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Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - February 14th, 2010
The Risks of Fishing with Jesus
Rev. Gwen Drake
Luke 5:1-11
Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of your word today. Through Scripture you challenge our assumptions, increase our awareness, nurture our imaginations, and touch our feelings. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
It had been a rough night for Simon Peter and his fishing buddies. They had worked all night for nothing. They called it quits, began washing their nets, hardly noticing the crowd pressing in on the shore of the lake until the teacher climbed in Simon’s boat, sat down like he owned it, and started teaching the crowd from the boat. Hopefully, no one noticed they had had an embarrassing night of fishing failure. All the crowd’s eyes were on this master teacher. Simon kept on task, just wanting to go home and rest, probably more than a little annoyed at the inconvenience presented by this stranger in his boat.
Then the teacher turned from the crowd to Simon and ordered him to go out again and let down the nets. “But, Master!” Simon exclaimed. “What do you think I have been doing all night long?” The crowd was watching, his partners were waiting, and a stranger with no fishing experience was telling him to go try again. What’s wrong with this picture? I think what’s wrong with it is that Simon said, “If you say so, I will.” Was there a discussion? Was there a sign? Was Simon so tired he just consented without a fight?
Whatever we read between the lines, what happened next was not what Simon expected to happen! He took the boat out again, let the nets down, caught so many fish the nets were breaking, he called for help to haul the catch in, and then the boat began to sink. It was the catch of Simon’s lifetime, and if the story had ended there, it would have been great. I could tell all of you, “If we only have the good sense to listen to Jesus, we will have such success that we will have a hard time pulling the catch into the boat.” I could preach on that.
And maybe I should. Those of us who have spent a lot of time in the church, we know—there is a lot of failure around here. Jesus called us to be “fishers of people,” and follow him. He promises Simon Peter, James and John, “I will teach you to catch people.”
So much is asked of us, and we have so little to show for our efforts. “Master, we have worked all night long and we have caught… nothing.” “I have taught a Sunday School class for many years, now, and nothing seems to change.” “I have worked with the youth of this church, and none of them stayed in the church.” “All we have is this huge building that needs continuous maintenance and updating and repair. Master, master, we have worked all night long; we have caught nothing!”
It’s not the end of the story. This fishing story doesn’t end with the great catch. Verse 8 says, “But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, I am a sinful man.” And I wonder, what was that about? I would have thought he would have rejoiced and kissed Jesus’ feet! Especially after such a night of futility.
Why did Peter say, “Go away from me, Jesus, I’m a sinful man.”? One translation of the Greek is Peter saying to Jesus, “Get out of my neighborhood.”
If we don’t know what was going on with Peter when he said this, then I would say we don’t know about the risk and the danger of fishing with Jesus.
Now, be honest. Most of us know something about going fishing and coming back with nothing to show for it. It would have been fine with us, if the story had ended with the failure to catch fish. Something about us is downright comfortable with fishing all night without a bite, being in church all day long with little to show for it; something in you, something in me, is content with Good Friday, and scared to death of Easter.
Pastor Will Willamon, before he was a Bishop and before he was the Dean of Students at Drew Theological School, told his church, that it was crazy for a church their size, with their record of giving (or more accurately, their record of not giving) to increase their budget by 18 percent. He told them…this was back in the 70’s, “Economy’s bad. You had trouble making this year’s goal, and you want an 18 percent increase? Are you kidding yourselves?” He told them, from the pulpit, he was a young pastor back then, “You will never pledge the budget.”
By the end of October, they had gone over their budget by two thousand dollars. And they gave him a bad time about it! “Preacher, wasn’t it you who said we wouldn’t be able to make that budget?” Pastor Will acted like he didn’t hear. “Yup, I think it was you who said, just a couple of weeks ago, ‘You’ll never….”
“Quiet!” Preacher Will exclaimed!
Now, what was that about? You would think he would be celebrating! Well, maybe he wasn’t experienced in the perils of fishing with Jesus.
Let me tell you what we do know. We know all about sociological determinism. “Americans aren’t that religious anymore, especially in the Northwest.” Amen. “We live is the ‘none zone’ or the spiritual, not religious zone.” Amen. “Our preacher is a divorced woman, who wants to listen to her? Our church has had a checkered past, who wants to come here?” Amen. “There so much competition out there, no one has time for church anymore.” Amen. “Master, we have worked all night long, and have caught nothing.” Amen.
“Put out into the deep water, let down your nets. Don’t be afraid,” said Jesus. “From now on, I’ll teach you to catch people.”
We can handle the bad news. We can even handle Good Friday. It’s the good news; it’s the resurrection; it’s the deep waters of God’s unmanageable, mysterious, powerful grace that scares us. It’s the changes. It’s having a sanctuary full of squirmy children. It’s the need for more volunteering and radical hospitality. It’s the meeting of people we don’t know, in our pew where we always sit. It’s the good news that is scary! It’s the Resurrected Christ who rocks the hell out of our dead and dying world that terrifies us. Get out of here, Jesus.
Reggie McNeal has written a new book. The book announces a new shift that is happening with church. That shift is from an internal focus to an external focus, from being church-based to being community-engaged, from developing programs to developing people. He calls this movement, and his book, The Missional Renaissance. He writes, “The missional renaissance is under way. Signs of it are everywhere. Churches are doing some ‘unchurchy things.’…New expressions of church are emerging….Individual Jesus followers are also increasingly unwilling to limit their spiritual lives to church involvement…The missional renaissance is changing the way the people of God think about God and the world, about what God is up to in the world and what part the people of God play in it. We are learning to see things differently, and once we adjust our way of seeing, we will never be able to look at these things the way we used to.” Jesus said, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets. Don’t be afraid. From now on, I’ll teach you to catch people.”
But, Jesus, we know how to do church, we have been working all night long doing church, you don’t know what you are asking of us. And Jesus said, Follow me and I will teach you to catch people.
According to Reggie McNeal, we are in a cultural shift, another renaissance, and this transition time is uncomfortable and exciting and scary and exhilarating. We pastors are not trained in a life of people development. We learned how to do church, teach Bible Study, do pastoral care, build programs and hope they will come. The commitment of people, Reggie says, will not be to the church. It is shifting to being committed to people and causes beyond the church. And Jesus said, “Follow me and I will teach you to catch people.” Jesus is here, breaking us out of our boxes once again. He is making himself known beyond the confines of religion. He is showing up across all the domains of culture. Church is not a place; it is a way of life!
A Bishop said to a seminary graduate, “We are sending you to this old, inner-city church, some wonderful people there. They are old. Been in decline for the last twenty years. Only a handful left. They won’t expect much of you. Just go there, visit them, and do the best you can.”
The seminary graduate gulped. Her first parish was to be like this? So be it.
In her initial meeting with the board, she could see the reality of what the bishop had described—a room of blue hair and pastel dresses.
“I have previously thought I had a gift for working with children,” she told the board when they asked about her strengths.
One of the women spoke up, “Then the bishop has sent you to the wrong church. We are long past those years.”
In the days that followed she noticed many children passing each afternoon outside her study window, children on their way home from school. She prayed, “God, show me a way to minister here.”
Next, she discovered a pianist who had played in vaudeville. She asked a couple women to make peanut butter sandwiches. Then on a Wednesday she and three other women rolled the old piano out the double doors of the Fellowship Hall, doors that had not been opened in a decade. Gladys sat down at the piano, out on the front porch of the Fellowship Hall, and began to play. She played a medley of hits from the thirties, then moved into a little ragtime.
By 3:30 a crowd of children gathered. The pastor passed out sandwiches. Gladys moved from “In the Mood” to “Jesus Loves Me.” The children clamored forward. The pastor told them a story about a man named Jesus. They promised to come back next Wednesday.
A year later, nearly a hundred children were coming every Wednesday. On Sundays, the Sunday School rooms were full, being taught by a group of older women who thought they were too old to have children. Those children brought their parents. Where there was once death, there was life. It was Easter every Sunday in this little, once declining church.
Then the Board of the church met and asked the bishop to move the new pastor. “It’s just not the same church,” they said.
And Jesus said, “Come on out here in the deep water, cast your nets.”
We often say, in unison, as Simon Peter did, “Get out of our neighborhood, Jesus, I’m a sinful person!”
And Jesus says, “I’m going to teach you to catch people or I’ll die trying.”
Jesus did die trying--showing us the breadth and length and height and depth of the graciousness of God, grace beyond our comprehension and imagination. God’s love surpasses our knowledge. It’s big. It’s enormous. And we see the nets breaking and feel the ship sinking and we insist on our unworthiness, or is it our unwillingess? Yet, God continues to love us…and there’s nothing we can do about that. We do not determine how great God’s love is—God does. Simon Peter’s sinfulness and unworthiness did not exclude him from discipleship. No, from then on he was catching people with Jesus.
God is calling us to not dwell on our failures or our past and to not get stuck in our bad news. Our failures and unworthiness do not exclude us from discipleship. Only our unwillingness excludes us. God calls us to move out to the deep and terrifying waters and drop our nets. God calls us to widen our circle. God calls us to reach out beyond our comfort zones.
God calls us to believe in the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, a love that took him to the cross and to what we fear even more than death—resurrection, new life, something unmanageable and scary, beyond our fixed and failing reality. God is calling us to be the Easter people. To believe in the resurrection of us. God is calling us to move out in the deep waters of uncertainty and cast our nets. Amen.
Prayer:
Loving and holy God,
You call us to come and follow. You are in our lives, changing us, touching us by your grace and your power. For your claim on our lives, we give your thanks.
Christ Jesus, you have called us to follow you and to call others to follow you. You keep nudging and shoving, prodding us toward other people, even those who seem like outsiders. You remind us all of us are in your circle, you love us all.
Remind us that salvation is not our personal possession—it is a gift to be shared. Help us to share ourselves including our faith, and our doubts, with those we know, those we meet. Help us to listen to each other. Turn our church inside out, ignite us into a beacon of your love, so that all may see you and your light in us.
You have heard our concerns, our joys, both spoken and unspoken. You heard our sighs and our groans… we release them to you, trust them in your love and grace…so we can go forth and live more fully and more generously. We pray for peace in the world, for the relief of suffering, and for all your children everywhere.