Hoping for Fish and Fishing for Hope
A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Epiphany on February 6, 2022
by the Rev. Casey Kloehn Dunsworth
Text: Luke 5:1-11

If you have not been to seminary, you may not know that they teach us a lot of different things. We learn about scripture, tradition, and church history, of course. And we learn how to properly set the communion table, and how to not drop a baby during a baptism, and how to read Greek or Hebrew, and how to provide a non-anxious presence during a tense vestry meeting.

It differs, of course, by denomination, but I spent two years in the classroom in Berkeley, including a summer as a hospital chaplaincy intern, followed by a year-long practical internship in Colorado followed by a final year back in the classroom in Berkeley. I learned to preach and teach and pray with the people of God, entrusted to me as their pastor.

They did not, at any point, teach me to fish. And yet, here I am, about to interpret a story about fishing.

In our Gospel story this morning, Jesus is at the lake, doing what he was known for doing—proclaiming the good news, that the reign of God had come near. Teaching people that they were beloved, and that as God’s beloved, they had responsibilities to one another. If the entirety of our scripture is any indication, he was probably doing this via extended metaphors and cryptic parables. On this particular morning, he was also confusing some fisherman.

Simon, as well as his fishing comrades, the brothers James and John, have been fishing all night and have come up short. They, and presumably others, have been on the lake for hours, doing the grueling and unglamorous work of catching fish for their families and their neighbors.

The story that many of the fishermen on this lake are telling themselves, each other, and probably others, is that there is no hope. There are no fish. “We have worked all night long and have caught nothing.” They’re cleaning their nets, they’re packing up, they’re going home.

And Simon is not naive, he knows what a night of complete loss means for his family. He is perhaps trying to recall how much food was left in the house, how many coins stashed away. Thinking of alternate strategies for the next night of fishing. Should they try a different part of the lake? Should they try a different net? Should they try a different time? How can they adapt? What if they fail?

But Jesus interrupts that distress and says “put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon explains the reality of the situation, but then says “Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.” Simon may be lacking in riches, and in the current moment, decidedly lacking in fish. But Simon has hope. When Jesus instructs him to keep trying, Simon could have said, “there are no fish. And if we try again we will have to clean our nets all over again, and my already-sore back will be aching, and we’ll be even later getting home, and we will still not have any fish.” This would not have been unreasonable, frankly. It is simpler to cut your losses and go home.

But last week, Pamela told us that the Apostle Paul told us that faith, hope, and love abide—notice that “cynicism” is not on that list, nor is “giving up” or “giving in”. Packing up your toys and getting out of the sandbox is not generally a fruit of the Spirit.

It is so much easier to be pessimistic about our world. What’s really difficult, what’s really contrarian, is pushing ourselves to hope for what is possible.

I imagine Simon taking a deep breath, pushing back the nay-saying voices in his boat and even in his own heart, and casting that net into the water one more time.

I imagine the awkward silence, as they all wait for something to happen. So far, in the Gospel According to Luke, there are stories and rumors spreading about who Jesus is and what he says and does. He has been teaching in synagogues and being “praised by everyone” it says in chapter 4. He has also been unceremoniously run out of town for daring to proclaim that he is the embodiment of the promises of God. He has also cast demons out of people possessed, and healed hordes of weary people. It is with this reputation that Jesus says, “let down your nets”.

The story doesn’t say how long the nets were in the water, but at some point they were teeming with fish, so much so that they could hardly carry the weight. Simon is afraid, as he cannot comprehend how this is possible. But he doesn’t throw up his hands and say “where were those fish three hours ago?” He falls to the ground at Jesus’ feet and claims that he is too sinful to deserve such a miracle. Jesus is, as we know, in the business of grace and abundance, and so this net full of fish is merely the beginning.

Simon, John, and James bring their boats to shore and join with Jesus on the way. That’s it. That’s how these lowly fishermen become part of the greatest story ever told. They have hope for their future, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. So they change their lives in order to be a part of the future they hope for.

You have not been told by Jesus to continue fishing when there are no fish. But you have been told by Jesus to love your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And you have been told to do that when you are heartbroken, and soul-weary, and your mind is numb and your strength is failing. And when you scarcely love yourself, let alone your neighbor. You have been invited and commanded by the God who is and who was and who is to come, to trust in the truth of your belovedness and your worthiness.

We have all been given this commandment, and we have all received this invitation. And we are all languishing. We are approaching the third March of this pandemic, during which we have suffered to differing degrees but we have all suffered. We are living in a country that seems to be holding on by a thread.

This may feel like absolutely the incorrect time for your preacher to insist upon hope. “Take heart!” I say. You roll your eyes. But hope is a discipline. I first heard that axiom from one of my personal heroes, Mariame Kaba, a Black muslim woman, who is a prison-industrial-complex abolitionist. She has seen the worst of our inhumanity in her decades of work, and yet she continues every day, with hope. And Saint Pauli Murray, a trailblazing Black and indigenous Episcopal priest, wrote that “hope is a song in a weary throat.”

We are called to hope, even and especially when it seems impossible. We are called to build God’s beloved community together out of hope and truth and trust and whatever else we’ve got lying around.

One of the ways that we can and must work toward a better future together is being honest about our collective past. It’s likely that this week in the news you’ve encountered something about anti-semitism and something about antiblackness. That’s actually probably true every week.

The previous week included Holocaust Remembrance Day, on which a school board in Tennessee decided to ban Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel detailing the events of the Shoah for a middle-grade audience. I own a copy of both volumes of Art Speigelman’s masterpiece, I read them in high school, and they are crucial to our children’s understanding of the horrors of antisemitism in a format appropriate for their cognitive and emotional development. Book banning is always a travesty and is always fascist.

Don’t get me wrong, there are books that I don’t think should have been published, because they contain dangerous lies and enrich dangerous liars by their sales, but they are free to be published alongside the truth. And we should ignore those books, and instead pick up books like Maus, that tell the truths we find hard to read. When we do that, we keep our history alive, even when it hurts.

We teach our children and ourselves about what was done in the name of power and greed and hatred and bigotry, and we do everything in our own power to prevent it from happening again. We have to understand the harsh realities of our history and apply that understanding to modern problems. And we have to do that alongside our hope for a world in which those realities are seen as unrepeatable atrocities.

Because we have not done that, we have raised a generation who denies the Holocaust and who disregards how antisemitism still runs rampant in our world. And that generation is raising another who holds even more firmly to those dangerous lies, and uses that unsound framework to make sense of the rest of the world.

This is apparent this week because Whoopi Goldberg, in her role as a host of The View, claimed that the Holocaust was not about racism because Jewishness is not a race. And Whoopi, who is a Black woman, was suspended from the show. Meanwhile, her costars and hosts of the past, largely white women, have made other inaccurate and harmful claims—including racist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, and other bigoted remarks—while facing little to no actual repercussions. Perhaps they’ve been “canceled” on twitter or something, but they’ve kept their jobs.

While Whoopi’s statement is factually inaccurate, her being singled out for consequences is also a problem. While it is true that people of all races can be Jewish, it is not true that Jews have not been racialized, and that the genocide perpetrated against them and others by Hitler was about their collective ethnicity more than it was about their religious beliefs. It was about creating a master race of people. Whoopi’s experience of race and racism as a Black woman in the 2020s is different from Jews in the 1940s. Both experiences are the result of white supremacy.

This nuance is hard to grapple with in our age of binary, black-and-white thinking and sound bytes for television shows like The View. It is important for us to know more than one sentence or one paragraph about the deadliest events in our world history, even though it is uncomfortable, and even though we feel generations or continents removed.

The legacy of the Shoah continues in antisemitic violence across the world. The legacy of genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America and against enslaved Africans continues in racialized violence, poverty, and oppression throughout our nation’s laws and our social order.

In our liturgy, we have ritualized confession and absolution. Every week, we name aloud our sins to our God, and we are assured of our forgiveness. In order to move ourselves, our nation, and our world forward into the fullness of the future that is possible, we have to begin with confession of sin.

We also commit to humble repentance. Every week. We must learn about what harms we have perpetrated or what harms we have benefited from, and we must tell the truth about those harms, and we must commit to putting an end to those harms.

We must be repairers of the breach.

Tomorrow evening, Carole Hom and I will host an information session about our upcoming Sacred Ground circle. This will be an opportunity for anyone who is interested to learn more about the curriculum, our planned schedule, logistics, all that good stuff. You can read all kinds of information about what Sacred Ground is, via the links that have been in the announcements and newsletters lately. But what I am going to take this opportunity to explain this morning is why you should join us.

For the next few months, we’ll be meeting every three weeks, having done some assigned reading and watching on the history and legacy of whiteness, of the indigenous peoples of this land, of Black Americans, Asian Americans, Latin Americans, and what it means for our present and our future.

We will be open and vulnerable and honest with one another about what we didn’t know before, and about what we will do with what we are learning. We will support each other in the struggle to understand our complicity in these realities. Especially if you are a white person, for whom this curriculum is largely designed, you will be invited to reflect deeply on the nation you have inherited.

We will do this so that we can move forward together in hope. You may presume that we can move forward together without looking to the past. But without a firm grasp of the eras that have felt hopeless, we cannot begin to fathom the degree of disciplined hope we will need to practice. We could instead move forward with reckless optimism, presuming that the past is behind us and all that matters is our good intentions and positive vibes.

Conversely, you could be of the opinion that it’s too late. That the harms are so large that reparations are impossible. That there is no way forward.

Womanist theologians (Black feminists) say that God “makes a way out of no way”. Following the example of some fishermen, we will trust that God is making a way. We will trust that the way forward is together, in hope. Amen.