FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, YEAR C February 6, 2022
1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11 Panzer Liturgical Chapel
Imagine that most of us don't start the morning unfolding and scanning the morning paper. But if we did, we would eventually get to the classified section, where we would see advertisements for all kinds of goods and services. Imagine in the "Help Wanted" section this ad: “Wanted: volunteers to leave their lives behind to go and fish for people. Might also include public speaking, healing, teaching, and constant explanation. Loyalty strongly desired. No experience required.”
The gospel for today is the story of Jesus taking some of his disciples on a fishing expedition on Lake Gennesaret. There’s Jesus, standing by the lake with the crowds fast approaching him. There’s Simon and friends, usually fishermen extraordinaire, cleaning their nets on the beach after a very unproductive night… ready to go home and get some sleep, I’m sure. But wait, Jesus wants to teach the people from a little ways off the shore. So he asks Peter to take him out onto the lake in one of the boats. And when he was finished teaching, he asked to go out further from the lakeshore and told Peter to let down the nets.
Now Simon tried to be patient with Jesus. “Master we have worked all night long but have caught nothing, but OK, if you say so, I will let down the nets.” What followed was a fisherman's dream. The catch was so big the nets broke and the boat began to sink! Suddenly Jesus' stock as a fisherman began to rise and Simon, James, and John, the sons of Zebedee, were thoroughly impressed. Jesus told them not to be afraid and that from now on they would be catching people. The boat was returned to shore and the fishermen left everything they had and followed Jesus.
The readings for this fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, like all readings for the Epiphany season, teach us about how people were and are affected because of God’s Epiphany. That is, it makes a difference that God chose to manifest himself in Christ. It changes people’s lives. It changes their mission.
Now, most modern North Americans are not fishermen. Many view fishing as a leisure pursuit for aging baby boomers or contemplative retirees. The imagery is a bit archaic for those of us who get fish from the supermarket and restaurants and when incredibly adventurous get sushi from bars. Despite the imagery, the message is clear, those who let down their nets in faith will harvest a catch.
Today's texts can speak to the reluctant evangelists in all of us. Most of us have no problems with getting into a boat with Jesus and listening intently to his wonderful teachings, but when it comes to dropping the nets to fish, we often shake our heads. Not only can we doubt our abilities, we often doubt the fact that Jesus can catch anything either!
There are many and varied reasons why we are shy evangelists. Some of us believe that being Christian is primarily a "private matter." Isn’t that the message we get from all around us? Religion for post-modern folk is supposedly "between you and your God" like your socks are between you and your shoes. Socks are a good thing, wear them, but keep them under wraps.
Many Christians buy into this cultural view. Getting in the boat is fine, after all, water is calming and therapeutic, the relaxation is good for the blood pressure… what a great opportunity to get away from the world and contemplate what life is all about. But that’s not what God’s fishing is about at all. And today’s gospel reminds us that Jesus doesn’t call the disciples to spiritual contemplation, at least not at this moment. No, God wants us to go fishing, not just as a spiritual exercise but to actually catch some fish! “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people,” says the Lord.
And our reaction is just like Simon Peter’s. “Go away Lord, I am not up to the task at hand. You are great, and I am small, and will never measure up. Someone else will do a better job.” Often our faith is great, but we are not up to sharing it with others. We are afraid that they won't listen. We are afraid they will think we are fanatics. We are afraid they won't get it, so we don’t even get in the boat. We’ve had our eye on a particular career all our lives, and going down Jesus’ road will deter us from our goals.
You know, we are very blessed. Most of us adults got the opportunity to choose our vocations. We took a look at what we liked to do and we picked a career. Most teenagers are in the process right now of trying to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives. And the choices are so vast… and the possibilities are so endless, you may even have several careers before it’s all over. And yet it’s important to remember that because we claim Jesus Christ, we have allowed God to claim our lives. For a very few of us, it has meant changing careers and participating in a life of particularly public ministry. But for most of us, God calls us from within our careers and lives to keep doing the same old thing, but to do it for God’s glory and honor all along the way. After all, Jesus didn’t call Peter to be a physician or an accountant… he still wanted him to be a fisherman… he was just offering him a new kind of catch on this journey called faith.
A couple of important points here: 1) in Matthew and Mark’s gospels, Jesus calls the disciples early on in his ministry, so it does feel quite remarkable that these men would follow him with so little experience of who he is and what exactly he is asking them to do. Luke’s version of the gathering of the disciples is different. We have seen in the last four weeks that Jesus has already been at this a while. He has covered a lot of physical territories and his reputation is preceding him – people are waiting for him to arrive.
Simon didn’t follow Jesus on a whim. His good regard for Jesus compelled him and his fellow fishermen to cast off with Jesus into the lake, even though they have already had an unsuccessful night of fishing. They listen to him speak, and even though they think nothing will come of it, they put their nets into the water and remarkable draw up more fish than they can handle. This made such an impression on them that they laid it all down, left their boats and nets, and followed Jesus out into the countryside. But they weren’t going to save souls. They were going to introduce people to Jesus, and bring change to the lives they were living right then, not in some unknown future.
We often think of this as Jesus’ call for us to save souls for His kingdom. But that is not what Jesus is asking the disciples or us to do. We are called to introduce people to Jesus. To remind those who know him why they are welcome in his company. We are not just calling them to be saved. We are calling them to bring people to serve.[i]
2) Our passage from the 1 Corinthians passage is Paul’s reminder to the Church there that Jesus is worth being followed, not just because he was a wise teacher or performed miracles. His arrest and death are enough to scare most rational people away. Here we have what many scholars think is one of the oldest testimonies about Jesus’ resurrection. Paul argues that believing in the resurrection is a necessary part of what it means to be a disciple. We think of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and think of them as first evidence, but they were written 30 to 50 years after it happened. Penned in about 54CE, only 20 years after Jesus’ resurrection, Paul presents this not as a historical fact, but also as a theological foundation for what becomes the Church.[ii]
Verses 3-7 set up the historical record… he was killed, buried for three days, then rose and appeared to many until his ascension forty days later. And verse 8 tells us that the proof did not end there. Paul recounts his own experience of seeing Christ as told in Acts 9, compelling him to change his name from Saul to Paul, and setting him on an entirely new path, taking the message of Jesus, his resurrection, and his ability to change people’s lives forever to distant shores. As Saul, he was a reprehensible person, flushing out Christian believers and persecuting them for their faith in Jesus. When he becomes Paul, he is an evangelist extraordinaire. And he is our reminder that, as he wrote to the Church in Rome, nothing can separate us from the love of God, even our faults and mistakes, our feeble attempts and backslides… God’s grace and love through Jesus Christ are enough… in fact, they are abundantly able to show us that Jesus’ sacrifice was not made in vain.
We are grateful for the gospel story as given to us from four perspectives, but Paul reminds us of something more… that Jesus is not just defined by his story, but by his continued presence with us and in us, as we go out to preach Christ and be Christ in the world. The season of Epiphany is a season of revealing, an exploration of the promise of Advent – Emmanuel - God with us.
So, what do we do? I imagine that we are much like the prophet Isaiah, who when he was told he would speak for God, at first declined, believing himself to be unclean and unfit for the mission. But like Isaiah, our sin has been washed away, and so we are called to respond like he did, proclaiming, “Here I am, send me.”
Each week in our liturgy we proclaim belief through the words of a historic creed of the Church. Each week we profess belief in Jesus, who was born, lived, died, was buried, and resurrected. Intellectually, we struggle with how this all happened and what it means for us. But as Christians, our lives are not only about what we understand. It’s also about what we come to believe through faith, even if we can still not grasp all the details. Our faith grows, not only because we learn more about who Jesus was, but because we encounter him more in the world.
I found two good quotes for this week’s lessons, and since I could not choose between them, I will use them both.
From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, written from an underground experience in the midst of WWII. Pastors and seminarians had refused to give in to an institutional church that refused to denounce Nazi rule and atrocities. These unknown friends were trying to figure out how to find community when they were not sure who could be trusted. Bonhoeffer's words remind them that Church is not defined by building or official institutional degree: “The church is
not a religious community of worshipers of Jesus Christ but is Christ himself
who has taken form among the people.”
And this one, also from Life Together is especially important as we try to understand the kind of life Jesus is calling us to: “Jesus calls us [men] not to a new religion but to life.”[iii]
In the name of the Holy Trinity. Amen.
Peace, Deb
(c) Deb Luther Teagan, February 2022
[i] Pulpit Fiction, Epiphany 5C, 2022 https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/epiphany5c/#1Corinthians15%3A1-11=
[ii]
Will Willimon, The Core of the Gospel, Pulpit Resource, Feb 6, 2022, https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/11089/february-6-2022-the-core-of-the-gospel
[iii]
David Van Brakle, “Christ as community: Bonhoeffer’s antidote for Western
Christianity,” https://medium.com/christian-citizen/christ-as-community-bonhoeffers-antidote-for-western-christianity-b17e0767a128#_edn2
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