4 January 2007
Luke 5.1-11
At the shore of discipleship
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007
Today was Boy Scout Sunday at Park Presbyterian Church, and we had rows of blue and olive drab shirts to remind us of the spiritual—“reverent”—part of the Scout oath. At a couple of points in the sermon, their presence with us comes to
mind.
I was listening to the Morning Stories podcast from WGBH, Boston. A woman who trains service dogs—puppies that assist people with special needs—was telling about a dog, Wenda, which she had trained for a little girl with epilepsy. Certain kinds of dog have the personality to learn how to be a companion for such people. This companion and helper is called a service dog. The dog was with the girl at a swimming pool. The little girl’s mother was farther away when the girl started to have a seizure in the water. The dog was the only one near enough to respond immediately. She managed to get in the water and tuck her nose under the girl’s shoulder, so her head would stay above the surface and prevent drowning. With moments, of course, the mother came over, and the girl was saved.
What amazed the trainer is that she had not trained the dog to perform this safety move. Somehow, the dog just knew what to do. The dog just got in the water and, very possibly, saved the girl’s life. (We could give the dog a water safety merit badge!)
I know that a dog is not what people usually think of as the model for being a disciple. When Jesus talks about dogs, it never even once involves a compliment. “Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine,” he says, for example, smearing two beasts with one insult. But we’ve learned to appreciate what a dog can do, and one thing a dog can do is teach us something about being a disciple.
The dog that saved the girl with the seizure, as the trainer explains, had something in her personality that could be valuable in protecting her life. She is apparently watchful and concerned, always scanning the situation to see if her assistance is needed. She can submit to the leadership of a master and can learn the tasks that will be of use to her eventual companion. Most important, to one little girl, she can apply her native gifts of personality and the teaching of her master to a new situation. She can invent a solution in the moment of crisis, which is how Wenda the service dog saved a life.
That’s all there is to discipleship. Wenda can do it, and so can you.
Today, the gospel shows us the moment when the master and teacher has identified the persons whose gifts of personality are suitable for becoming disciples, and Jesus invites them into a life of service to the realm. They have something in their personality that could be valuable for the sake of life in the realm, the kingdom of God. Perhaps they are, like the life-saving dog, watchful and concerned. They may be cool and quick in a crisis. Or they may be open minded enough to accept the many new teachings that Jesus deems essential for the new life in the realm. Maybe they’re heartbroken, as Jesus is, that so many of the people God loves live under crushing oppression and get blamed for their lot in life. They might be humbly wise in the face of arrogant power or wildly hopeful in the face of impossible odds. Their spiritual vision, for all we know, may be just distorted enough as to obscure their tradition’s faded images of faith and bring into focus the previously indiscernible face of the God who seeks loyalty through friendship rather than judgment, who seeks commitment through love rather than threats.
Who knows what Jesus sees in Simon, or in James and John, the sons of Zebedee? He sees something.
These last few weeks we’ve been reflecting on spiritual gifts, which are the facilities we each of us have in some number and measure in our soul that we can use for the life of the church and the health of humankind. Everyone has a gift, and maybe several, that will be sought and called for in time. The gifts will come to fit together in a vital whole, the way organs and limbs come together in a vital body. The guiding principle of the vital fitting together of our gifts is love—even as the guiding principle of hope is love, even as our very faith is enlightened and enlivened by love. Now we understand that. Now what?
Now we enact our gifts, our vital unity and our love. Now Jesus speaks to us. “Let me show you something,” Jesus says. “Take your gifts and the implements of your livelihood.” (Let’s say you’re a fishing professional.) “Take your implements back out into the water, the deep water, where you have been failing to accomplish anything, so far, and see what happens.”
When Simon and his coworkers went out again, discouraged as they were, they apparently didn’t expect much. Maybe they expected merely to show Jesus and anyone looking on that the problem is there’s no fish, not that they’ve been bad fishing professionals. It’s a drag to fail at fishing repeatedly, and now there is this self appointed, uninvited fishing consultant is just one more mindless know-it-all. Maybe by failing yet again, after taking his advice, you can at least prove that the problem wasn’t you. Well, Peter and the others cast their net without hope, and yet, they hauled in that famously net-bursting catch of fish.
So Peter feels like an idiot. He knew he was doing it right—he was sure of it—but now look. “Go away from me Lord,” he cries, “for I am a sinful man.” Was he sinful because he couldn’t get it right until Jesus made him do it right? Or was he sinful because he was presumptuous about his competence? Or was he sinful because fish avoided him but merrily swam to their demise for Jesus? Peter is just so ashamed. He wants Jesus to go away, so that maybe he can shrink to the size of a pebble and be washed under the waves to the floor of the lake.
I know Peter’s pain. Believe me, I know. I work in Presbyterian churches. I struggle and sweat and strive, and I catch enough of whatever we need to live for another day. Good enough, though some days I come up empty. Then Rick Warren backs his U-Haul into a driveway at Saddleback, California, and the fish swim in by the thousands. He writes a couple of books: The Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life. There’s absolutely nothing new in them. The theology is the same old theology, and the motivational tools, though proven, are timeworn. Yet there he is, Rick Warren, with all his thousands of church members and the best selling non-fiction book in history. The rest of us just look like idiots. It’s the most natural thing in the world that we feel ashamed, failures as we are by comparison..
But Jesus looks at things differently. He ignores our ashamedness.
Oh, that’s right. With Jesus, it’s not about making us afraid of things, including shame. I resist it, but what I do still so often feel shame, which is for me a cosmic punchbowl of fear spiked with 200‑proof sadness that I drink from, whenever life looks so hard and I don’t know what to do about it. Jesus, at his Christly best, doesn’t make it about shame. He makes it about grace.
So in that moment of grace, Jesus had said to Peter and the others, “Go do it again. Do what you know how to do. Use the implement of your trade you have learned how to use and the gifts in your body and soul that you got from the God who made you, from the God who made me. Go be yourself as fully and as hopefully as you can, and see what happens. I’m not going to do it for you, no matter how tired you are or how much you believe that it can’t be done. You really can do it, and you really are going to do it.”
And then when they did do it, and when Peter had come unglued and wished Jesus would go away and wanted to be a pebble, Jesus said—the way he would say again and again, the way angels had been saying to everyone since they invited the shepherds to Jesus’ birthday—Jesus said, “Do not be afraid.”
It is not about fear. I don’t know what it is about us that we make our faith, the most important thing in life, about fear. Fear makes us miserable, but in the face of an unknown future that depends in some important way on us, fear is also comforting. If we listen to fear, we may not act. If we don’t act, we can’t be blamed for doing it wrong. If we don’t act, at least everyone else who also didn’t act will share the blame. We can shrink into a pebble along with all the other pebbles on the floor of the lake. It’s actually sort of pretty, if you think about it, all those pebbles in the filtered light, lining the bottom of the lovely lake of fear. Fear gives us that almost pleasurable kind of comfort. And one thing about being fearful, you have lots of company.
Jesus figures if a Boy Scout can be brave, so can you. Fear is only the fog on your path to discipleship. You may not see through it, but it can’t stop you if you just keep walking. And you have to walk your path. You walk it down to the shore and take out your boat to the deep water and cast your net.
This moment when Jesus tells you that your time has come to haul in the catch, whatever that means for you, how do you recognize it? Hauling in your catch may be taking on the church responsibility you’ve been sidestepping or inviting people to form the small group you’ve been unsure how to start or talking to that lonely coworker about your faith. Hauling in your catch is the thing that you’ve finally decided to believe in about yourself that Jesus already believes in. When is that moment, and how do you know it?
It is not when you feel ready. God always feels ready for your decision before you do. You never feel ready for something like this, but you can decide when you see well enough to know it’s time to cast your net.
You look at yourself. You see the personality traits you have, which include the traits that aren’t very strong and trip you up. That’s all right. The reason you have strengths is that you have corresponding weaknesses, and your weaknesses are opportunities for other people’s strengths to flower.
You look at yourself, and you see, perhaps with the help of a guide or a teacher, the seeds of spiritual growth that would flower if you set them out in the sunshine and give them some water.
You look at your calendar and write down on it when you will start—I mean an actual calendar, the date and the time. It may surprise you that Jesus will consider this an appointment you have made with him, which he intends to keep, if you will.
Then you act. The day comes and the hour comes, and you act. Don’t be surprised if something extraordinary happens. Peter got a catch of fish; you may get a hug and the expressed amazement that you, all of a sudden, have discovered something about your life. It may not be obvious that this thing you can do is relevant to anything in particular. It surely did not occur to Peter that catching a lot of fish meant that he’d be a leader for a historic religious movement. The one seems unrelated to the other. You never know what’s going to happen when you finally just do what you’re made to do.
To read this story of Jesus with people that once fished for a living, you’d think these things happen with a sudden arbitrariness, a divine caprice bespeaking God’s sense for whimsy. Personally, I suspect that Peter and Jesus had a lot of conversations in the course of the decision Peter would make to follow Jesus. In any case, Jesus and I certainly have a lot of conversation still, working out what he sees in me, what I see in myself. And how on earth I will ever do what needs to be done for his sake?
I suspect that a lot of conversation with Jesus will be part of whatever you’re going to do, if you really mean to do it. Now is a good time to start your conversation, which we call prayer.. Pray in whatever way you can think of to pray, but don’t just sit there waiting for the words to come by themselves. Pray on your knees. or pray on a walk though the snow. Pray with your voice or your pen or a paintbrush. Pray with your spouse or with a friend. Pray after a dream. Pray before you turn on the television. Pray instead of turning on the television. Pray as if your life depends on it. Pray as if someone else’s life depends on it, which may well be the case. Even if you’re a dog.
Somehow in the process, you will become a deeply appealing person, because of your faith, and people will come to you. They will want to know what is this about you that gives off light, that awakens hope in them when you are near. They will want to have what you have, and you will find that you, like Peter, will be catching people.
Amen.
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