Sermon on February 9, 2025
“Go Deeper”: A Sermon for Epiphany 5
By: The Very Rev. Pamela Dolan
Gospel passage: Luke 5:1-11
Sermon text:
I’m going to be honest and just say up front that I’ve never been crazy about that image of “fishing for men,” even when it is changed to the slightly softer version, “catching people.” I guess it boils down to a feeling that I don’t want to be caught; I don’t want to be anyone’s target, or fill anyone’s quota, and I really don’t want to think of activities and services that the church provides as bait for unsuspecting people we are trying to snag in our nets somehow. It all sounds kind of icky and manipulative to me, and I didn’t even come from a church background where this kind of language has been weaponized.
So, I struggle with today’s Gospel a bit, especially that last section. Which, of course, is always an invitation to go deeper–not to try to rationalize or apologize for Scripture, but to see what my own discomfort trying to tell me, and to move forward from there.
As so often happens when I go a little deeper, the part of the story that I find most engaging is the interaction between Jesus and Simon Peter, especially when Jesus wants him to head out into deep water and cast his nets and Peter finally puts up just a little resistance.
If we were directing a theatrical version of this episode, we’d have to decide the speaker’s tone when he says, “If you say so, I will let down the nets.” Presumably, there is respect there, since he calls Jesus “Master.” But was there also resignation? Exasperation? Was it easier to do it, even though he knows it will fail, than to try to talk this guy out of his crazy plan? Is Peter humoring Jesus, with the full expectation that in an hour or two of fruitless fishing he’ll get to say, “I told you so?”
If that’s what he is expecting, he is in for quite a shock. Not only his own nets, but even the combined capacity of two boats cannot hold all the fish that they catch.
So, is that it? Is the whole message just supposed to be that we’ll get lots of goodies in life if we only do what Jesus tells us?
Gosh, I hope not. I really think there’s more to it than that. For one thing, we don’t preach the prosperity Gospel here. We don’t promise that if we just follow the rules and do as we’re told, we’ll be rewarded with whatever our hearts desire—even if that’s just a whole lot more fish. That kind of magical thinking is dangerous, and too often leads to victim blaming. If we believe that good people are rewarded, then it follows that the person with the most fish must be the best person and that if you are don’t have any fish it means you’ve done something wrong. This way of seeing life is not supported by our understanding of a God who loves us so much that he willingly became a poor, itinerant worker in an obscure, oppressed part of the world. And it isn’t supported by our experience of life, or at least the experience of the majority of the global population.
The reality, rather, is that we live in a world where the just and the righteous are not always rewarded, where the good guys don’t always win. Furthermore, we are in a moment right now that many of us are finding especially frightening and precarious, and we’re pretty sure that the biggest catch of fish in the world is not going to be enough to buy us a secure and healthy future.
For all of us who are feeling afraid, overwhelmed, burned out, or exhausted, I think the place where Jesus meets us in this story is exactly that moment when he asks Peter to push out into deeper water and Peter says, in a nice, polite way—give me a break. I’m just so tired. I’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.
I can so relate. I imagine we’ve all had those moments of just wanting to throw in the towel, because dear Lord, haven’t we worked hard enough already? It is so counter-intuitive to try again, to not give up, to keep going in, even the face of emptiness and exhaustion. And yet, sometimes you do have to listen to that quiet voice asking you to go deeper, to push out just once more, even when our nets empty and our spirits depleted. God never says that it’s going to be easy, or that the outcome is guaranteed. But God does promise to be in the boat with us, especially if we are willing to head out into deep waters, where the real work gets done.
In ancient Mediterranean cultures, deep waters are almost always a symbol of chaos. There are monsters, dragons, sea creatures lurking in those fathomless depths. We may think those fears are primitive or silly, but if you’ve ever been in deep water and had that sudden feeling of dread, of realizing that you have no idea what is underneath you or how far down it all goes, you know that there’s nothing silly about it.
In today’s world, going deep can be hard to do. We live in a culture of surfaces, of superficialities, of the hot take and the immediate backlash. We have lost or are losing our capacity to sit with uncertainty and discomfort, to take our time, to practice discernment. Going deep means we might uncover things in ourselves or the world around us that we can’t control or contain, deep griefs and deep longings, sighs too deep for words. And yet, that is also where we find the presence of God. That’s what happened to Simon Peter when he listened to Jesus and pushed out into the deep. The fish were never really the point. That moment of recognition, of falling on his knees because he realized he was in the presence of the holy—that was the point, for Peter, as it is for all of us, too.
I suppose it’s common knowledge that fishing for a living is hard, messy, dangerous work. That must be one of the things that Jesus loved most about the people who depended on fishing for their livelihoods. Jesus seems drawn to the difficult, messy parts of our lives. When we, as individuals and the Church, are willing to go deeper, we can be sure that it will get a little messy. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll need to learn from one another and offer each other grace. We’ll need to help clean and mend nets, haul up the catch together, pass along our knowledge and share what we’ve learned.
Returning to the troubling line about catching people, I find myself wondering something: So what if Jesus isn’t asking the church to “catch” people, in the sense of landing them in a net or a trap, but catch people in the sense of catching them when they fall? What if Jesus is just showing us what it looks like to be the safety net for one another, to hold us fast and keep us close, to not let anyone be out on the sea alone?
There’s an old fisherman’s prayer that goes something like, “O God, be good to me—your sea is so great and my boat is so small.” Most of us have probably uttered some version of this prayer in moments of stress and hardship. It might help sometimes to remember that we’re not meant to be out on the sea alone. The image of the boat is one of the oldest representations of the church in Christian iconography. We’re all supposed to be in the boat together, especially when times are hard. And Christ, Jesus, has promised to be right there with us, helping to haul in our nets when they are full and finding coves for shelter when the seas get too rough. First, though, we have to be willing to push out into the deep.
“Willingness” is the name of a reflection by Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes[i] on this same passage. I’d like to end with a portion of it:
A beckoning deeper than words
comes to you, an incoming tide,
a hunger not your own,
a hankering greater than all of us. […]
A great shoal of possibilities
swims just beneath your knowing.
You cast your control of things
into the mysterious waters.
The net of holiness
is not belief or understanding
but willingness. AMEN.
[i] https://unfoldinglight.net
