Scripture Reading: Luke 5:1-11
The Gospel of Luke, more than the other Gospels, does not see Jesus alone as the one who comes to heal the world. Luke’s message is that Jesus and his disciples do it together, and that after Jesus is gone, his disciples are raised to carry on what he began with them.
The reading is the story of Jesus beginning that movement by calling Peter and some of his companions into partnership with him. Readers of the Gospel decades later would have known that Peter became the first spiritual head of the church. So, this is a kind of “founders’ story” that says something about the church by showing what kind of person Jesus chooses to build it on.
The story takes place on the shoreline of the Lake of Gennesaret – another name for the Sea of Galilee. The Plain of Gennesaret is a beautiful, low plainthat rises up from the western shore of the lake,and extends about four miles along the shore, and two miles inland. It is so lush and beautifulthat people of the time called it “the Garden of God” and “paradise”—a wonderful beginning place for the new movement Jesus is gathering around him.
One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. He saw at the water’s edge two boats,left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats,the one belonging to Simon,and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.
When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon,“Put out into deep water,and let down the nets for a catch.”
Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”
When they had done so,they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.
Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” So, they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.
Meditation
Friday morning I was near the end of my morning prayer time, sitting on the sofa in the living room when the phone rang in the kitchen. I had just begun a closing ritual of “binding prayer” which takes 3 or 4 minutes to finish. I had to decide what to do: finish the prayer, or answer the phone.
The binding prayer is something I do at the end of morning prayer time. I focus on a particular gift, or awareness, or kind of spiritual openness I feel I particularly need for that day. I name it, then “bind it unto myself” by wrapping a small length of wool around a stick, saying with each wrap around the stick, “I bind unto myself this day … such and such an awareness or need.” It takes a few minutes, and after a few weeks the stick looks like this.
Friday, I was beginning to bind unto myself “a need for direction.” I don’t mean a whole new direction like a new job, or new purpose for my life. But in the ordinary day-to-day living of what I do and who I am, I was aware of how much I live and work just by habit and routine, how the things I choose to do are mostly what I feel like doing or know I do well, and that because of this my life and my work are probably more limited than what God really wants of me, or for me.
So, just as I start binding unto myself the need for God to direct me in little ways through the day and the week to what God wants me to do, the phone rings, and I think, “Wow! That’s a pretty quick answer to prayer. I guess I should answer.”
But I’d only begun the binding. If I stopped it would fall apart and I’d have to start all over again later. So, I let the phone ring and go to voice mail. I figured even God would leave a message.
I checked a few minutes later after the binding was done, and there was no message. Call display showed a number with a 337 area code, which Google tells me is southwestern Louisiana. No doubt, a telemarketer of some kind. Probably not a call of God I needed to answer.
But then, who’s to say? Maybe it was an invitation to a conversation that would have made some difference for good in someone else’s life. And in mine, as well. Because isn’t that how it works? That when we answer a call of God to some engagement with the world, everyone involved – including us, is changed.
We all know stories of accidents, confusions and seemingly one-off little jaunts that turn into life-changing moments.
Like the story we know of a man named Art from a church in Hamilton, who on a business trip to the Dominican Republic took a wrong turn one night on the way back to the resort he was staying at, found himself in a labyrinth of roads and streets in the poorest part of the island, was moved by the deep poverty and need he saw, and step by step over the next few years learned how to inspire and lead groups of church people to go with him to that part of the island to build good homes for people in deep poverty in that part of the island he got lost in, that fateful night.
But the call – a call from God, isn’t always as big and dramatic as that. Or as exotic and far away from home.
A call can come to our heart’s door, doing something as simple and ordinary as reading the newspaper or watching the news or listening to the announcements at church, and suddenly finding something in yourself caught, like a fish on a hook, by some story – some tragedy, some new wonder, some new thing needing to be done or starting to be done in the world. It catches your attention, and it might be the oddest thing that at the moment doesn’t seem to have any connection with your life. But you poke at it, you learn a bit more, you find some little way you can be involved or can help, until turn by turn, play by play, you’re reeled in. It becomes part of your life – part of the purpose of your life, and you’re glad for it.
And a call from God isn’t always that big or extended. Sometimes it might really something small and one-off – a conversation with a friend or a neighbour; an invitation to do something that you’ve never done before, or felt inadequate or uncomfortable about doing; an opportunity to say or write or do something from your heart about your life, your faith, your experience of God that seems a little new and scary. But you feel the urge, sense an opening, and against your usual resistance, you say yes, you say things you’re not used to saying out loud, or get involved in something you normally don’t let yourself get involved in – and it makes all the difference in the world to the person you’re with, and also to you.
Remember, in the story we’ve read, only a handful of people – Peter and his partners, left their nets and their boats and that huge load of fish and their families behind, to follow Jesus for three years and then when he was gone, to start a church. The rest of the people that day went home to their daily lives, their families, their jobs. And it was there, in little bit by little bit, that they would go about answering the calls – big and little that came to them – and both the world around them and they would be changed by it.
The story of Peter, though, is helpful, because it highlights three things about the call of God in our lives.
One is that at the time when Jesus calls Peter into partnership with him, Peter is just going about his business like he did every day. He’s not on retreat, not seeking a spiritual experience, not even in synagogue, not trying to be a saint. He’s just trying to catch fish – an occupation probably passed down to him by his father. It’s what he does for a living, day in and day out – night in and night out. And that’s where the calls of God come in our life – in the ordinary stuff, the day-to-day realities of life.
A second thing is that at a critical point he is able and willing to see the ordinary world around him in a new way, by seeing it through the eyes of Jesus. The night on the lake he has just come back from was not a good one, and he is probably not too enamored of the lake that morning. As we heard in the introduction to the story, the Plain of Gennesaret where he comes to shore was so lush and beautiful that people of the time called it “God’s Garden” and “paradise.” But the lake at the foot of it that was his world, seemed at that point to be nothing like paradise – much like our lives and our world seem a lot of the time – kind of hard, cold, broken and ungenerous.
But Jesus sees it differently. Jesus sees beneath the surface and beyond the immediate circumstamce, to the bigger picture. And Peter is willing to trust what Jesus sees in the lake just waiting to be pulled out. Just waiting to be realized and brought to light. Just waiting to be enjoyed and celebrated.
Which leads to a third thing – Peter’s trust in Jesus’ vision of him. When Peter sees the catch of fish that Jesus has led them to, he knows Jesus is a true prophet of God, the messiah come to bring new life to the world. And he knows his own unworthiness and inability to be and to do the kinds of things that Jesus and the kingdom of God are about. He is not just being humble, nor over-negative when he says, “Depart from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” He is being honest, as we all are when we admit to ourselves and to others that in ourselves we really don’t have what it takes.
But Jesus says, “Yes, I know. (Jesus doesn't try to talk Peter out of his confession.) I know your limitations, your sins and weaknesses. But don’t worry; we have work to do together. It’s not all up to you; nor is it even all up to me. It’s up to us together – we who reach out and those we reach out to. It’s up to the community and the body of God we become when we work together for the healing of the world.”
Peter trusts what he says. And it’s this openness to Jesus’s vision of us all just as we are as partners with him in bringing out the goodness at the heart of the world as we know it, that is the kingdom of God.
I wonder, what the call is these days for any one of us, and for us as a church. Our AGM as a congregation is coming up in a few weeks, and thisis one of the questions we’ll give some time and energy and thought to: where is Jesus is leading us and what he is directing us to, that’s most likely more than we are worthy or capable of just in ourselves,but is exactly where and what, he and the world and our own deepest hearts really need us to be, and to be doing right now?
To be servants together with him and with one another of the kingdom of God in and around this place?
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