Message for worship at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 9th of Second Month, 2025
Speaker: Brian Young
Scripture: Luke 5:1-11
Luke 5:1-11, NRSV: Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, 2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. 4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” 6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. 7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” 9 For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” 11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
Since last summer, I have been part of the Challenges and Opportunities Committee (AKA “C&O”), the ad hoc group that our meeting convened to discern how we might use the generous bequests that have come to us since 2023. Most of you know that we were assisted in this work by our Friends Colin Saxton and Scott Wagoner. As we were trying to get our arms around the task, one of the things that Scott suggested we do was to think about why, what, and how—and he suggested we proceed in that order. The why for something tells us whether or not a particular action or goal fits in with our overall direction, the calling that we have from God. The what and the how proceed from the why—so rather than just say, for example, we should give $10,000 to the Community Food Pantry, we begin with “we are called to share with those in need, and we hope to inspire additional giving.” Sharing with those who have need is our why, there; this is one of the ways that our meeting has responded to God’s call for more than a century. The specifics of what to do and how to do it then follow. So if you’ve seen the report that C&O gave to Monthly Meeting in January, you’ll remember that each section of that report, each broad recommendation on how we might use the money, begins with a “why”. (I will also say that the committee has revised that report based on feedback we’ve received from you all, and we will share that new version with everyone in the coming week, in advance of next Sunday’s meeting for business.)
And, ideally, each of the “whys” behind each of our proposals needs to relate to the overall why of our mission as a meeting. Here, I’ll point out our meeting’s mission statement, in this room, on the wall to my right—let me ask how many of you have looked at that recently? (Ask Ted to point camera at it so Zoom attenders can read it also.)
“As a Christian Quaker community, we seek to discover God’s truth, proclaim God’s love, and live our faith.” This is the framework for what we do, the why for the whats and the hows in our corporate life—or at least it’s supposed to be. Part of the work of the C&O Committee, as we’ve been thinking about “whys,” has been trying to relate each of those proposals to the overall why of our mission.
Mission is, of course, one of the great themes that we can see running through the Scriptures, both in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. As I’ve already said, mission is the framework for any kind of purposeful action in the world; it provides the why for the what and the how. When mission shows up in the Bible, it is usually provided or directed by God or one of God’s messengers.
The last time I spoke, we considered Jesus’ mission statement, when he rises in the synagogue at Nazareth to read from the scroll of Isaiah, in the previous chapter. My summary of the mission that Jesus claimed there is: proclaiming good news, release for captives, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed—healing, liberation, good news of God’s jubilee for all people. And we can further summarize all of those things as signs of God’s mercy; that God’s reign as Jesus proclaims it is about mercy, and not vengeance.
Today’s passage, at the beginning of Luke’s next chapter, starts with Jesus moving forward that mission, in the words he proclaims to the crowds on the shore of the the Lake of Gennesaret—Luke doesn’t give us specifics in this instance, but I think we can assume most of those in the crowd are the common people of Galilee: fisher-people and farmers, small merchants, homemakers and children, servants and slaves; those are his likely audience, and hence he is here preaching good news to the poor. He enlists Simon (later called Peter) and the rest of his crew in providing a platform for his preaching—Peter’s boat provides a little distance from the crowd so everyone can see, a nice expanse of water across which Jesus can throw his voice.
But then the story moves from mission to call. Call is another one of the great themes of the Scriptures. I think of call as the process by which we are invited into mission; the process by which we enter the framework of a great purpose and participate in it, encountering first the why, and then discovering the what and the how.
All four of the Gospels include scenes in which Jesus calls people into his mission. With Luke, Matthew and Mark set the first of these scenes on the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret (AKA the Sea of Tiberias, AKA the Sea of Galilee), and all three of those initial scenes involve Simon Peter, and the brothers James and John. One thing that we see in Matthew and Mark’s call stories is that the disciples follow Jesus without question—he simply says, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers for people,” and they do. (The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier points this out, in the hymn we sang earlier this morning, with “let us, like them, without a word, rise up and follow Thee.”) So in Matthew and Mark, the silence of the disciples is fairly peculiar. It’s not clear, at that point, what their “why” is for following, other than becoming “fishers for people,” whatever that means.
Luke gives us a bit more to go on, however. Commentators point out that Simon has encountered Jesus before in at least one episode, when Jesus heals his mother-in-law, near to the end of chap. 4 (vv38–39); and then apparently many more are brought to the house before Jesus can leave, and he heals them and exorcises demons from among them (40ff). So Simon already has witnessed Jesus’ power as he works at his mission, and perhaps that has prepared him for the call that he hears in his boat, in the deep waters of the lake.
The call begins with Jesus’ command to row into deeper waters, and cast the nets down for a catch. Simon knows this won’t be any good, for he and his crew have been at it all night and got nothing; yet he obeys. And the nets come back so full that they can’t handle it themselves! James and John have to come out in their boat just to haul things in.
One aspect of call that we see here and other places in the Scriptures is the realization that one is not ready, or not worthy, to participate. We might think of the prophet Isaiah, who has a great vision of God at his heavenly throne, and who responds, “woe is me, for I am ruined! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and yet my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5). Here in the boat, Simon Peter sounds a lot like the prophet Isaiah to me: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” It’s much the same objection: “I am not worthy, who am I to serve one so holy as this?”
But both Isaiah and Simon Peter are assured of their worthiness: God sends an angel to cleanse the prophet with a burning coal; here in the boat, Jesus simply says, “Do not be afraid...” It is a reminder to us that when we are called to enter into mission with God, we needn’t be ready, or worthy, or have it all figured out. For if it depends on our own preparation and our own efforts, we will never be ready; there will always be something else we need to work on, some doubt we have to allay, some shortcoming we need to fix. When God extends the call and invites us into God’s great why, God knows our incompleteness, our sins and shortcomings. And God calls us, nevertheless, because God will supply our shortcomings, forgive our sins, and complete the things we have left undone.
Now, here’s one thing I wonder about in this story of mission and call: what happens to all those fish? Does anyone else think it would have been a terrible shame to waste the miraculous catch that weighed down the two boats? It seems impossible that the fish would simply have been left to rot there in the boats of Simon and James and John. In this place and time, food of any kind was precious, and under normal circumstances, these fishermen probably would have prepared every single piece of their catch for market, or for their own hearths. What happens to this great abundance?
I’m sure that I shouldn’t be anxious about that food having gone to waste. One likely possibility is that one or more of the fishermen that stayed behind were the beneficiaries—Luke mentions that Simon had helpers in his boat. There’s also Zebedee, the father of James and John; perhaps the miraculous catch became a sort of compensation for the loss of his sons, who take off with the strange preacher and healer from Nazareth, seldom to be seen again.
Another possibility that we might picture—and admittedly, this is even more speculative—is that those left behind in the boats give much of the catch away to the crowds who have been listening to Jesus’ teaching. Presumably many of those folks are still there, and have even seen Simon Peter and James and John struggling with their nets, the boats almost swamped with the amazing bounty. In that vein, we would think of the feeding of five thousand later in Luke’s Gospel, and the abundance that Jesus works there—perhaps a similar feeding takes place here, but after Jesus and his new followers have left the scene. As I’ve said, this is speculation, but I mention it because I think that while this is a story about Jesus’ mission, and Jesus’ call to the disciples, it is also a story about abundance. And this is not the first time we will see this theme played out in Luke’s Gospel—for God’s incredible abundance is surely part of the good news that Jesus proclaimed.
In fact, the abundance of the miraculous catch is part of what calls Simon Peter and the rest into discipleship. Remember that these men were otherwise bound to a dangerous and difficult profession, where the outcomes were never guaranteed (“we have worked all night long but have caught nothing...”) Commentators tell us that fishing, like any economic activity in Palestine in this period, was heavily taxed, subject to quotas whenever anything was brought to market—the sea and everything in it belonged to the emperor, hence the emperor could tax it. With that understanding, the kind of liberation that Jesus proclaimed in the synagogue a few days earlier extends also to his first disciples. He calls them into an alternative community, outside the economic structure of the day; not one without risk or want, of course, but one in which they are free from the burdens of taxes, debt, and uncertainty. An alternative community, in which God’s abundance is the rule...
Some queries as we enter the quiet together:
How do we hear Jesus’ call into deeper waters here today?
What in us resists, says we are not worthy?
Can we trust in God’s abundance, as a next step in following Jesus into God’s alternative community?