PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 5:1-11                                                                            A SPECIAL KIND OF MEETING
Sermon February 14, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            Simon bar-Jonah was a waterman, not much different from the watermen who work the marshes and bays around the Eastern Shore.  He made his living in a boat on a lake in northern Palestine, called “Geneseret,” or “the Sea of Galilee”—not much of a “sea,” seven miles wide and fourteen miles north to south at its greatest dimensions.  It’s a fresh-water lake on the northern Jordan River, receiving the snow melt from the mountains of southern Lebanon.  The lake has always had plenty of fish, and the villages along its shore have always been fishing villages.  The watermen caught some interesting kinds of fish—a tropical version of carp, sardines, and a kind of catfish.[1]  They preserved these fish in salt and shipped them all over the Roman Empire.[2] 

            That morning Simon awoke to the sound of gulls along the shore.  He knew breakfast was going to be late, because his wife’s mother had been sick, and not only did the women in the family have to take care of her, they also had to do her chores.  The whole family lived together in a single house, like everybody else’s family in Capernaum.  Besides Simon and his wife and mother-in-law, there was his brother Andrew, their father Jonah, and the children.  No wonder Simon slept on the flat, adobe roof whenever he could.  Breakfast came as soon as possible, and then Simon and Andrew went back to the beach to help their business partners wash the nets after a night’s job of fishing.  Simon had had about three hours’ sleep.  If the fishing had  been good last night he wouldn’t have slept at all; but catching nothing by three in the morning, he and Andrew came ashore and went home to bed.  So Simon was drowsy from sleep, irritable from having to wait for breakfast, tired from working most of the night, and generally not ready for a new day.  And besides all that, since his father had retired from the business, Simon himself had the responsibility for his family’s part of the business. 

            He certainly didn’t expect this to be the day his life was to change forever.  The story of what happened this morning was told and retold for fifty years afterward, and was written down in three different forms:  the one we have here, one in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and it was also told as if it happened after the Resurrection in John 21.  That’s how important this story was in the early church. 

            The young miracle-worker[3] Jesus of Nazareth had come to town, and there was a crowd gathering on the beach as Simon started working in his boat.  Jesus asked him to let him speak from the boat, and he obliged.  We don’t know what Jesus said in that sermon:  the way Luke tells it, Simon may have ignored the whole thing.  Well, who would blame him in the condition he was in?

            But have you ever noticed that the really big changes in your life happen without any preparation?  Some people can’t even remember when or how they met the person they married.  Many haven’t a ghost of a notion why they first asked for a job where they’ve worked for decades.  It’s true what they say:  “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.”  And so it was on this day for Simon the waterman.  When Jesus finished his sermon, he tapped Simon on the shoulder to get his attention and said, “Put out a little and cast your net.”

            Simon was in no mood:  “Look.  We were out here all night.  Do you see any fish?  What does a carpenter know about the water?”  But he did it anyway.  He probably didn’t know why.  But what happened next got his attention:  the net trapped such a large school of carp that it began to tear.  Simon called to James and John to bring the other boat.  There were a few anxious moments when the boat started to take on water.  But when they finally got to shore, while the others were sorting the fish, Simon turned to face Jesus; and something happened.

            Do you know that feeling that comes over you sometimes, like from nowhere, as if God were passing by?  A hunter knows that feeling when the wind blows and the branches of a great oak creak, and the forest feels like God is close by.  A woman knows that feeling when she has given birth to a baby.  A teacher sees a student’s eyes light up, as if inspired.  Or maybe, after years of a difficult situation from which you thought you would never be released, you turn around and look back at your life, and discover a pattern—as if everything that has happened to you has pointed you in some direction you had never dreamed; and it’s a revelation, as if God were passing by.  That kind of feeling came over Simon in this moment on the beach.  He looked at this holy man, just like other young rabbis he had seen; but no—there was something else.  In the very human, even common presence of this Nazarene Simon caught a glimpse of something unexpected:  the very presence of God before him. 

            Simon sank to his knees:  “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinner!”  Do you know this special kind of meeting?  Simon doesn’t know the right word to use to talk about how unworthy he feels.  He falls back on religious language:  “I am a sinner!”  That’s only part of it.  My guilt before God is real enough; but when God shows up, really is present, there’s more than “sin” that puts me off.  I’m not worthy to approach the Holy.  Out in the forest with the holy feeling I’ve had—that’s not always comfortable.[4]  But in that special kind of meeting when God’s reality comes so close I can’t get away—that’s too much. 

            Isaiah wrote of a similar feeling one day in the temple.  He said, “I saw the Lord high and lifted up.”  And Isaiah did exactly what Simon does here.[5]  And when God met Amos the fruit-tree pruner, Amos answered, “I am neither a prophet, nor a prophet’s disciple!”[6]  Isaiah and Amos, Simon and you and I—“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinner!”

            This story says something about our response to Jesus Christ.  We’re not people with halos, like medieval paintings of the apostles.  We are women and men, old and young, doing our best, making mistakes in the daily round of life.  And when God comes near, it’s a fearful encounter.  We back away.  We’re like the Hebrews trembling at the foot of Mount Sinai as it quaked and smoked:  they said to Moses, “You go talk to God, and we’ll wait there.”  It would be comical if it weren’t us; but it is us.  Every one of us.

            Now I know that not everybody has the same kind of meeting with God.  The founder of Methodism, John Wesley’s experience was deeply emotional: 

But when the founder of Quakerism, George Fox described his experience it wasn’t emotional but mystical:  he said, “All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.”[8]  People who participated in those famous frontier revival meetings two hundred years ago would sometimes run about the camp ground barking, or sit under a tree and moan.[9]  Martin Luther made a fast dash to the men’s room.[10]  And for a lot of us, this meeting with God isn’t a simple, one-moment event that we can nail down:  it’s a gradual unfolding, a growing realization that’s deepened by prayer and study for a lifetime.  But even for the most rationalistic among us, there are those sweet moments of holy meeting, down in the core of the soul.  It’s a special kind of meeting.

            And what it imparts to you and to me is not some sickly sweet quietism, too heavenly to be of any earthly use.  What this meeting gives us is fire.[11]  Life flames up.  The world takes on color—the blues of joy and peace, the yellows of kindness and gentleness, the reds of anger put to service in an unjust world.  Life flames up in colors.  People are no longer part of the furniture:  the child making a little too much noise in the doctor’s office waiting room, and the retired woman who walks with a limp and a gleam in her eye, and the young couple oblivious to everybody else but each other—they all become bearers of the image of God for us.  Poverty ceases to repulse us and begins to challenge us.  Illness becomes a moment for service.  Bereavement becomes a time to reach out.  Anger gets directed to doing deeds of justice; and fear is overcome by a love that tears down walls and builds bridges. 

            However God may make contact with you, whatever that special meeting may be, just like Simon the waterman, meeting Jesus changes things for each one of us.  I’m not talking about changing our table manners or the way we dress.  To be called to become a Christian means that you and I have been called to live changed lives in a world that hates racial differences, and hates the economically deficient, the gay, the Black and Brown, the non-English-speaker, and the female—in this kind of world to live changed lives.  Life with Christ means something else and something other than the generally accepted life, the way everybody does it.  I don’t mean that Christians are good and everybody else is bad:  I mean that because I am a Christian, I know that I’m selfish and self-concerned; and I see through all the little lies I tell myself—and I’m trying to change.  I know that my culture is materialistic and that our industries exploit whole nations overseas; and I care about those people—their poverty, their poor education, their children working in sweat shops from age nine, their dictator and their civil strife.  In other words, to be a Christian, to have met the living God in the Man from Nazareth, makes me different.

            So, you’ve been met on the road you travel.  You’ve participated in a special kind of meeting.  You’ve been grasped by the presence of God that’s greater than you are.  You’ve recognized your sin; and you’ve been accepted.  You’ve received a call to be a Christian.  And now, like Simon, you’re living and trying to find out what that means in the practical things of each day’s family, and work, and school, and friendships, and conflicts, and money and stresses.

            Simon Peter’s story is your story, too.  Christ called him to be an apostle and gave him the gifts to do the job.  What has Christ called you to do, and what gifts has God given you to use in this world?

AMEN