“Get Ready for a Shock”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Text: Luke 5:1-11
I am going to propose to you this morning a new or a different definition of the word “faith.” I do so by wanting you to picture this: your car has just broken down on the side of a road on a day as cold as this and, all of a sudden, the florist comes along and says, “Trust me, for 50 dollars I can fix your car for you.” If you agree, then you have faith!
Or, you are planning your wedding reception and all the events around it - complicated, grand and magnificent - and the local plumber comes up to you, and he says, “Trust me, for five dollars a head, I can feed everyone at the reception for you, and you can have the most magnificent wedding event that has ever taken place in your life.” If you agree, then you have faith!
Or, let's say that you are going to be audited by the CCRA, and you know in the back of your mind that there is some undeclared income somewhere in the books, and the local minister comes to you and says, “Trust me, I will pray over these books and solve all your accounting issues for you.” If you agree, then you have faith! Well, actually, you are downright stupid, but you do have faith.
Or, you are a fisherman, and you have gone out all day and have caught nothing, you are tired and aggravated. In port a carpenter's son comes to you and says, “Trust me, if you will go out with me in the boat to the deepest part of the waters and put down your nets, you will catch an enormous amount of fish.” If you do, then you have faith.
Well, is not the latter exactly what our reading suggests? Is that not what happened? The disciples, Peter in particular, had gone out fishing, had come home with no fish, and in the end Jesus says to him, “Trust me, go out into the deep waters and you will be able to catch fish.” But, there is something different, profoundly different, between that incident and the scenarios that I pictured ahead of time.
The difference is what preceded that invitation. You see, we read in Luke's Gospel that Jesus was speaking the Word of God, and a large crowd had followed him, and were hanging on his every word. The crowd got so large that Jesus realized to be able to speak to them all, he needed to create a sort of amphitheatre, so he says to Peter, “Peter, can I go on your boat? Just set out from shore a little bit.” From that boat he spoke to the people on the shore.
Marial and I have taken the ferry from Tiberius to Capernaum, and we have seen the hills on the side of Lake Geneserett (Galilee), and the wonderful sea and embankments of grass that grow up from it. Just picture Jesus in a boat with this semi-circular bank around, and the crowds are listening to him, hearing the Word of God.
As Jesus expounds the Word of God, so too the disciples, Peter in particular, are hearing what Jesus has to say. In other words, in a very public place, in a very profound way, the Word of God was being heard as Jesus spoke to those on the Sea of Galilee. But, the response of Peter is also remarkable. Peter not only agrees to allow Jesus to speak the Word of God to the people, but when Jesus then says to him, “Let us now take this boat and go into the deep waters that we can catch fish” Peter's response was incredibly brave because we have been told that he had washed his nets. In other words, he was done for the day. He's been out in the night - the best time to catch fish - had caught nothing, came home and washed his nets in preparation for the next day. He'd given up. Yet, Jesus comes along and says, “I want you to take those very nets that you have just washed and I want you to go out into the deep sea.” Can you imagine how intimidated he must have been?
There's a whole crowd on the embankment hearing this conversation between Peter and Jesus. They must all have been wondering. Peter is a well-known fisherman, someone with credentials as a fisherman, and Jesus, a carpenter's son from Nazareth is now giving him advice on where he should fish. Peter must have felt that his professional acumen was being called into question, I think. It was so public, he couldn't live it down.
But, what happened? Peter responded. He responded to Jesus' invitation. Immediately, he set sail into the deep waters with Jesus. What was the motivation? What was the power that was behind this? Well, I believe that between the hearing of the Word and this act of trust, Peter had faith. He had faith that was based on the hearing of the Word.
Christian faith then is not like that of the wedding planners and the plumber. It is not a faith that says “Anything goes! We will do whatever is in our best interests.” It is a faith that has been thought through and is based on something. Nor is it a faith that simply paralyses itself by some inner debate. It is one that ultimately must result in doing something.
Faith is both faith in something and it is also a trustful response to what one has heard. Between the word and the act, there is faith. Peter's faith becomes, I believe, the model for the way we should live our lives as believers and followers today. But the reason for this encounter between Jesus and Peter is a most incredible message for us, and that message is that the word of Christ motivates.
Something you hear a lot about today are motivational speakers: people who are paid sometimes thousands, or sometimes hundreds of thousands, of dollars to go before large crowds to give motivational speeches. Many of these motivational speakers are very gifted, they are very slick, very powerful, and they do have the ability - there is no doubt about it at times - to motivate people, to move people, to get them to do things and to change things in their lives.
Sometimes these motivational speakers do not find themselves moving into the political realm or the even into the religious realm. In fact, there was an article just this past week in MacLean's Magazine bemoaning where all the great speakers have gone They certainly don't seem to be in Canadian politics for the most part, and they don't seem to be in many areas of public discourse. There is recognition that motivational speeches have a role to play, and even though some people are suspicious of motivational speaking, there is a power to it.
I was reading about one such incident, which is the most famous of all probably, and that was the relationship years ago between Andrew Carnegie and Charles Schwab. What a lot of people don't know is that Andrew Carnegie ran this great steel empire, was a great and wonderful entrepreneur and industrialist, but he hired Charles Schwab to be the head of the steel department of this great corporation. It is a well known fact that Charles Schwab was the first person in such a position to be paid a million dollars a year for his work.
In all this discussion now about bonuses and everything, Schwab was the man who led the way. But, Schwab was once asked how he could justify getting 3,000 dollars a day, and the person asked him, “Are you therefore one of the great and most knowledgeable people about steel?”
Schwab replied, “I know almost nothing about the making of steel.”
The person said, “But you are in charge of this.”
Schwab responds, “No, I know virtually nothing, but this I do know: how to motivate people who do know how to make steel.”
He probably had some other gifts as well. Schwab was a great motivator.
There is a power then in motivating people and moving people either through words or speech. But, Jesus is not just a motivational speaker. What the disciples saw in Jesus, and what Peter saw in Jesus, was the embodiment of the very Word of God that he espoused. He didn't just follow Jesus on the basis of his word, but on the basis of his being and his very nature. Somehow, Peter saw in Jesus the very power and the presence of God at work.
It wasn't just motivational words to get someone else to do something. It wasn't for the self-aggrandisement or the income of the motivator that Jesus did what he did, but rather, in speaking the Word of God and being the embodiment of that Word, he moved Peter to do the things that he did. There was this power in Christ's ministry, there was this attraction, there was this motivation that was based on who he was.
And, I ask you, is that motivation there for you? Is the faith that you have some disembodied thing, some idea or some concept, or is the power of Christ coming into your life in such a way that it moves you in what you do?
For Peter, there was no question that it moved him. Christ's words not only moved him in a motivational way, it caused him to act. Look at what happened in this great story. Here we have Peter, having caught no fish, standing in the boat with Jesus talking to the crowds, and now responding to what Jesus says. Why? It is because, as Peter says, “Because you say so.” It is because of the force of Christ in his life. That is why he went out. He went out into the deepest of waters.
Recently I was speaking to Professor Paul Weston at Ridley College in Cambridge in England. Paul made a fascinating comment. He said:
You know, the Word of God is something that moves us, and it moves us in a sense from the kingdom of this world and the concerns of this world and the demands of this world into the Kingdom of God. In this movement, in this powerful transition, Christ is at work. The Church, through the Word, needs to move and be a community that is only based in the kingdom of this world, the one that is moved and is found in the Kingdom of God in the Kingdom of Heaven.
I thought about that in relation to Peter and Jesus. Jesus' word to Peter moved him from being simply a fisherman, relying on his own resources, to going out into the deep. I don't want to overly allegorize this story by suggesting that “the deep” represents a great many things. But, it definitely represents something, namely that when Peter was clearly told by Jesus to go into the deep waters, it required a profound commitment and an act of faith on his part to go there.
When he went out into the deep places, he found that his nets were full. I was thinking that in the sermon last week, David very eloquently expressed how important it is for us to go deep into our faith and deep into the Word, and that in the deep places there is a profound lesson and a place of growth and nourishment for us. That is what Peter had to do.
Any fisherman would tell you that at the beginning of the day after a night's fishing, you don't go to the deep to catch the fish, you go to the shoreline, that you put down the nets where they are basking in the warmth of the sun, not in the deep places, and so his impulses must have been, “Jesus, you are out of your mind!” But, still he went, still he acted.
Max Lucado tells a wonderful story about a man called Ferreira, who is one of the most famous divers in Cuba. This man, Ferrera does what almost nobody else on earth can do. Unassisted, with only flippers and a wet suit, he can dive down deep beyond 500 feet. He can go to the very depth, and in about three minutes and twelve seconds, he can go down to that and come back up. It is a place to which only submarines can go, but to which this diver goes on his own. He fills his lungs up with air, pumps them up like a bicycle pump before he goes diving, and then he goes straight down into the depths and comes up.
When asked why he did this, he said, “It is wonderful to go to the depths, but most especially, it is wonderful to be completely and totally surrounded by the water.” This is interesting, particularly for baptismal families, the imagery is very powerful. By going down into the deep waters, he is surrounded by the water and, for a moment, the water becomes his world. He becomes one with the water and the water with him. The water is both his boundary and source of life and buoyancy, but also potentially his source of death. This world under the water becomes for him for a few moments the world.
I think that is a wonderful image to have when you think of Jesus taking the disciples out into the deep. By throwing their nets into the deep places, into the deep waters, they are in a sense immersing themselves in trust in the power of the Kingdom of God, and when they go out into those waters, the most amazing things happen: they come back from the depths with their nets overflowing, so much so that Peter actually has to call to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, the great boat owner and the wealthy boat person in Galilee, to come and bring another boat, because there are so many fish that the boat would capsize.
By going out into those waters, by trusting in those waters, he learned the final thing, and that was that Christ's word is an awesome thing! When they went off into the deep and they caught the fish, they were absolutely stunned and amazed about what had happened. Can you imagine, when they came back into shore with this boat full, and they are looking at the carpenter, thinking: “This man is amazing!”
The crowds must have been wondering what on earth had been taking place. Can you imagine the chitter-chatter amidst the crowd afterwards that Peter, the great fisherman, had gone out and actually done what the carpenter had said and this miraculous thing had happened? But, Peter was humbled. Peter didn't come back bragging that they had gone out there in faith and had been great and wonderful people - look at all the fish they had caught! But rather, he confessed his sin by saying, “Who am I?” He recognized Jesus as Lord, and he looks upon Jesus and he recognizes, not by virtue of his own power or his own strength and his own ability, no matter how much faith he had, it wasn't his faith alone that had done this, it was the great power of Christ, and he recognized that.
I had a bit of an epiphany, a strange experience, last week. I had gone to the British Museum, and I hadn't been there for many years. I went in to the great Rotunda, which is donated by a Canadian industrialist. I was proud that a Canadian's name was right up there at the heart of the British Museum. I thought, “This is really good, very cool!” I walked through and I finally found my way into the Gift Shop, and I thought, “I must bring something home for Marial, or else she will never forgive me.”
Then, I saw this incredible sight: there were all these young children, boys actually, in their blazers, their school uniforms and their shirts and ties and little grey shorts and white knees. They were all jostling to buy ridiculous stuff to take home with. I got in line with these boys, and one of them in particular was using his elbows trying to get to the front. I looked at this little boy, and he turned around and looked at me. He had highly reddish-auburn hair, more brown than red, wore glasses, had freckles, was a little rotund, had big cheeks and a big grin on his face, and was elbowing everyone out of the way.
Well, I thought I had seen myself - 40 years ago! I looked at this little lad, and he looked up at me, and he says, “Excuse me, do you mind if I go ahead of you in the line?”
I looked at him and I said, “Yeah, I do mind if you go in the line-up ahead of me.”
He was astonished. He must have thought, “He must be Canadian this man, I mean, he really must!”
We looked at each other and I just welled up with tears! It was like I was transported back in time. Sure enough, he went through the line, he barged everyone else out of the way and got what he wanted, and I thought, “Yeah, that was me 40 years ago!”
That very afternoon, and yes, this is going somewhere, I got on a train, and I went past the place outside of London called Putney. I remembered something about Putney. Putney was the place where Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army had written their agreement, their constitution, after they had won the Civil War. In a church, at a prayer meeting, they had constructed the whole Constitution for Democracy and for the governance of the country.
As a little boy, I remember that I didn't dress up as Batman or Robin or Superman or Cowboys or Indians. I would dress up as a Roundhead. I would put a steel pot on my head and would pretend to be one of Cromwell's army: not a particularly nice kid, I don't think I was! But, that is what we used to fight - Roundheads and Cavaliers. Terrible, actually!
I remembered this, and then I remembered as it carried through on the train what had transpired in that meeting all those years ago in the mid-1600s, and that is that the Roundheads were overwhelmed. They were astonished that they had won the war. They were elated that this had happened. They believed that God in his providence had helped them win the victory.
They were sure it was God's providence at work. That was part of their faith. But, Cromwell then warned them that even when great things have happened, even when wonderful things are achieved, we still must be humble before the Word of God. It is not the victory that has been won simply on the basis of how good or righteous or powerful the army may be, but it is God, and God alone, who deserves the credit.
A number of times, Cromwell and Sexby and others warned everyone not to get carried away with their own importance, but to follow according to the Word of God. And, I thought of Peter. I thought of Peter coming back to the shoreline with all these fish. And, what does he do? He humbles himself! He confesses his faith in Christ. He knows that it is Christ's word and command above all that has been the source of his abundance. That, my friends, is true faith! Amen.