Sermon for February 9, 2025

 February 9, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott

Luke 5:  1-11

In today’s readings, we get not one, but two call stories, Simon Peter’s and Isaiah’s.  They are similar in that the call in both stories is clear:  the call itself is clear, even if the mission isn’t clear.  Catching people?  What exactly does Jesus mean by that?  After two thousand years of hearing this call story, we might think we know.

I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about what it means to hear this kind of call.  During my formative years in Lutheran (ELCA) churches in the U.S. southeast, we were asked if we felt we had a calling, and if so, we would find ourselves on a track to either missionary work or seminary.  It was mostly males who heard this call.  It’s not really surprising—after all, in Sunday School and Confirmation classes, all of the call stories we heard featured males as the primary character:  Abraham, Moses, Jonah, Peter, and Paul.  And historically, people who didn’t look like Peter and Paul were not allowed to follow a call into ministry.

That idea of call has almost always been the same:  drop everything, follow Jesus, abandon your life and families.  Go and make disciples.  It was never stay and make disciples.  It was always go.  The call would be worth the sacrifice.  And in my formative years, we were always told of how extreme the sacrifice might be, particularly if we wanted to do missionary work.

Over the past 20 years, I have frequently thought of the nature of call and sacrifice as I researched seminaries.  Until very recently, ELCA  seminaries also assumed that people who wanted to be ordained would be able to uproot themselves and uproot or leave their families and go to a campus that was likely very far away.  It is no wonder that the ELCA has a shortage of pastors.

If you’ve been attending church regularly, you’ve probably heard sermons where pastors reminded you that you, too, are called to go fish for people, to go and make disciples.  It’s important to know that the writer of the Gospel of Luke has a different reason for giving us this story of Peter’s conversion in this way.  The Gospel of Luke is a story continued in Acts, and when we read the two books together, parts of the Gospel are heard differently.  The story of the conversion of Peter is offered to help justify Peter’s later leadership position.  One Gospel commentator points out that Luke sees the twelve disciples as having a different mission than the mission of ordinary people, like you and me who are more likely to be called to stay and build faith communities that bear a different kind of fruit than missionaries who go two by two.  Yet many sermons that I’ve heard lift up Simon Peter as a model for us all, that we should go to every nation and make disciples.

That missionary model of going to foreign nations to make disciples is problematic for many reasons.  And frankly, these days, it would be hard to find a foreign nation that hasn’t heard of Jesus.  There’s no reason to travel to a foreign nation on the off chance of finding someone who hasn’t already heard of Jesus.  In fact, many developing nations see the U.S. as a mission field full of people who need to hear the good news of God’s saving grace.

Yet every year we get this call story of Peter, and frankly, I wish we had a broader view of call stories.  You may have picked up on that, as you have listened to my sermons over the past 15 months—the Advent story of Mary and the angel Gabriel can be seen as a call story, as can the Advent story of Elizabeth’s late-life pregnancy, as can Joseph deciding not to divorce Mary.  I could go on and on, but you get the idea.  There are many ways to be called, and many missions to which we can be called.  

There is another problem with getting the exact same call story every year:  it’s easy to think we know everything there is to know about it.  As I returned to this Sunday’s gospel, I forced myself to look at it more deeply.  I read the chapters around this Gospel, and I was struck by how Simon has had a chance to get to know Jesus.  The Gospel of Luke chapter 4 is where Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, one of his first miracles.  In Mark and Matthew, the appearance of Jesus and the conversion of Simon is much more sudden.  Jesus appears and says, “Follow me,” and that’s what Simon does.  Here the conversion is more gradual.

When I think about call stories, I’ve been frustrated by the maleness of them, and I’ve also been irked by the youngness of those called.  It’s easy to abandon everything and follow Jesus if you’re working in a dead-end fishing job.  But Simon Peter in Luke’s Gospel is more established.  He has a mother-in-law which says he has or had a wife.    The men have been fishing all night and caught nothing.  They are washing their nets—the equipment needs tending, even if the work has amounted to nothing. I think about this scene and my own work life as a teacher.   I have tried to think about a modern equivalent:  maybe the writing and rewriting of reports that the worker suspects will never be read or the new textbooks that require the rewriting of syllabi and lesson plans, even though the new textbook doesn’t say much that is new.  Maybe the men in today’s Gospel are more like us than they seem at first:  ordinary people doing ordinary, necessary work even when they can’t believe it’s necessary or important.

Jesus tells them to go to try fishing again, to put their nets in deep water.  In Biblical language, the deep water is a place of chaos, but also a place of creation—the language here has links to the creation story in Genesis where God comes into the chaos and forms creation.

We have been living through a year that feels chaotic so far.  We have a flu season that instead of winding down as expected is headed to a new peak—and the statistics about bird flu are alarming.  We are a small congregation, but this year, we’ve experienced more death of those closest to our community; this year, it may seem more like the forces of death are winning over God’s resurrection promise.  and thus, might feel more menacing.  If you’re paying attention to national or international news, the world feels even more chaotic than in years past.

A week where Mike Flynn and others accuse groups like Lutheran Social Services of laundering money for criminal groups—well, these are strange times we’re living in.  And I have worked for and with Lutheran Social Services for decades, and I can assure you that they are not laundering money, unless by laundering money one means that the group is taking money from those of us who donate it and making sure that the hungry and the homeless and the refugees have resources.  They do good work, as does Lutheran World Relief, ELCA World Hunger, and any number of other religious organizations.  We’ve had decades of the U.S. government saying that religious groups should take care of the poor and dispossessed, a thousand points of light doing care work more effectively, more compassionately than government can.  Religious groups have done just that.  And now, we have people in the government criticizing religious groups for doing that work.  We live in strange times.

Today’s Gospel speaks to our strange times.  In fact, we can see this call story as one that speaks to our strange times.  If we see the deep waters as representing chaos, it’s clear that God does not leave us to drown.  We are to cast down our nets and try again, even when we’re convinced that it’s a fool’s errand, that we’ve worked and worked and worked and there are no fish to be caught.

God appears to tell us to try again.  In our lives of chaos, try again.  Even if we’re older and tired, try again.  We may be convinced that God can no longer make all things new, that there is only chaos and no creation left in the deep waters.  Today’s call story reminds us of all the times that God has answered by giving so much fish that the nets threaten to break, that we have to call in our fishing partners to help us so that the overflowing abundance doesn’t break the boat.

In our current climate full of the cacophony of chaos, the deep water of our time in history, Jesus calls us to a different life and calls us to help others to find a different life.  Listen to the call of Jesus.  Look for ways to live out the Gospel.  Let us reinforce our nets and plunge them into the deep water.  Let us pray for more abundance than we could have imagined.  Rather than drown in the depths of fear and despair, let us reinforce our nets, preparing for the abundance that God calls us to be ready to receive.