Back to Basics: The Body

In the 12^th century, in the region that is now Belgium and northern France, something extraordinary was happening among the women of the region. Laywomen were forming new communities that sought to live a Jesus lifestyle. They continued to do simple work, but they also held meetings together, followed common spiritual exercises and rejected the paths that would have been chosen for them had they remained in the world they had come from.

We don’t often think about women religious leaders of the 12^th century, but there were some charismatic leaders who began to attract followers into big movements. Jacques de Vitry was unique in that he was a man who became a disciple of these women whom he felt had the potential to reform the Church of his day. He left his position at the University of Paris to go and write the life of Marie of Oignie.[i]

There are wild and wonderful tales to tell about Marie of Oignie and about other women of the time. Ask me sometime to tell you about Christina the Amazing. But one thing that is disturbing about these women is how they treated their bodies. Jacques writes of Marie that “when her sainted little body was washed after death, it was found to be so frail and shriveled from illness and fasting that her spine touched her belly and the bones in her back seemed to be lying under her stomach as if under a thin linen cloth.”[ii] Something went horribly wrong with the Christian theology of the body here if this was seen as good!

We have come a long way in our understanding of the relationship between body and soul since the Middle Ages. Or have we? Lauren Winner, in the book Mudhouse Sabbath, which we are reading in some of our small groups during Lent, talks about going into a boutique to try on dresses and the self-loathing she felt when the store didn’t carry her size because it was the sort of store that did not carry large sizes. She burst into tears as she left, saying to her friend, “I’ll never be thin again.”

What her friend helped her realize, though, was that the store had just fed into her anxieties about what a healthy body looks like. Medieval mystics and Kate Moss-size models might get into those dresses, but they are not our best models for what healthy looks like. Winner goes on to say:

“The shopping expedition was good proof that, though I believe God has something to say about bodies, I generally tune God out and listen to Cosmopolitan instead. I’m pretty sure, if God called me to chat about my body would say things like, ‘I like your body. I created your body and if you read the first chapter of Genesis lately, you might recall that I called Creation good.’ Still, when I’m staring in the dress-shop mirror, I generally wish my body – or at least a few pounds of it – would vanish.”[iii]

Men have a different relationship to their bodies. We can be just as concerned about appearance, but most of us have been socialized to think about our bodies like pick-up trucks. And not just little pint-size pick-ups that you just use to help your neighbor take a few things to the landfill – I’m talking tough, working trucks that they show on TV going through mud holes and having tons of bricks dropped in the back of them. That’s us. Our bodies are made to be Ford tough – like a rock. Most of the time we ignore them and we downplay anything that damages them. Lose an arm? We’re like the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “It’s just a flesh wound.” And that’s why it’s such a huge transition for men when our bodies really do start to break down and we have to learn to live with limitations.

The great preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor says:

“I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body…Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.”[iv]

Taylor says she scandalizes people sometimes when she says this. Maybe that sounded scandalous to you – like maybe confronting our naked bodies is not spiritual enough. But maybe we’re not spiritual enough because we’re not confronting our bodies. We’re neglecting the very thing that Paul tells us is the temple of the Holy Spirit. “You were bought with a price,” Paul tells us. “So glorify God in your body.”

All of my highest and holiest moments have come though this body. I imagine that most of yours have come through your body, too. I remember getting off the bus on a warm afternoon and running to get my bike and riding at top speed up hills and down. The feel of the sun and the wind and the smell of the air. It would be several miles before I realized I was even tired. It was like flying.

The awkwardness and yet thrill of dancing with a girl at those ballroom dance classes my mom made me take. The feel of her hand in mine and the feel of the strong muscles in her back.

The good exhaustion after a game of half-court basketball on the driveway of someone’s house. We played to a hundred so the game could go on for hours. Then we’d just collapse and it felt great.

The thrill of a kiss. The warmth of a hug. The smell of the church and the scratchy burlap of Christmas pageant costumes. Kneeling at the altar to receive bread and juice.

The messy wonder of birth, watching Suzanne’s body do this amazing thing, and then holding Joel and then Rachel in my arms. The mundane messiness of feeding and changing and rocking and hoisting a child on my shoulders.

Feeling the holy weight of hands upon me at my ordination as I knelt at an altar rail. Knowing the bishop was just a man, but knowing as well that something happened in that moment – some claim had been made on me that I would only come to understand over many years.

Standing at the bedside of my grandmother following her stroke and holding her hand. Sharing silence because she couldn’t speak, but knowing that those hands had shaped me in ways that spoke of God’s love more powerfully than any words she might have said. Watching her as she took her last breaths and went peacefully on.

Clogging. Hiking to the top of Ben Lui in Scotland and throwing up. It couldn’t get more physical than that. Singing in the choir. Kayaking through the marsh cathedrals of the seaside. And yes, that thing you’re thinking of…all of these high, holy moments are in my memory because of this body.

We are sometimes guilty as Christians of believing what the Gnostics did. Gnosticism was one of the earliest heresies in the Church and it had many forms, but at its heart it was the belief that the only part of us that God is really concerned with is our immaterial souls. The body, they felt, was a hindrance – maybe even evil.

After all, the pleasures of the body can lead us into trouble. We follow those pleasures into all sorts of trouble. We sleep with people we shouldn’t sleep with. We take substances – like drugs or deep-fried Twinkies – that we shouldn’t take. We drink to excess. We smoke. We eat too much. And it gets us into trouble. So the body must be evil, right?

The Christian Gnostics believed that Jesus came to liberate our eternal soul – the inner light – from its fleshly cage. They looked to passages like the one where Jesus says not to fear those who can kill the body but only the one who can cast your soul into hell [Luke 12:4-5] and they saw there a justification for their beliefs. They also saw how Paul often talked about the struggle between the spirit and the flesh.

Christianity rejected Gnosticism, though, because it fundamentally ignored the fact that God has loved and used bodies since the beginning of beginning. Men and women were created in the image of God and that means more than just we have a soul that is in God’s image and, O, yes, we also have this body. No, the body bears some of that image, too.

Fundamentally, Christianity rejected Gnosticism because of that great Christian word we use far too little – incarnation. God became human to show us that matter matters. God came to save us in this world, in this flesh by becoming a fully human human being. And Jesus, who was fully human and fully divine, enjoyed this world. Enjoyed being embodied. He went to wedding feasts. He ate at the table with friends, sinners and Pharisees. He healed hurt and broken bodies – like the bent-over woman in the gospel story for the day. He wept at the death of friends and he washed the feet of his disciples. Jesus loved the bodies of this world and who he is for us is inseparable from the body through which we knew him. It is through Jesus’ body on the cross that the way to salvation was opened for all people.

This is why we say, when we say the Apostle’s Creed, that we believe in “the communion of saints, the resurrection of the…body.” Because even when these worn-out bodies of ours have drawn their last breath, God promises us an embodied future. What those resurrection bodies will be like, we don’t know, but we don’t lose the body.

So what’s a body to do with the bodies we have? It’s obvious that God loves all kinds of bodies. Big bodies, small bodies, tall bodies, short bodies, disabled bodies, suffering bodies – they are all alike made by God so we should love what we’ve got. Bodies can do amazing things. They are incredibly resilient. I look at some pieces of machinery or appliances that were made in 1963 – same year I was made – and I think – “Man, I’m in a lot better shape than that!” Think of how amazing that is that these bodies can endure so much and still keep going.

Yes, love what we’ve got and realize that the world often gives us unrealistic images for what our bodies should look like. But then take care of what we’ve got. It has only been in the last five years that I have started to atone for all the years of Tex-Mex food that I ate in Texas. That wasn’t the only culprit, but it was a major contributor to my getting up to almost 275 pounds a few years ago. It has been a slow process, but I have been trying to do better by what God gave me. I will say that it is a major benefit to have someone to be accountable to in doing this. For the last eight months you’ve heard me mention several times that I have been working with a trainer – Matthew Henry – and it makes a huge difference. Care for your body is not a nice option for Christians – it is a spiritual practice like prayer – a training for offering your body to the glory of God.

What, then, do we do when our bodies don’t work like they used to? What do we do when cancer strikes or we lose abilities that we used to have? Ironically, it may be in those times that we are most aware of our bodies. Instead of taking our bodies for granted, when we are ill or sore or wounded we know that we are really more dependent than we think. And ultimately it is our limitations that bring us to others who must do for us what we can no longer do for ourselves. We hate this. We hate to be dependent on others – to feel that we are weak or needy. But it is in these times that we may discover the necessity of the other body that I want to end with – the body of Christ.

The poet Scott Cairns, in a book titled The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, talks about friends of his who have left church because, they say, they are still spiritual, just not religious. In its own way, this is a kind of Gnosticism, too. Cairns says:

“I comprehend the unfortunate distinction being made by their parsing of terms and that distinction continues to strike me as the result of an insidious and ongoing failure – theirs, ours and mine…These beloved friends must find their way home. They must find a way to reconnect their faith to their communities and their communities to their faith. They must find a way to reconnect, as it were, the spirit with the body. Satan, our tradition tells us, looks for any vessel sailing without a fleet, and it seems to me that an individualized, isolated ‘spirituality’ is almost by definition satanic.”[v]

Who are we? Are we individuals set out on our own to navigate the world under our own strength and power? That’s surely a recipe for disaster. Aren’t we a body – the body of Christ? And it is in this body, sharing frequently of the body and blood in bread and cup, that we learn the things that will take us to the kingdom – body and soul. Thanks be to God.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 [NRSV]

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

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[i] Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 173. Referred to hereafter as Petroff.

[ii] Jacques de Vitry, “The Life of Marie d’Oignies,” in Petroff, p. 183.

[iii] Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003], pp. 66-67.

[iv] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in This World: A Geography of Faith, [HarperCollins ebook, 2009] location 621-630.

[v] Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009], p. 77.

Since You're Awake

picture - Before the plunge at the February Freeze - Feb. 13, 2010 - Cape Charles Beach

Since it is Valentine’s Day, I have been thinking about romantic comedies. It seems like there are only two types of movies in the theaters these days – big budget action thrillers featuring comic book heroes or blue cat people and romantic comedies. We love them. Or at least a lot of us seem to – many of them female, if I can make a broad generalization.

One of the oldest tropes in romantic movies is the discovery that your soulmate is the person who has been there next to you all along. You think you’re searching for the woman or guy of your dreams and all of it sudden it dawns on that she or he has been their waiting for you to discover it. The scales fall from your eyes, there’s a big, sloppy kiss, cue the music to swell and it’s a wrap.

I think about a movie like Roxanne, which is now over twenty years old but which is based on a much older story – the tale of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the movie version Steve Martin plays a fire chief named C.D. ‘Charlie’ Bales who is infatuated with a beautiful astronomer named Roxanne, played by Darryl Hannah. What keeps him from expressing his love for Roxanne directly is his nose, which is huge, and which he can’t get surgically altered because of an allergy to anesthetic.

Roxanne is taken with Chris – a dim-witted fireman who works with Charlie. Chris is extremely nervous around women – he has a bad habit of throwing up when he’s around them – so he asks Charlie to write him love letters he can give to Roxanne. Charlie does – writing three letters a day – even though he knows Roxanne will believe that Chris has written them.

You know how this story has to end, right? Eventually it all comes out that Charlie has written the letters. Roxanne, though initially mad at the deception, sees something in Charlie that she had never seen before and is awakened to the possibility of love and romance. She tells Charlie:

“You know, I've been thinking about what attracted me to Chris. It wasn't the way he looked. Well, that's not true, at first it was the way he looked. But it was how he made me feel. He made me feel romantic, intelligent, feminine. But it wasn't him doing that, was it? It was you. You and your nose, Charlie. You have a big nose! You have a beautiful, great big, flesh-and-bone nose! I love your nose! I love your nose, Charlie. I love you, Charlie.”[i]

This is where you go, “Awww.”

Awakening to something that has always been there but you have never quite seen. It’s a big part of our human experience. A big part of the Christian experience, because when you think about it, entering into a relationship with Jesus can do the same thing for you – it can help you to see the wonder and magic of the world in ways you never could before. Suddenly life is filled with the glory of God.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to talk about the disciples and to ask the questions: Why is it so hard for us to stay awake? And when are we going to learn that being a Christian is an unnatural act? Are you interested in coming along with me to discover answers to these and more of life’s persistent questions? Come on and join me in the broken world of Jesus’ disciples.

We have talked before about the struggles Jesus’ disciples went through. Their failure to understand or comprehend what Jesus is talking about is well-documented throughout the gospels. Last year we followed the gospel of Mark and saw that that was one of his consistent themes and this year we are looking at it in the gospel of Luke.

In Luke…our gospel for today…we have plenty of instances where the disciples don’t get it.. Jesus tells them to humble themselves and be servants…they argue about which of them is the greatest. Jesus tells a parable about seeds and a sower…they don’t get it. Jesus tells them he must suffer and be rejected and die and three days later be raised from the dead…and they really don’t get it.

By the middle of Luke’s gospel, the disciples were getting pretty good at following Jesus physically. He even starts to entrust them with missions of their own to heal and to release people kept captive by dark powers. But they still can’t understand what Jesus has come to do. They have a story in their minds about how the world ought to work and in their story the Promised Liberator will come and claim power, use power, and reveal power. The disciples will rise up as agents of victory. They just don’t realize that their story doesn’t work. It can’t handle brokenness. It can’t handle the truth.

So after telling the disciples exactly what’s going to happen to him in Jerusalem…after telling them that some of those listening will not taste death before seeing the Reign of God revealed…8 days after this…he took three likely candidates to “get it”…Peter, James and John…up a mountain to pray. You can feel a sense of expectation in the air, can’t you? In the Bible, when you go up on a mountain something special is going to happen…something life changing. Bushes may burn and not be consumed…Stone tablets etched with commandments will be given out…Prophets will compete for God’s attention…Promised lands will be revealed…temptations will come…God will speak in a cloud with thunder or in a still, small voice. When you go up on a mountain, something’s going to happen, and I know you feel the tension and the expectation, don’t you?

Sure enough…something amazing happens. Jesus is praying and the appearance of his face starts to change…his clothes flash with the brilliance of lightning…Moses and Elijah, who know a thing or two about mountaintop experiences, appear to talk with Jesus about what is about to happen in Jerusalem. It’s an amazing event…a transfiguration other gospels call it. And what are the disciples doing…Peter, James and John…who are given front-row seats for the show…whom Jesus hand-picked for this revelation…what are they doing?

They’re falling asleep. Well, you know, it’s hard hiking to the top of a mountain. They’d been busy preaching and healing down below. They had the crowds to deal with, the travel arrangements to make, the book promotion tour to plan. They were busy guys and Luke says they were just pretty sleepy and were barely able to keep their eyes open for all of this.

But, NO, you know there are no excuses! These disciples were not sleepy for any of those reasons. They’re sleepy because that’s how they are throughout the whole gospel. They aren’t awake enough to see the fish Jesus calls them to catch. They aren’t awake enough to understand the parables Jesus is telling them. They aren’t awake enough to comprehend Jesus’ predictions of his imminent death or the conversation about his ‘departure’ that he is having with Moses and Elijah. When the end comes and Jesus takes them up on another mountain to pray before his arrest, is it any surprise that these same disciples fall asleep again? They just can’t grasp it.

What’s it going to take for them to get it? A voice from heaven saying, “Listen to Jesus”? Well, that’s exactly what they get. Peter makes a silly suggestion, (because he doesn’t know what to say), that they have a campout with Moses and Elijah and just as he’s beginning to talk a cloud comes and overshadows them. The disciples are awake now. In fact, they’re terrified. And a voice which can only be God’s voice says, “This is the Chosen One; listen to him.” The cloud leaves. Jesus is standing there alone.

The disciples are speechless. In fact they don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. They still don’t “get it”. They’ve still got to walk to Jerusalem. They’ve still got to go to the Garden. They’ve still got to fall asleep, and betray him, and deny him, and abandon him. They’ve still got to disbelieve the outrageous reports of the women who claim the tomb is empty. They’re still waiting for him to die and waiting to live. But maybe now they’re beginning to see that something they didn’t expect is happening. Maybe they are seeing in Jesus something they hadn’t seen before. The new story isn’t yet clear, but the old story is beginning to fall apart.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the mountain, it’s starting to unravel for the other disciples, too. A man who has an only child has come to the disciples to get them to cast out the spirit that seizes the child and convulses him. The man is grieved because his son is hurting. In fact, he says, “My son is broken by this spirit.” But the disciples, who had so recently been healing up and down the land, are powerless here. They can’t handle brokenness. They can’t restore a son to his father. Only Jesus can handle the brokenness. Only Jesus can reconcile the child to his parent. Only Jesus knows the frustration of having so short a time to reveal so much. Only Jesus sees in this healing a foreshadowing of great things yet to come, of his own resurrection. But it has its effect. The disciples, and everyone else, are astounded, Luke says, “at the greatness of God.” The old story is starting to unravel.

It’s really not fair to pick on the disciples for being sleepy, dopey, and all the rest of the seven dwarves, because they could be stand-ins for us. They ARE stand-ins for us. It’s not just the disciples who get too comfortable with their own expectations…WE get too comfortable. I get too comfortable.

Do you ever think it’s comfortable to be a Christians? If you grew up in the Church you could start to think that it’s a natural thing to be a Christian. Because so much of our culture is built around the assumption that most Americans are Christian, it’s not that difficult to be Christian. Though your friends may shake their heads in wonder at you, most of them are not going to scorn you because you go to church on Sunday or a Bible Study on Wednesday night.

There might even be some strokes in going to Church. When people see you in the congregation on Sunday morning the cockles of their hearts are warmed and they will tell you how much your being there means to them. And the fact that I’m still asked to write recommendations for folks going on to jobs or grad school tells me that it’s still a positive thing for religious professionals to weigh in on these signs of cultural advancement.

I know it doesn’t always SEEM easy to be Christian, and it’s not always, but the fact is that Christians are still pretty acceptable figures in the United States and that’s dangerous because it is not natural to be a Christian. Christians are made not born. They trace their transformation to baptismal waters that represent death to old ways and rebirth to new ones. Christians are important to the world, not because they are good citizens of the nation, strong pillars of the community, or all-around nice people. Christians are important because they know that Jesus changes everything.

Christians aren’t trying to make the world more humane, they’re trying to tell the truth about it…that it’s not humane, but it’s still God’s. Christians aren’t trying to look good…they’re trying out what it means to BE good and they discover that by living on the edge every day. Christians don’t ignore the brokenness of the world…they celebrate the good news with broken bread to remember a broken body that means broken people like you and me can be made whole. And we put ourselves in places where we would not be if we did not believe that the words we say are trustworthy and true.

Another season of the Church year ends this week. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and we begin the 40-day journey of Lent. It’s good to stop on this mountaintop before we take that journey. It’s good to be reminded of how strange and unnatural this Christian thing is. Because if we get too comfortable with what we’re doing, we might just start building tents and forget that we don’t live on the mountain. We live down below where God is still at work, turning the world upside down and inviting us to join in. But that may seem hard because, you see, to join in this work, we have to be awake and see the world through the eyes of love. God’s love for every living thing. Thanks be to God.

Luke 9:28-43

Now about eight days after these saying, Jesus took Peter and John and James with him and went up on the mountain to pray. He was in the midst of prayer when the appearance of his face changed and his clothes flashed with the whiteness of lightning. And, look, two men were talking with him--Moses and Elijah. These, who appeared in glory, were speaking about his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Now Peter and those with him were weighed down with sleep, but having kept awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were leaving from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Teacher, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents -- one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,” not knowing what he said.

While he was saying this, a cloud came and covered them and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. A voice came from the cloud saying, “This is my Son, the chosen one; listen to him!” When the voice began, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one anything about what they had seen.

On the next day, having come down from the mountain, a great crowd surrounded him. Look, a man from the crowd shouted, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, because he is my only child. Look, a spirit takes him and all at once he cries out and it convulses him so that he foams and it scarcely leaves him--it breaks him. I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they weren’t able to.”

Jesus answered, “O you faithless and perverse generation, how much longer will I be with you to put up with you? Bring your son here.”

While they were bringing him, the demon threw him to the ground and convulsed him. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit and healed the boy and restored him to his father. And everyone was astounded at the greatness of God.

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[i] The Internet Movie Database, Memorable Quotes from Roxanne (1987), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093886/quotes.

Put Down the Nets and Step Away from the Boat

Tonight’s message is very simple. The thing I want to say is this: “You can’t grab hold of Jesus if you don’t have empty hands.” Which sounds like a very old-fashioned preacher thing to say. You can’t grab hold of Jesus if you don’t have empty hands. Let’s see if we can make some sense of that.

Last year I was invited down to the high school to be a part of a career fair. There were folks there from Purdue and NASA and the military – all there to talk about what they do and what sorts of things they look for in new recruits. These job fairs are a strange combination of exciting and overwhelming. I remember them from my campus ministry days, too, and I remember the way students came away from them with very mixed feelings.

Why is it that preparing for a career can be so exciting but actually getting one can sometimes seem so disappointing? In the abstract jobs can be places where dreams are fulfilled and where aspirations can be lived out. Often it’s the vision that moves us into careers. It’s not just that our careers will make us money…they are supposed to allow us to put our talents to work, contribute to the community, transform the way we work with one another, change the way we think, change the world. But moving from the thrill of those things to the realities of training, conforming, and paying the bills is a little less enticing.

You go to job fairs and what’s the first thing you ask yourself: Is this me? Could this be me giving my life to public interest work? Could this be me joining an accounting firm? Could this be me working for a Fortune 500 company? Could this be me joining the Navy? The Peace Corps? Could this be me doing full-time ministry in the Church? Is this me? That’s the question…isn’t it?

And a surprisingly large percentage of the time, the first response is…No…this is definitely NOT me. What I see in this new job, this new career, is something I don’t understand and am not sure I want to follow. What I see is an organization that doesn’t know me…that doesn’t really know what I can do. What I see is a future I’m not sure I want. I don’t think this is me. And so we rarely leap at the first opportunity that presents itself.

That’s what makes Jesus’ disciples so frustrating. Just who did they think they were dropping their nets, leaving their boats, and following Jesus at the first word of invitation? What kind of model is that? There is no deliberation. No questioning. No figuring out the cost. No reckoning on what this is going to do their Social Security earnings and their 401(k) plans. We know that at least Simon Peter was married. Don’t you know he heard about it when he finally went home?

What did they think they were doing? They were being downright irresponsible, dropping everything to follow a traveling teacher who could do a nifty trick with a boatful of fish. Didn’t they know they were setting a bad example for the rest of us? I mean, how are we going to say, “No, I can’t follow you like that, Jesus,” when they pick up and leave their boats at the first sign that the fishing in Galilee was really picking up? It’s something to think about when you’re wandering around the job fair. What does it take to follow a path you’ve never seen before?

It’s an interesting story that Luke tells us in the gospel reading. Jesus has begun to teach and heal around the Sea of Galilee and the word has started to spread. Folks are starting to claim some pretty amazing stuff for this young man. Some say he even preaches with the authority of one who knows the very word of God.

Then one day he shows up by the lake where several fishermen have pulled up on the shore to wash out their nets after a very unsuccessful night of fishing. A crowd is following him. They’re pressing in on him. They can’t get close enough. So Jesus gets into one of the two boats there and asks one of the fishermen, Simon, by name (though you might know him better by his later name of Peter)…he asks Simon to put out from the shore just a little bit so that he can have some room to reach. Simon obliges and Jesus sits down in the teaching position and teaches the crowds.

Some time later the crowds start to disperse and Jesus decides to provide a miracle for the fishing fleet. As miracles go, it’s not one of the most spectacular….Jesus just tells Simon where to go to find the fish. Now this was in the days before bass trackers and fish radar, so folks who made their living on the sea had to rely on their knowledge of the shoals below, the habits of the fish, and just plain luck. So when Jesus points them to fish after a night of fishing futility, well, that’s impressive, but it hardly ranks as the sort of thing that would cause a person to leave behind everything and follow.

What is impressive about the catch is the quantity of fish. This story tells us about straining nets and sinking boats all because of the great load of fish…more than any of them had ever seen in their lives. But would it really have been enough for you to follow…enough to make you send word back to the folks at home that you wouldn’t be home for dinner…ever?

Of course, I have a theory. I think this miracle took all the fun out of being a fisher. After this, could any of them ever told another story about “the one that got away”? No, it was over for them as soon as there was a catch in which none of them got away. The old story was broken. The old cycle of fishing the lake, with good days and bad, and always wondering what more could have happened, was not the most meaningful story in their lives anymore. A new story had begun. So when Jesus says, “From now on you will fish for people,” it was a new day beginning. The old way was done.

What I don’t think is that the disciples need excuses from us to justify this wild and dangerous thing that they do. “Maybe,” some interpreters say, “Maybe there was something in Jesus’ teachings from the boat that caused them to recognize that Jesus was different. Maybe they had heard stories about his healings and were impressed by his credentials. Maybe Jesus had an aura around him like in the old painting of Jesus that hangs in so many old Sunday School classrooms. Maybe he had a glow.”

But if that were so, why didn’t everybody pick up and follow? What made the disciples different? The rich young ruler came to Jesus to follow him but couldn’t bring himself to leave his riches behind in the hands of the poor. Some people, maybe even most people, were able to resist the temptation to drop everything and follow this man.

So no, I don’t think we need to give the disciples an excuse. I think what made them follow was not anything outside of them, but something inside of them. I think these disciples were desperate people. When Jesus happened upon them in the midst of their everyday lives they saw an answer to a deep, gnawing need that they couldn’t hide from themselves any longer. Jesus called and they followed--not because they were foolish and irresponsible--but because they honestly could not see any other way of living except in the footsteps of Jesus. Like Roger Miller wrote and Janis Joplin sang in “Me and Bobby McGhee,” “Nothing’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and these disciples had nothing left to lose.

So they let the nets fall to the ground. They didn’t go back to the village to tell the best fish story they ever had to tell. They even left the fish for somebody else to clean. And then they had the empty hands they needed to grab onto Jesus. That’s what this sermon is about in case you forgot. Empty hands for grabbing on to the one who brings new life.

But it doesn’t make it any easier to follow these disciples. They can tell us what they dropped, but it doesn’t help me to discover what I’m holding in my hands. Where is that place of quiet desperation in me that waits for the call of a fishing master? Where is the clear, compelling path that reveals itself as my path? Who am I and what is it that I have to give, that I have to give, that I need to give?

What is it that you’re holding onto? What is it that blocks your line of sight, that obscures your vision, that keeps you from listening to that still, small voice within or that loud, booming voice without that tells you to follow? Deep inside, we’re all desperate people, and that’s O.K. Desperation suits us. Or maybe it’s desire. Desire for a life that is more than just the same stories told endlessly. Desire that is more than just a repetitive cycle with nothing new. Desire for life and hope and God.

In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis writes about this deep desire that motivates him, and he believes, many of us. He is writing about heaven and he says:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else…Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”[i]

It may not happen in the career fair. It may not happen in the classroom. It may not happen in our workplace or in the office with our financial planner. But somewhere in each of our lives, we are being called. To discover that place within us that responds to God. To leave behind the things that we clutch. To take a risk on a new story. And to take our empty hands and follow.

Put down the nets and step away from the boat. If your life is going to be different, it might as well start now. Thanks be to God.

Luke 5:1-11

Now it happened that the crowd pressed in on him to hear the Word of God as he was standing by the Lake of Genesserat. He saw two boats there by the lake, but the fishermen from them had gotten out and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, which belonged to Simon, and asked him to put out from the shore a little ways. Then he sat and taught the crowds from the boat.

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Go out to the deep waters and let your nets down for a catch.”

Simon answered him, “Master, we labored through the whole night and caught nothing, but if you say so, I will let down my nets.”

When he did this, they caught a net full of fish, so much that their nets were breaking. So they nodded a signal to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. They came and filled both boats so that they began to sink.

But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell at Jesus’ feet saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord!” He said this because fear surrounded him and all those with him at the sight of the catch of fish. So also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, the partners of Simon.

Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”

And they brought the boats into shore and, leaving everything, they followed him.

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[i] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, [HarperCollins e-book, 1940], locations 1640-1659