so many fish that it was impossible to lift the net
out of the water without breaking it, so he called his partners to
help. Even so, the catch threatened to sink both boats. After a night
of fruitless labor, maybe it was just all too much.
Simon’s
didn’t just react to being “shown up” by a rank amateur, nor
simply to the huge catch. He reacted as someone who is in the
presence of something uncanny, something not just extraordinary, but
supernatural. With the hair on the back of his neck raised and
overwhelmed with awe, he thought only to make it stop.
Simon
was little different from us in this. He believed in God. He was a
good Jew, as good a Jew as he could be, given the life he lived. It
is one thing to tell the stories of God’s mighty deeds in the past,
to pray for a good catch and safe night as they shoved off from
shore, or to pray for his family and their health. There was the
world of faith, with its stories and its marvels, and there was the
ordinary world in which he was a struggling fisherman trying to
support himself and his family. The two worlds may border on one
another, but here, this morning, the world of marvels had invaded his
working world. It was too much.
“Go
away from me, Master! I am a sinner.” It was a good excuse, a
reasonable excuse. He was clearly in the presence of the Holy. Just
what that meant, he didn’t know, but he knew it when he saw it. And
he knew what he was. And there was just no way that the world of the
Holy was going to fit into his world, or he into it. Like I say, it
was a reasonable excuse.
But
the Holy is often not very reasonable. It does not respect the
boundaries we have set up for it. We construct our theories about the
life we live. We construct our theories about who or what God is. And
then, when we’ve got it figured out, when it makes sense and we’re
comfortable with the result, the God we think we’ve defined and
bounded and limited turns out to be alive and not at all bound to
rules we have made. If we are, like Simon, unfortunate enough to be
confronted with the living God, we are likely to find ourselves
undone, unmade, dissolved.
We
just want it to stop. And yet we don’t. We just want to go back to
our lives. And we pray that we won’t have to do that. This is what
it is like to stand before what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium
tremendum2,
“the tremendous mystery,” that threatens to undo us but before
which we stand, fascinated, frozen in place, unable to move. Simon
knew that he could not move, so he told Jesus to go, before his life
was unmade. But Jesus paid no attention to him.
In
spite of that it turned out that Simon was not unmade, not entirely
at any rate. His former life with its struggles, its little triumphs
and failures, was not entirely dissolved. He would still be a
fisherman. But instead of catching fish, he would catch people.
What
would that mean? He had no way of knowing; only time would
tell. Simon was not given to brilliant flashes of insight. He was not
given his nickname, Peter, “Rocky,” on account of his quick wit.
There were some clues, though, that reflecting on his life years
later he began to understand. There are realities that anyone who
answers Jesus’ call to discipleship must reckon with, realities
that not a one of us can avoid, try as we may.
The
first is this: following Jesus means that we have to move away from
the safety of the shallows near the shoreline into deep waters.
Following Jesus is risky. That’s as true for us now as it was for
Simon then. It’s true for individuals and it’s also true for
congregations. We can be safe or we can follow Jesus, but we can’t
do both.
The
second reality has to do with some things that seem
counter-intuitive. Simon had to let down his nets into water he was
certain contained no fish at all. He could have invoked the eight
words that have killed so many good ideas in the church: “We tried
it once and it didn’t work.” But he didn’t. He did the
counter-intuitive thing. We face the need to do some
counter-intuitive things, too. Any church that seeks its own survival
is doomed. A church thrives by forgetting itself and serving the
world in which it is placed. A church is alive to the extent that it
gives its life away.
And
the third reality, and maybe the hardest to accept, is that, having
given up the safety of the shallows and having embraced an invitation
to a counter-intuitive act, Simon was overwhelmed by the result.
Overwhelmed all the more because he knew that it wasn’t really any
of his doing and he could claim no credit. These were not repeatable
results and they were not a way to get rich in the fishing business.
When
I go to clergy meetings and Cokesbury is there with a book display, I
always go looking to see what they have. Truth to tell, I seldom buy
much these days. I have vast reserves of unread books. As Jill
Sanders, a colleague of mine says, “I am not so much well-read as
well-bought.” As I look through the books I am often dismayed at
the number of “how to” titles. How to turn around a church’s
financial struggle. How to start a small group ministry. How to start
a new church. How to have a successful building program.
My
colleagues are struggling with real problems and they think they want
a new set of techniques, some off-the-shelf program that will meet
their need, or some new technology that will make this church thing
“work.” Cokesbury is more than willing to sell them books with
titles that seem to fit the bill, written by people who did it once
somewhere and claim to have bottled just the magic elixir that the
church needs. “Step right up here, folks. Let me introduce you to
the latest wonder drug, a potion so powerful it will nearly raise the
dead!”
But
Simon already knew how to fish: technique wasn’t the issue. He knew
nets and boats and he knew the lake: there is no magic answer.
There
is no magic answer for us, either. Not for ourselves as individuals
and the problems that we have. Not for our congregation and the
challenges that we face. Not for our planet and crises it faces. No
answers are to be found in new techniques or packaged programs. No,
what we have is what Simon Peter had: we have the stuff already on
hand, we have an over-fished lake, we have a Jesus who invites us to
engage in counter-intuitive deeds, and we have a God who acts to
bless us in ways we can neither prevent nor control.
“Do
not be afraid,” says Jesus, “from now on you will be catching
people.” And we left everything and followed him.
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1
K. C. Hanson, "The Galilean Fishing
Economy and the Jesus Tradition,"
Biblical Theological Bulletin
27(1997).
2
Rudolf Otto, The
Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the
Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational,
trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).
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