5^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

February 7, 2010

Omaha, NE

Rev. Steven W. Plank

“When the Fish Aren’t Biting”

Text:    Luke 5:5 – “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.  Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

Scripture Lessons:       Isaiah 6:1-13

Luke 5:1-11

Proposition:  Doing the Lord’s work in this day and this world of ours is not an easy thing.  So, what do we do “When the Fish Aren’t Biting?”

Prayer for Illumination:  Living God, help us so to hear your holy Word that we may truly understand; that, understanding, we may believe, and, believing, we may follow in all faithfulness and obedience, seeking your honor and glory in all that we do; through Christ our Lord.   Amen.

Do you like to go fishing?  An old seminary friend of mine was, and still is, a passionate fisherman.  He wanted to get a sign for his office door at the first church he served, and have it read, in large print, “The Pastor’s gone fishin’!”  He had opportunities to go fishing there a lot… which might in part explain why things didn’t work out too well for him in that congregation.  However, over the years, he’s learned balance.  Scott has been the chaplain at a drug and rehabilitation center in Missouri for years, and also has been the Stated Supply Pastor at the Federated Church in Bunceton, Missouri for almost 20 years.  He still goes fishing, I’m sure, but he’s just learned to do it in moderation.

I’ve never been one to love fishing above most everything else.  I’ve enjoyed fishing over the years, though, especially when my folks had a place in the northwoods of Wisconsin.  Their house was on a chain of lakes, and the lakes had trout in them, along with small-mouthed and big-mouthed bass, northern pike, muskie, along with assorted other pan fish.  While in high school and college especially, I would often fish when we were up north.  I once caught a nice two-pound walleye.  I caught a 21” northern once… saw it come up from beneath the boat and hit the lure as I was reeling it in from a cast.  What a sight that was!  I also fished for muskie on a fairly regular basis.  Muskie are the largest member of the pike family of freshwater, American fish.  In Wisconsin, you couldn’t keep a muskie unless it was a minimum of 30”.  I often saw muskie swimming in the clear lakes of the northwoods.  I saw my Dad catch one; he had it mounted, and it now hangs on the wall of the home of my nephew, Scott, in Phoenix, Arizona… a place where they don’t have a lot of muskie, by the way!  But I never caught one… until, one day…

It was a cool, misty day up north.  We were going to leave later that afternoon to go back home.  We had a fire in the fireplace, and people were either packing up things or playing gin rummy or sitting and reading in front of the fire.  I decided that I’d throw on a jacket, and I grabbed my fishing rod and walked down to the lake.  I thought I’d just cast off of the dock for a while and see what happened.  I’d been down there about 15 minutes, and suddenly, unexpectedly, wham!  My line started straining as a huge pull to yank it hard.  It had to be a muskie!  I was so excited.  I started carefully, almost gingerly, reeling in the fish.  I was hollering for someone to come down to help me… but, of course, the doors were closed and the windows were shut because it was cool and rainy.  I was the nutty guy who decided to go fish in that kind of weather, and I was clearly all on my own at this point.  I finally got the fish up so close that I could see it battling against the lure and the line.  Yep, it was a muskie all right!  I knew that what I needed to do was use the fishing net I’d brought down to the dock, and put the fish in the net in order to land it.  The fish was in the right position to be netted, and I slowly knelt down to pick up the net.  My hand touched nothing but the dock.  In a panic I looked down, and, seeing nothing, looked around.  There, way on the other end of the dock, was the net.  So, I dragged the muskie through the water down alongside the dock until I got to where the net was.  It was time to land my first muskie!

My heart was racing.  My breathing was fast.  My excitement was boiling over!  All of those physiological reactions of my body apparently overpowered my brain, because, instead of kneeling down, putting the net in the water, and leading the muskie head first into the net, I, for reasons still beyond my understanding, somehow thought it would be a good idea to lift the fish out of the water first, and then bring the net up from underneath it!  I lifted the fish out of the water, and saw that it was caught just by a lip on one of the lure’s hooks.  I quickly but carefully positioned the net under the fish, and began lowering it into the net.  The tail of the fish touched the end of the net, the fish looked at me (I swear it did!), seemed to chuckle in a fishy sort of way (I swear it did that, too!), flicked its tail once, easily knocking the net out of my hand, and spit the hook out of its mouth (once again, I swear it did).  It looked over its shoulder at me as it was falling into the water, and then laughed as it hit the water and swam away.  I’m sure it did all of those things!

It was then I began to realize, in my bitter disappointment at losing the first muskie I’d ever hooked, my several mistakes.  First, keep your net close at hand.  Second, the strongest part of the fish is its tail, which is why you put it head first into the net so it can’t flip itself out.  Finally, when a muskie hits a lure, you are supposed to pull hard on the line in order to set the hook firmly in the fish’s mouth; I hadn’t wanted to do that for fear that I’d lose the fish.  Hmmm, imagine!  However, when all was said and done, I felt like a real fisherman… because I, too, had joined the ranks of the people down through the millennia who could tell a story about “the one that got away!”

I have realized over the years that I’m not really a fisherman.  This past fall when we were in New York for Michael and Lauren’s wedding, Michael’s bachelor party was at a small lake on private land.  We fished, and then cooked out and told stories.  The only thing we caught were little bluegill, and it was fun to catch them… but, to be honest, they weren’t that good to eat, and the real fun for me was not the fishing, but rather being with all of the other men who were there and who were swapping stories.  Maybe it’s just that I’m not a patient enough person to sit in a boat or stand on a dock in all kinds of weather to fish.  And any real fisherperson will tell you that you have to sit in a boat or stand on a dock most often for a long time, because that’s what you do “When the Fish Aren’t Biting.”

Our Gospel lesson this morning is St. Luke’s remembrance of the calling by Jesus of his first followers.  It was early in Jesus’ ministry.  He already had had mixed response to the Good News he was proclaiming.  In his hometown, he’d been run out of the synagogue for his brash claims of being the fulfillment of the ancient messianic prophecies of Isaiah.  He had brought relief to a man who had been possessed, and brought healing to Simon’s mother-in-law.  Jesus then went out into the wilderness, but crowds were already beginning to follow him.  They apparently were hungry for what it was he had to say and teach and do.  Jesus preached to the crowd that had gathered around him that day, and the people responded so favorably that they wanted Jesus to stay with them for a long time.  However, he left, saying he had other people to go to who also needed to hear the Good News of God’s saving, redeeming, justice-demanding love.

He went to a lakeside, and once again people were crowding in around him, longing to be fed and nurtured by his words and actions.  In order to be better heard, he got into a boat, and asked the boat’s owner, Simon, to row out just a bit so folks could hear him better.  After he finished his preaching and teaching, Jesus sat down, and asked Peter to go out into deeper water and lower their nets to catch some fish.  Peter, who apparently had been out working all night, said to Jesus, probably with not a little exasperation, “Master, we have worked all night long, but have caught nothing.  Yet,” he continued, “if you say so, I will let down the nets.”  He’d already seen his wife’s mother healed.  He had already watched the way in which Jesus could touch people’s hearts and minds with his words and actions.  And so, at the very least, he probably thought, “What have I got to lose?”  So Peter rowed out into deeper water, let down his nets, and, to his surprise and delight and amazement, “they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.”  Peter signaled his business partners, James and John, to come over with their boat to help, but the catch was so great that both boats almost sank trying to bring the fish back to shore!  Luke wanted to make sure that we understood the abundance that resulted from following Jesus’ ways and words.  When he had seen what was happening, Peter, in humbled awe, fell at Jesus’ feet and acknowledged him as Lord.  Jesus then invited Peter and the others to follow, and, Luke tells us, “they left everything and followed him.”

Now, as with any analogy, one can take the analogy of Jesus calling us to be fishers of people to an extreme.  I remember once hearing someone talk about developing a style of evangelism that was more like Jesus’ style.  “After all,” this minister said, “Jesus was a fisher of people, not a hunter!  He didn’t track people down, shoot them, skin them, tie them on the top of a pickup, and drive them back to town, gutted for all to see!”  While that is true, if you take the analogy of fishing too far, it doesn’t appear to me to have any more integrity than that of hunting.  It has more finesse, to be sure, but I don’t like the image of laying some sort of spiritual or emotional “bait” out for unsuspecting people to see and nibble at until we can yank the line, set the hook, and reel them in!  So we can’t take this, or any, analogy very far before it quickly breaks down.

However, I think there is still a lesson to learn from this story this morning.  There are times in our lives, and in the life of the Church, when we keep working at things, and working, and working, and nothing seems to have any positive, lasting impact and effect.  Especially in our society, people still think that if we just could figure out the right gimmick to employ, people would flood back to church, filling both our membership rolls and our coffers!  But it feels as if we’re in the same spot those first proto-disciples of Jesus were in in our Gospel lesson this morning.  We keep working, but we’re not sure what to do “When the Fish Aren’t Biting.”  So we feel stuck at best, disheartened at worst.  But what the disciples were willing to do in their situation was to follow Jesus’ words and try something new, something different.  Had they fished from the other side of their boats already?  It’s likely they had.  But Jesus was telling them that what they were doing clearly wasn’t working, and it was time to try something else.

Jesus comes to us in our day, reminds us of God’s claim and call on our lives – just as was on the life of the prophet Isaiah, just as was on the lives of those first followers of Jesus, just as was placed on our own lives in the symbol of our baptism.  Jesus reminds us that there is still work that needs to be done, love that needs to be shared, Good News that needs to be proclaimed, justice that needs to be called for, peace that needs to be sought after.  And, I believe, Jesus tells us that, if what we’re currently doing isn’t working, if we keep trying things “When the Fish Aren’t Biting,” then we need to try some new things.

The sabbatical work I’ll be doing during the month of August and a couple of weeks on either side of that will be an exploration of what some possible “new things” might be for us to try.  The work of our new Long-Range Planning Committee, which meets tomorrow night for the first time, will include looking at what new things we might need to begin doing “When the Fish Aren’t Biting.”

That encounter with Jesus on the lake forever changed the lives of those first disciples.  They not only tried a new thing while fishing in their boats, but, once they got to shore, they completely left behind what they had been doing, and they began to live life in a whole new way.  What new ways and new things might Christ be calling us to do… as a congregation, but also in the ways in which we structure our personal, family, and work priorities?  If I’d been aware of some new ways of fishing those years ago, I would have landed that muskie.  But I learned from what didn’t work.  I wonder what new things we’ll be learning in the next months and years as a community of faith, as a people of God in our society, as the lights to the world that we are called to be?  I don’t know… but I’m excited to find out!  AMEN!