Faith and Fishes
February 07, 2010
February 7, 2010
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11
Although the text doesn’t say so, it seems clear that today’s Gospel story is set in Capernaum, where Peter lived, and where Jesus was based during his ministry. I went to Capernaum last summer, and it was very moving. It is all in ruins, of course, but you get a good sense of the distances. And while many of the sacred places in Israel are known as “traditional sites” (in the sense that we don’t really know whether a story happened here, but the tradition is that it was in this place), in Capernaum, we actually know where some of the primary sites are. So let me take you there…Capernaum is on the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Gennesaret. It is a coastal town. The home of Peter, a stone house, is very near the lakeshore (for remember, the Sea of Galilee is actually a freshwater lake), perhaps 100-150 feet off the shore, with no buildings in between. And as you walk inland from the lakeshore, after passing the home of Peter, you come to the synagogue. Now, the ruins that are there now are the ruins of the synagogue that was built later on the same site where the synagogue had been in the time of Jesus. When we see the synagogue, we are not seeing the actual building where Jesus worshipped, but it is in the same place.
The distance from the home of Peter, where Jesus stayed, to the synagogue is roughly the distance from the Post Office to Frame. And then the street continues on, past the synagogue, where there had been other buildings, other businesses. It is very like Frame on Main Street – Jesus was living in the midst of the town, and dealing with the everyday concerns of the folks there.
In this morning’s Gospel reading, Peter, James and John are just doing what they do – they are fishing. They had fished all night, without catching anything. They were tired and discouraged. In the meantime, Jesus was getting crowded by the many folks following him, so he asked Peter to take him a little way from the shore in his boat, and then he taught the folks from the boat.
After he concluded teaching, he turned to Peter and suggested that Peter put out again, further from shore, and try going a little deeper. Peter protests – after all, he knows how to fish, and he knows that further effort will be fruitless. But he finally takes the advice of Jesus, and is amazed to draw up nets that are overflowing. He needs to call James and John to have them bring their boat to help carry the whole catch.
This story is so like our own experiences sometimes – we going along, doing what we’ve been doing for a while, and we come to a time when it is no longer fruitful. Our efforts at managing our life stop working – perhaps it’s our work life, our family life, our health, or our spiritual life – whatever it is, we find that what we’ve been doing no longer works. We’re coming up empty one way or another.
Jesus suggests going a little deeper - two and a half years ago, as I learned about oceans, I learned that there is a world of difference between shallow seas and the deep oceans. It’s not simply a matter of degree. And while most of our economic activity in the ocean takes place in the shallows, they are only 8% of the total ocean water on earth. Nonetheless, though our economic activity takes place in the shallows, scientists are aware of the importance of the deep open ocean to the health of the earth – the deep waters help to regulate climate, impact our atmosphere, and contain some of the least studied animal life on earth. I suspect that the same can be said of the spiritual life. Skimming the surface is substantively different from going deeper, and yet the depths are critical to our wholeness in ways we do not always understand.
But we don’t understand the deep. It is frightening to be so far from solid ground. And this is certainly true of us spiritually as well.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt tells a story in his book God, Prayer and Spirituality about a secular Jewish family who moved to a small town, and as he tells the story: “They enrolled their child in the best school in the area, a Catholic parochial school. To their dismay their child came home after the first day and said, ‘Daddy, you’ll never guess what I learned today. Did you know that God is really three, that there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, and that his son died for our sins?’ The distraught father sat his son down, looked him in the eyes, and said, “Let me make it clear, son. There is no such thing as a Trinity. There is only one God, and we don’t believe in him.’”
How often do our certainties fail to empower our living? We spend so much time wondering about whether we understand God, and yet are unwilling to trust God as the ground of our lives. Our intuitive response to such a realization might be to walk away from faith, but in this morning’s reading, Jesus suggests that going deeper into what has not worked might be the better answer. We need to be willing to go deeper, to engage the possibilities that some of our certainties will fall away, and be replaced by new understanding, or even new questions. But if we are unwilling to go deeper, if we stay, theologically, in the shallows, then when life takes us into the deep, we may not recognize God there.
I think, sometimes, that we are so afraid that God will not live up to our beliefs, and so we are unwilling to really engage with God in the real challenges of our lives. And so God never becomes real to us, and we never feel quite safe – because if we can’t trust God with our doubts, if we can’t trust ourselves to be with God in ways we don’t understand, then how can we turn to God when life tears loose from its moorings?
Going deep means different things to us at different times in our lives. At one point it may mean facing our doubts – entering into unknown space with God to see how we might emerge together. At another point in our lives, it may mean depending on God in ways we never had to while our lives were still predictable and manageable.
For Peter, in this story and others, it meant trusting Jesus in new and different ways. In this story, Jesus asks Peter to trust him in his work life. Peter’s mother had already been healed by Jesus, so he knew that Jesus could work miracles – but that was separate from his work life, where he knew how things worked and he was in control. Maybe that’s the same for some of us – we’ve trusted God, but only in our inner life, not in the places where we work or learn or deeply engage our own lives.
How do we go deep? It’s easier, sometimes, when life takes us there – when we suddenly find ourselves in uncharted territory -- some crisis comes, or we have questions we never had before, or we find that habit is no longer enough, and while we are still afraid of intimacy, we are even more afraid of not being known, of never knowing God, and so we find that we need to go deeper. And often, it is like Peter’s experience – what used to work is no longer working, and so we find ourselves needing to reach into the unknown, and finally willing to let go of what we’ve known in order to go deeper.
And going deeper may cost us our certainties – a belief may become ‘the one that got away’ as we find ourselves realizing that we don’t actually believe things we thought we believed. Or we may find ourselves reaching to trust God with a new intensity, which also might be uncomfortable for us. If we’re used to being rational people who have largely thought of faith as something we think about, it can be a new and powerful experience to find ourselves strengthened, empowered, or just deeply touched by a sense of hunger for God or by a sense of God’s care.
If we do allow ourselves to engage our doubts, we may find our own sense of faith changing in ways we hadn’t anticipated. And yet, allowing ourselves to engage our doubts can be an important step in the eventual growth of our faith. I was 10 years old when I realized that I did not believe in God; and then I was 14 when I had a born-again experience that led me to a couple of years during high school in a much more conservative, evangelical expression of faith than my family’s…or my own as an adult. That time was hard on my family. But engaging in those journeys seriously laid the groundwork for my faith being an integral dimension of my identity. We need to support those we love as they go deeper, even when it threatens our own certitudes. As Alice Walker wrote in The Color Purple, “No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.”
And while going deeper, either through doubts, or through a new embrace of faith, or through putting our feet to our faith in action may seem frightening – if we take the reality of the living God seriously, we can trust that just as for Isaiah, God will enter into the journey with us. As God promised Jeremiah, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord….” (Jeremiah 29:11-14) We are not alone on the journey.
Lent begins in 10 days, and it is a traditional time to go deeper. Perhaps we want to try a new prayer practice, or getting involved personally in acting on our faith. During Lent, we will have services each Wednesday evening – these are services with space for reflection and contemplation, beginning with about two minutes of silence and building to much longer by the end of Lent – if you’ve wanted to go deeper in trying contemplative prayer, this might be a good way to begin. The Wednesday services are quite different than Sundays. One week we will try “lectio divina” – a prayerful way of reading Scripture; another week we will try the “examen”, a prayerful reflection on the day.
Going deeper can be frightening, but can yield abundance, both for ourselves and for those around us, because genuine experiences of the holy always overflow into our relationships with others – just as Peter needed to ask James and John to help haul in the catch. God’s call is never only for private reflection but is a path to living out our own experiences of God in deeper, more authentic relationships with others, and with the community around us. God is involved in this world, Jesus was engaged with real people in and around the Sea of Galilee, and so any time we go deeper in our faith, it should lead us into deeper engagement with this world that God loves. Just as Frame is where Church Street meets Main Street, our own discipleship is where faith meets life. Amen.
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11
Although the text doesn’t say so, it seems clear that today’s Gospel story is set in Capernaum, where Peter lived, and where Jesus was based during his ministry. I went to Capernaum last summer, and it was very moving. It is all in ruins, of course, but you get a good sense of the distances. And while many of the sacred places in Israel are known as “traditional sites” (in the sense that we don’t really know whether a story happened here, but the tradition is that it was in this place), in Capernaum, we actually know where some of the primary sites are. So let me take you there…Capernaum is on the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Gennesaret. It is a coastal town. The home of Peter, a stone house, is very near the lakeshore (for remember, the Sea of Galilee is actually a freshwater lake), perhaps 100-150 feet off the shore, with no buildings in between. And as you walk inland from the lakeshore, after passing the home of Peter, you come to the synagogue. Now, the ruins that are there now are the ruins of the synagogue that was built later on the same site where the synagogue had been in the time of Jesus. When we see the synagogue, we are not seeing the actual building where Jesus worshipped, but it is in the same place.
The distance from the home of Peter, where Jesus stayed, to the synagogue is roughly the distance from the Post Office to Frame. And then the street continues on, past the synagogue, where there had been other buildings, other businesses. It is very like Frame on Main Street – Jesus was living in the midst of the town, and dealing with the everyday concerns of the folks there.
In this morning’s Gospel reading, Peter, James and John are just doing what they do – they are fishing. They had fished all night, without catching anything. They were tired and discouraged. In the meantime, Jesus was getting crowded by the many folks following him, so he asked Peter to take him a little way from the shore in his boat, and then he taught the folks from the boat.
After he concluded teaching, he turned to Peter and suggested that Peter put out again, further from shore, and try going a little deeper. Peter protests – after all, he knows how to fish, and he knows that further effort will be fruitless. But he finally takes the advice of Jesus, and is amazed to draw up nets that are overflowing. He needs to call James and John to have them bring their boat to help carry the whole catch.
This story is so like our own experiences sometimes – we going along, doing what we’ve been doing for a while, and we come to a time when it is no longer fruitful. Our efforts at managing our life stop working – perhaps it’s our work life, our family life, our health, or our spiritual life – whatever it is, we find that what we’ve been doing no longer works. We’re coming up empty one way or another.
Jesus suggests going a little deeper - two and a half years ago, as I learned about oceans, I learned that there is a world of difference between shallow seas and the deep oceans. It’s not simply a matter of degree. And while most of our economic activity in the ocean takes place in the shallows, they are only 8% of the total ocean water on earth. Nonetheless, though our economic activity takes place in the shallows, scientists are aware of the importance of the deep open ocean to the health of the earth – the deep waters help to regulate climate, impact our atmosphere, and contain some of the least studied animal life on earth. I suspect that the same can be said of the spiritual life. Skimming the surface is substantively different from going deeper, and yet the depths are critical to our wholeness in ways we do not always understand.
But we don’t understand the deep. It is frightening to be so far from solid ground. And this is certainly true of us spiritually as well.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt tells a story in his book God, Prayer and Spirituality about a secular Jewish family who moved to a small town, and as he tells the story: “They enrolled their child in the best school in the area, a Catholic parochial school. To their dismay their child came home after the first day and said, ‘Daddy, you’ll never guess what I learned today. Did you know that God is really three, that there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, and that his son died for our sins?’ The distraught father sat his son down, looked him in the eyes, and said, “Let me make it clear, son. There is no such thing as a Trinity. There is only one God, and we don’t believe in him.’”
How often do our certainties fail to empower our living? We spend so much time wondering about whether we understand God, and yet are unwilling to trust God as the ground of our lives. Our intuitive response to such a realization might be to walk away from faith, but in this morning’s reading, Jesus suggests that going deeper into what has not worked might be the better answer. We need to be willing to go deeper, to engage the possibilities that some of our certainties will fall away, and be replaced by new understanding, or even new questions. But if we are unwilling to go deeper, if we stay, theologically, in the shallows, then when life takes us into the deep, we may not recognize God there.
I think, sometimes, that we are so afraid that God will not live up to our beliefs, and so we are unwilling to really engage with God in the real challenges of our lives. And so God never becomes real to us, and we never feel quite safe – because if we can’t trust God with our doubts, if we can’t trust ourselves to be with God in ways we don’t understand, then how can we turn to God when life tears loose from its moorings?
Going deep means different things to us at different times in our lives. At one point it may mean facing our doubts – entering into unknown space with God to see how we might emerge together. At another point in our lives, it may mean depending on God in ways we never had to while our lives were still predictable and manageable.
For Peter, in this story and others, it meant trusting Jesus in new and different ways. In this story, Jesus asks Peter to trust him in his work life. Peter’s mother had already been healed by Jesus, so he knew that Jesus could work miracles – but that was separate from his work life, where he knew how things worked and he was in control. Maybe that’s the same for some of us – we’ve trusted God, but only in our inner life, not in the places where we work or learn or deeply engage our own lives.
How do we go deep? It’s easier, sometimes, when life takes us there – when we suddenly find ourselves in uncharted territory -- some crisis comes, or we have questions we never had before, or we find that habit is no longer enough, and while we are still afraid of intimacy, we are even more afraid of not being known, of never knowing God, and so we find that we need to go deeper. And often, it is like Peter’s experience – what used to work is no longer working, and so we find ourselves needing to reach into the unknown, and finally willing to let go of what we’ve known in order to go deeper.
And going deeper may cost us our certainties – a belief may become ‘the one that got away’ as we find ourselves realizing that we don’t actually believe things we thought we believed. Or we may find ourselves reaching to trust God with a new intensity, which also might be uncomfortable for us. If we’re used to being rational people who have largely thought of faith as something we think about, it can be a new and powerful experience to find ourselves strengthened, empowered, or just deeply touched by a sense of hunger for God or by a sense of God’s care.
If we do allow ourselves to engage our doubts, we may find our own sense of faith changing in ways we hadn’t anticipated. And yet, allowing ourselves to engage our doubts can be an important step in the eventual growth of our faith. I was 10 years old when I realized that I did not believe in God; and then I was 14 when I had a born-again experience that led me to a couple of years during high school in a much more conservative, evangelical expression of faith than my family’s…or my own as an adult. That time was hard on my family. But engaging in those journeys seriously laid the groundwork for my faith being an integral dimension of my identity. We need to support those we love as they go deeper, even when it threatens our own certitudes. As Alice Walker wrote in The Color Purple, “No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended.”
And while going deeper, either through doubts, or through a new embrace of faith, or through putting our feet to our faith in action may seem frightening – if we take the reality of the living God seriously, we can trust that just as for Isaiah, God will enter into the journey with us. As God promised Jeremiah, “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord….” (Jeremiah 29:11-14) We are not alone on the journey.
Lent begins in 10 days, and it is a traditional time to go deeper. Perhaps we want to try a new prayer practice, or getting involved personally in acting on our faith. During Lent, we will have services each Wednesday evening – these are services with space for reflection and contemplation, beginning with about two minutes of silence and building to much longer by the end of Lent – if you’ve wanted to go deeper in trying contemplative prayer, this might be a good way to begin. The Wednesday services are quite different than Sundays. One week we will try “lectio divina” – a prayerful way of reading Scripture; another week we will try the “examen”, a prayerful reflection on the day.
Going deeper can be frightening, but can yield abundance, both for ourselves and for those around us, because genuine experiences of the holy always overflow into our relationships with others – just as Peter needed to ask James and John to help haul in the catch. God’s call is never only for private reflection but is a path to living out our own experiences of God in deeper, more authentic relationships with others, and with the community around us. God is involved in this world, Jesus was engaged with real people in and around the Sea of Galilee, and so any time we go deeper in our faith, it should lead us into deeper engagement with this world that God loves. Just as Frame is where Church Street meets Main Street, our own discipleship is where faith meets life. Amen.