Believing in Miracles [Epiphany 5C - Luke 5:1-11]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Luke 5:1-11

 

Believing in Miracles

 

Always a crowd; always pressing in on Jesus.  Before, in the previous chapter of Luke’s Gospel, it was the angry hometown crowd, trying to press Jesus right off a cliff.  And today it is a lakeshore crowd pressing Jesus into the choppy waters of the lake of Gennesaret, aka the Sea of Galilee.  Even in the best of times, this Jesus’ work is dangerous business. 

 

Fortunately for Jesus, the mood has changed since his visit in Nazareth.  This crowd, the one by the water, is not angry, not jealous, not even murderous, they are desperate.  They are pressing in to hear the Gospel, to hear Jesus preach the Good News. 

 

If it is possible to be overly eager to hear a sermon, this crowd is that.  They press in so hard that Jesus is forced to make alternative pulpit arrangements.  He decides to find his safety in an empty boat. 

 

Simon, better known as Peter, James, and John were on the shore packing it in.  Some days you just need to accept that things are not going your way and cut your losses.  They were cutting.  That is why they were washing their nets on the shore.  The boats were docked for a reason.  They were done.  They were ready to punch out and go home, to put that fruitlessly frustrating day to bed.  All of this was very convenient for the preacher, the one with his back up against waves.  Those boats were clear, clean, and ready to board.  And Jesus does just that. 

 

I do wonder what Simon thought of this situation.  He was pouting and cleaning his empty nets in, what turned out to be, the front row of a pop-up revival.  Jesus had attracted a large crowd, much larger than Simon had ever seen on the shore.  And while they were there for Jesus, Simon, and his lack of catch, were also there for all to see.  Of course this is the morning the crowds appear: on the one day he catches no fish, on the one day Simon absolutely does not want an audience.  His futility was already embarrassing and now it is also widely known, on full display.  And then the preacher asks him to do what he very much does not want to do: get back in the boat.  In the days before cellphones, this means Simon’s wife will be waiting at the window sick with worry when he arrives home, late. 

 

But then it gets worse because when Jesus is finally done preaching, he tells Simon to put the nets, the nets he just cleaned, back into the lake.  Now Simon knows that there are fish in the lake.  This is not the first day of his fishing career.  But experience tells him that those fish aren’t biting today.  They wasted the entire night on the lake and they are tired and they want to go home.  And by the way, Jesus isn’t even a fisherman and so how could he possibly know better than Simon and his experienced crew the wheres and whens of net throwing.

 

But Simon does it.  He puts those clean nets back into the lake.  I’m not sure why Simon dropped the nets back into the water.  Was it curiosity?  Was he humoring Jesus – the only guy on those boats who didn’t cast nets for a living?  Or was there just something about Jesus that convinced Simon to take a chance on him?

 

We know how the rest of the story goes.  There were so many fish that there were too many fish – if too many fish is even a thing.  And of course there were.  That is the only way this story can go.  If Simon had hauled in empty nets, if this was only the latest in a long sequence of failures, this story probably would have been left on Luke’s chopping block. 

 

It was the best day on the lake Simon ever had.  I think this is made clear by his immediate reaction.  As the boat is sinking, a pretty desperate situation, Simon, now called Simon Peter in the text, falls on his knees before Jesus.  It was so many fish his paradigm shifted.  The man dragged fish ashore every day of his adult life but something about this, and about Jesus, was so different it changed his life.

 

This could be read as a simple story of perseverance.  You know, when at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.  But Simon was a first century subsistence fisherman.  He took a little wooden boat and a net out onto a turbulent lake every day so that he and his family did not starve to death.  Also, he had been fishing all night; night, all of it, is a long time to fish when the fish aren’t biting.  So I suspect grit was not an issue in this particular case or for this particular person.

 

Rather than a moral story, this is a miracle story.  But I think it is fair to ask: what exactly is the miracle?  Is it that Jesus found a crowd of people this excited to hear a sermon?  Is it that the stubborn Simon cast the nets against his better vocational judgment?  Is it that the nets remerged full of fish?  Because while that is impressive, the sheer quantity was impressive, Simon and the gang have pulled fish from this lake before.  And once they get the boats back to shore they seem to forget about the fish fairly quickly. 

 

Today is our Annual Meeting.  And in the lead up to the Annual Meeting, the vestry works hard to piece together a budget.  And there never seems to be quite enough money.  And in the lead up to the Annual Meeting, we pull the numbers together, and the Sunday worship attendance isn’t quite what it was before COVID.  And the ministry teams aren’t quite as big.  The pews aren’t quite as full.  Our families are a bit more frayed.  The nation isn’t quite as United.  And no one seems quite as put together or quite as optimistic. 

 

And, to some extent it feels like we’ve have been fishing through the night, putting in the hard work, but maybe the results aren’t quite there.  For two years, it feels like we have worked harder for less.  And that feels, at times, exhausting – like our efforts have been wasted. 

 

And still Jesus, in that very Jesus’ way, keeps telling us to put out into the deep and to let down our nets.  Because Jesus just doesn’t believe in empty waters or wasted efforts.  He believes in miracles, that the future is full of miracles just waiting to be discovered.  Even on the cross, when it seemed as if everything had been a waste, he was still casting his net, still fishing for miracles: praying for his executioners and inviting a crucified man into paradise, planting the seeds of the future while the world turned to dust around him. 

 

Jesus, in that very Jesus’ way, keeps telling us to put out into the deep and to let down our nets because he believes in us.  He believes in this church, and in our mission, and in our future.  Jesus believes in us.  And that is why he is asking us to trust that, just beyond our sight, there is a miracle, our miracle.  Nothing is empty; nothing is wasted.    

 

Maybe that is the miracle of this miracle story: that Jesus gets the folks in the boat, the ones who have been let down, worn out, wearied by the world, to believe in miracles.  To believe in Jesus as much as he believes in them.