February 4, 2007
(Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany)

Where the Fish Are

By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]  •  Psalm 138  •  1 Corinthians 15:1-11  •  Luke 5:1-11
(From The Lectionary Page)

My parents were planning to visit us this weekend but had to change plans at the last minute. My father loves to fish, and given the gospel reading, I planned to begin this homily with a good fishing joke. Trouble is, there aren’t any good fishing jokes. So here is a bad one.

Fellow was fishing. Guy walks up and says, "How's the fishing?"
Fellow says, "Fishin's fine."
Guy says, "How many you got?"
Fellow says, "None."
Guy says, "None? Thought you said the fishin's fine!"
Fellow says, "Fishin' is fine, catchin's bad!"

It was bad catchin’ and good cathin’ on the day Luke describes for us this morning. So many fish, the boat began to sink. This redeemed long hours of work, most likely throughout the night when lake fishing was the best. A long, hard night which ‘netted’ nothing (pardon the pun.)

I invite us to keep these images from the Gospel in mind as we revisit our first reading.

Isaiah was in the midst of a long night of a different sort. His nation had suffered a succession of evil kings, but King Uzziah had been a notable exception. A good king, an architect of peace who was generous to his people, and under him the nation had prospered. Now he was dead, and Isaiah felt lost.

Isaiah entered the temple to pray and to pour out his sorrow. The loss of such a godly king was overwhelming to him. He was fearful. What would happen to his nation now?

While he was in the temple, Isaiah came face to face with the Lord of Hosts, "sitting on a throne, high and lifted up."

Again Isaiah was overwhelmed, this time with an awareness of his unholiness in the presence of the Holy.

Woe is me! For I am lost;
for I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

But an angel took a burning coal from the fire used to offer incense and the touched that white-hot coal to Isaiah's lips, and pronounced:

”Your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven.”

And Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord saying,
“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

And Isaiah responded, “Here am I! Send me!”
(R.N. Donovan, Lectionary.org)

Much of the despair and fear and darkness that you and I experience is rooted in sin, sin for which we need forgiveness. This is true for us as individuals, and for the Church. God’s forgiveness indicates that we have a life-giving relationship with God, and that connection is absolutely necessary if we are to be vessels of God’s love and grace. We cannot be sent if we have not been forgiven. And in light of the Gospel lesson, we cannot fish without seeking and receiving God’s life-restoring forgiveness.

Lutheran Pastor Steven Molin tells this fishing story:

I was about five years old, and my dad, who was a construction worker, had a job one summer in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and he brought me along. The deal was, he would work all day, while I sat in the truck, or threw dirt clods at the construction site, but we would go fishing every night. That was the highlight for me; fishing with my dad for five straight nights.

Well apparently I couldn’t wait, because the first afternoon, my dad looked down from the roof of the building he was working on, and saw me sitting on a bucket, fishing in a puddle in the parking lot. I’m sure it was great entertainment for all the workers on that site, and of course, over the years the story got better each time my dad told it.

But what I recall from my dad telling that story is that he got me to stop fishing in that puddle by explaining that there were no fish there. He didn’t criticize me for fishing in a parking lot. He didn’t humiliate me for casting my line into muddy water that was probably only five inches deep. He told me that there were no fish there, and that later that day, we would go to a place where there were fish. And that made total sense to a five-year-old boy; to only cast our lines in places where we knew there were fish.

From today’s’ Gospel: it must have been just after dawn on the shores of the Sea of Galilee when Jesus began to teach the crowds that had assembled. Early in the morning, miles away from the city, the people were searching for something that was missing in their lives; searching for acceptance, or love, or for a purpose for their lives. Whatever the people were looking for, they must have found it in Jesus’ words, so they followed him wherever he went, and listened to his teaching.

So Jesus was there on the shore, speaking to hurting folks just like you and me. And because the crowd was so large, and the people were pressing in on him, he jumped into Simon Peter’s boat. How bold of Jesus! Peter knew who Jesus was, but they were not yet friends, and you don’t just jump into a guy’s fishing boat – not then, not now! But Jesus needed that boat, so he got in and continued to preach.

When the sermon ended and the crowd began to disperse, Jesus said to Peter, Push out into deeper water and let’s fish!

Into Deeper water.

And Peter protests: I’ve been up all night and I haven’t caught a thing.

That’s the excuse Luke tells us about, but I wonder if Peter whined a bit more:

• The deeper water is colder.
• The deeper water has bigger waves.
• The deeper water is far from the security of shore.
• It is dangerous out there.
• (Let’s not forget the Episcopal whine: we’ve never fished there before!)
• And perhaps an unspoken excuse: Jesus, I don’t think I can take one more failure today. So let’s skip the deep water.

It is that last one which may be the real reason Peter wanted to avoid the deeper water.

You and I have been called into deeper water.

You get a promotion at work, but the job is a lot more difficult, and you’re not certain you can cut it. That’s deeper water.

You get a part in a musical production and as you go through rehearsals it seems like everyone else sings or dances or acts better than you and you question your abilities. That’s deeper water.

You’re involved in a relationship and it’s getting serious; maybe headed toward life-long commitment, and it scares you. That’s definitely deeper water.

Every time we make a change, take a step, move in a new direction, that’s deeper water. It’s always risky. It’s never a sure thing. And it’s when the excuses begin to fly.

Peter protests, and Jesus still tells Peter to cast out into deeper water because . . . THAT’S WHERE THE FISH ARE!

And Peter’s responds by asking for forgiveness for not understanding why Jesus wanted him to go to deeper water. (Steven Molin, quoted and adapted.)

While working on this homily I experienced these lessons like a bag of hammers hitting me in the spiritual forehead. Go where the water is deeper.

Our cathedral community is called by Jesus to go into deeper water . . . because that’s where the fish are. The justifications as to why we should remain near the shore are familiar and strong and not without some merit, for as the Gospel lesson tells us, there will always be work to do on and near the shore. But there is also a bountiful harvest of good work to be engaged in deeper water.

St. Luke says the catch of fish caused the boat to begin to sink. Luke does not describe a rich fish, or a poor fish, nor is one fish more important than another fish. No fish are discarded, and no fish are described as trophies that are especially desirous.

That is not surprising – because God sees us all the same. We are beloved daughters and sons, made royalty – his children – in baptism, forgiven by grace, and sent on a holy mission. Isaiah and Peter are models for all baptized people, models for those about to be baptized.

Head to deeper water, where the fishin’ and the catchin’ are fine. Forsake the parking lot puddles. Baptism means – go where the fish are.

It's a One-Way Net

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

In one of my favorite satirical novels, Brideshead Revisited, the character of Charles is taken to task for some paintings he has spent 2 years and a lot of blood and sweat creating. Anthony, the character who serves as critic, tells Charles that his paintings were nothing but simple creamy English charm, playing at tigers [Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited, Little Brown & Company (Boston), 1945, p. 273]. He goes on to tell Charles that charm is death to art. It’s a devastatingly on-target critique within the context of the novel and, satire or no, there is considerable truth to the observation. Charm IS death to art. And it has a corollary in the world of Scripture and Theology: romantic piety. In much the same way, romantic piety is equally injurious to mature faith.

I bring all this up in light of our Old Testament and our gospel readings for this evening. The reading from Isaiah is one that is often read at ordinations – or, to put it more accurately, a portion of the passage is read at ordinations. The reading usually ends with God asking, “Whom shall I send,” and the prophet responding, “Here I am. Send me.” Edited thus, it has all the romance and piety of a Holman Hunt painting, of the brave clergyperson donning the stole and going forth in obedience to serve in the name of God while cherubim and seraphim chant without ceasing. And while we’re at it, let’s face it, in much the same way do we tend to treat the calling of the disciples: rugged fishermen setting down their nets and following our Lord. Luke includes the miraculous catch of fish by which Peter, James, and John have his own cherubim and seraphim moment. In the presence of such miracles, who wouldn’t respond to his call, “From now on you will fish for people.”?

What a lovely, romantic, pious, charming account.

Um…..maybe not so much.

The message that God gives Isaiah to proclaim is an impossible one. Barring the possibility that God is being ironic, why on earth would God ask a prophet to preach such negativity? What are we to make of ‘Go and say to this people: keep listening, but do not comprehend, keep looking, but do not understand, Make the minds of this people dull and stop their ears and shut their eyes.’ How are we to understand the oracle of doom that follows about the destruction of the cities? Scriptural scholarship gives us a few clues. We know that this portion of Isaiah was written at a time when Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians and the leadership had been taken into captivity. The oracle of doom that God had called Isaiah to preach was all too clear in the minds of faithful in exile. They’d lived through it, they had experienced its gritty truth.

Then, too, we’ve read the gospel of Luke before. We know that an amazing ministry of teaching and healing will unfold and that this ministry will lead ultimately to the disciples abandoning Jesus and Jesus being betrayed and crucified. Tradition, if not Scripture, tells us that following Christ’s resurrection and the beginning of the Church, Peter, James and John were ultimately executed as well. The image of the net being cast into the sea is itself an ambivalent one. Centuries of protestant evangelism notwithstanding, let’s be clear – fish are generally gathered into a net for one purpose, and one purpose only. They ain’t coming out alive. Certainly by the time Luke wrote his gospel, persecutions were a fact of life. To gather people together, to fish for people, to follow The Way, as the infant church was called, was to walk in the way of the cross. It would lead to death.

And, thereby of course, to resurrection. God is always in the business of transformation, of bringing new life. Certainly Isaiah, for example, will weave images of rebirth, new hope, restoration throughout the entire narrative. It’s true -- the gospel writers certainly craft their stories from the perspective of the resurrection, giving hints and narrative foreshadowings through the entire text. There is profound hope, but it has nothing to do with piety or charm. The hope we place in God’s ultimate faithfulness – from a Christian perspective, of course: the resurrection – never fades. But to get there, you gotta die first. Maybe a literal death, as with centuries of martyrs, maybe something more metaphoric. That’s the piece that romantic, pious, charming Christianity doesn’t much want to own up to.

The Exile was death to the Judeans who believed that God would never allow the temple to be destroyed and the Promised Land taken captive by despised Gentiles. What came out of the Exile was a new understanding that God, Yahweh, is far more universal. God was not bounded by geography, nor by their transgressions. God was with them in Exile and would bring them home again. And though their way of being as a people would be forever changed, the seeds would be sown for what ultimately would become rabbinic Judaism – where synagogues would take the place of the sacrificial system of the temple. Restoration, newness, renewal would happen. But death came first.

Episcopal priest and author Robert Capon, in several of his plain-spoken books, talks about how the primary task for Christians is to drop dead. He doesn’t mean literally, of course – though that certainly is the end that awaits us all. He’s speaking metaphorically. We are called to die to self, to give up any notion that we can earn God’s love, that salvation is in any way up to us. Capon’s point is, it’s a done deal. It happened 2000 years ago on a Friday in Jerusalem. The transformative life in us begins when we recognize that we are the ones caught up in that net, yanked quite intentionally by Jesus out of our various comfort zones.

Our lessons this evening are call narratives. Both carry with them images of the power and majesty of God, and the utterly temporal ephemeral nature of humankind. Death awaits every living thing, but for those of us who claim a faith in Jesus Christ, we know that death is never the final answer. Its power is always subsumed by the resurrection. But don’t let’s ever forget the order in which it happens.