Epiphany 5C: Dr. No and Mary's Yes

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Epiphany 5C: Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]; Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

The Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Priest-in-Charge

Perhaps the most common refrain I hear in my meetings for pastoral counseling with people over the course of the week when they pop in for a visit is a persistent, gnawing sense of skating across the surface of their life. They hunger for a life of depth, authenticity, and meaning and want to know how the life of faith can help them.

In our gospel for today, we encounter Jesus’ calling of the disciples. The crowds are “pressing in on him to hear the word of God”—a powerful detail that speaks to our own present situation. Like us, the crowds, are hungry, yearning, for something more. Like us, they want to live lives of depth, dignity, and significance. Notice, too, that the people Jesus is about to call to be his disciples have given up their work. They’ve stepped out of their boats and are mending and washing their nets. The nets are the very means of their livelihood, the way they earn their keep and feed their families. But nets are also ways in which we trap and capture things aren’t they? Is there a way in which the disciples, woebegone at having come up empty-handed in their night-fishing expedition are trapped, stuck in a rut? Is it just fish they are lacking, or do the empty nets bespeak a deeper, more profound sense of lack, a sense of something fundamental missing in their lives as well?

When Jesus tells Simon to, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,” he’s met at first with skepticism. “Been there done that,” is Simon’s first response. That is something for us to watch—the ways we resist the invitation to larger life, the call to live from the abundance of God’s grace, and keep ourselves trapped in the nets of our preconceived ideas. I remember I had a boss we called “Dr. No” for whom the first reply to any suggestion was always, “No way. Impossible. Can’t be done.” At first it was distressing, but after a while we all wised up to the fact that the first reply was always a “no” and we learned just to let that be for a while. After the second or third time, we started to gain some traction, but we had to content ourselves with the predictably mechanical and automatic first impulse to refuse from Dr. No.

Christian discipleship is always about how we respond to the invitation—the invitation to the banquet of divine love that has been issued since the foundation of the world. Again and again, in the most unlikely of ways and with a persistence that makes the importunate widow petitioning the judge look like a California surfer, God reaches out, God calls, God invites, cajoles, pokes, and prods that we might drop our nets, step away from the prison of our preconceived ideas into fullness of life in Him. But God loves us so much that we won’t compel us to join the party that’s in full swing. God made human beings with free will, the ability to co-operate with grace, or to refuse. Mary, of course, is the paragon of discipleship for this reason. Her wonderstruck “yes” to the angel Gabriel brings the child Jesus to birth in the womb. Her co-operation with grace—“Let it be with me according to your word”—is what makes her theotokos, the God-bearer.

Remember, right before the Annunciation, Luke gave us another example of an invitation that wasn’t met with the same whole-hearted, “Yes!” to God. Zechariah, you’ll recall, was busy at his priestly duties when an angel of the Lord appeared. He told to the angel to take a number and as a result was struck dumb until John was born. Now I’m sure there are many wives out there wouldn’t object to their husbands not talking for nine months, but the deeper meaning for us is the power of our consent, or refusal to the various annunciations that litter our lives on a daily basis—those moments when we have the choice to utter our yes that love might come to flower in and through us for others.

So Simon’s first response, is to resist, to hold back, to rely on what he already knows. “Look, Jesus, no offense, but I do this fishing stuff for a business. If I say there the fish aren’t biting, they aren’t biting.” The first thing we get is Simon’s most deeply held, unconscious, mechanical reaction. The old stories. The stale tape-loops. I remember once when I was in spiritual direction I was talking about “trusting my gut.” The old monk sitting across from me had a slightly horrified look on his face, so I asked him, “What’s wrong?” “Dear God boy, don’t trust your gut!” “Why on earth not, Father?” “Because your guts are full of sh*t!” His point is a good one. Our first reaction is often the least free response and most conditioned one. Like my old Boss Dr. No. Like Zechariah. Like the first part of Simon’s response.

But Simon doesn’t stay in that stuck place, does he? Instead, he says, “Yet if you say so I will let down the nets.” That’s the yes of faith, the yes of co-operating with grace, of consenting to God’s presence and action in our lives. And it’s not even a wholehearted “yes,” is it? Even a “yet” is enough to crack open the door for grace to slip through! It’s the willingness to take a chance, to make a leap faith as Kierkegaard calls it, to allow for the possibility that the world might not accord with our ideas about it. Simon let’s down his nets and the result is something that both astounds and terrifies him. Notice as well that that Simon, “yet” marks a hinge in the narrative. Hereafter, he will be Simon Peter, or just Peter. The new name is symbolic of the new being of life with Christ at its source and center.

Simon’s net of lack, his ensnarement in the myth of scarcity, his preconceived ideas about how things are, are shattered and he comes face to face with a sign of God’s inexhaustible abundance. There are so many fish they have to call in for back up, and even then the boats barely make it back to shore so over-filled are they. Just when Simon was ready to give up, when we was at the end of all his efforts and all seemed lost and hopeless, something shifted. Out of emptiness and lack, out of dead ends and forsakenness—“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—comes new life. That’s why Paul, in the First Letter to the Corinthians, is reminding us about the basic arc of Jesus’ life, “That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” There are no empty nets, or empty boats in the economy of God’s love and abundance. When we are at the end of our efforts, God is not at the end of his.

It’s not that we should necessarily set out with the intention to fail, of course, but that our failures, those moments when we come up empty and our efforts come to naught, open us, if we are willing to consent and utter our “yes,” to new possibilities, to something outside of ourselves, to workings of grace and power greater than ourselves. It’s no mistake that poverty of spirit—openness, receptivity, other-centeredness—is the first of the beatitudes (see John Cassian Conference 11). Perhaps now we can understand why Peter has that seemingly extreme reaction, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” What is Peter’s sin? It’s just fish after all! Shouldn’t he be happy at the catch?” Peter’s cry is a deep, profound, life-altering recognition of the ways in which he had put God in box, trapped God in the net of his human-all-too-human ideas of who God is and how God operates. Peter’s sin is the sin of self-enclosure and self-reliance—thinking that everything he accomplishes is the result of his own willed self-effort rather than an openness to the operations of grace. Problems and failures can help us look beyond our limited self, to look for meaning and purpose, to look for God. In weakness is our strength—the realization of God’s strength.

When the disciples come back to shore, something has shifted within them. Jesus tells them, “Do not be afraid,”—the phrase that appears something like 365 times Holy Scripture. Don’t let the nets of your preconceived ideas limit your understanding of who you are, who the people around you are, and who God is. That, I think, is the meaning for us of that detail that Simon, James, and John left everything and followed Jesus. They realized, that it is only in letting God be God, not trapping him in their nets, that true peace, freedom comes not in holding on and storing up, but in letting go, letting be, surrendering our private sense of self to the one who can bring life out of death. Jesus isn’t saying that we all have to be wandering mendicants. We can drop our nets and make mortgage payments. We can drop our nets and change dirty diapers. We can drop our nets and care for a sick parent or child.

My prayer for us this week is that we attune ourselves to the various annunciations that litter our daily lives. My prayer for us is that Mary’s yes, or even Simon Peter’s yet, hold sway in our lives more and more. My prayer is that we recognize the nets of our “stinking thinking” for what they are—the ways we trap, limit, and attempt to tame the living God whose abundance and goodness and beauty overwhelm—swamp the little skiffs of our feeble human understanding. My prayer is that Simon Peter, James and John, we, too, can have the courage to drop our nets and follow after Jesus, tripping down the way of love empty-handed, confident in the buoyant abundance of God’s love that is always there on the other side of our “yes.”