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Luke 5:1-11 “The Smart Thing” A sermon by the Rev Roland Kubke February 7, 2010
5th Sunday after Epiphany: Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 14:12-20; Luke 5:1-11
Have you ever been surprised when you have tried to do something you often do, but this time it didn’t work? What is the first thing you do when that happens? Well, you try it again, but this time you pay more attention to what you are doing. If it doesn’t work at the second attempt, then you try a third time, but the third time you probably use more force. If it still doesn’t work, what happens next depends on how smart you are. If you are smart, you try to tackle the problem in a new way. You try a different key or put in a new battery or unplug and re-plug the system. You may even simply give up and come back to it at another time when your mind might be clearer. Generally, you would assume only a foolish person would simply keep trying to do the thing that used to work before and to do it over and over and over again. We come across something like that in our Gospel lesson this morning. The disciples, who were all very experienced fishermen, went fishing. They did what worked for them many times in the past. They used the techniques that worked best for them. They had gone out at night. At night, they would hang a lantern from a pole. The fish would be attracted to the light and they would be easier to catch with their nets. That night, things were different. There weren’t any fish; the nets remained empty. The disciples did the smart thing. They called it a night, went back to shore and were still doing the necessary maintenance work on their nets when Jesus arrived with a huge crowd of followers. The disciples were smart enough to not do the same thing over and over again when what they were doing simply didn’t work. This is where our Gospel lesson gets very interesting. There are times when our Lord Jesus asks us to do something that doesn’t seem smart at all at first glance. Sometimes He asks us to persist in doing the very same things that don’t seem to work for us in the first place. Why? It is because there is something that we have to learn. You see, the success we encounter in doing the Lord’s work isn’t about our own intelligence and skill when it comes right down to it. Our success in doing the Lord’s work is really about God’s promise to bless the work that we are doing in His name. Thank God that He gives us the faith to focus on what He Himself calls us to do, for only then are we really serving Him!
It is true that God indeed blesses us when we do things for Him that make sense to us, too. There are many times when it isn’t hard at all to see that doing things a certain way is the right way to go. Our second lesson is an example of that. In that case, St. Paul was referring to the use of tongues. Speaking in tongues has been an exciting spiritual thing for a very long time. Essentially, someone starts to make all sorts of nonsense sounds that sound like nonsense to people witnessing it, but that are very meaningful and very emotional from the perspective of the person uttering those sounds. This is very common among people of pretty well every religion. It is found in the worship of pagan jungle tribes. It is found in a division of Islam called Sufism, the same people who are known for their dancers called the whirling dervishes. It is found in Hinduism, too. It is a big deal among Pentecostal Christians and is popular among Mexican Roman Catholics. St. Paul does not condemn the practise itself. His concern is to make sure that, if it is being used, that there is going to be a very healthy dose of common sense going along with it. He points out that speaking in tongues will only be safe and only be effective if you understand what is being said. Paul said, “I will pray in ordinary language that everyone understands.” “I will sing in ordinary language so that I can understand the praise I am giving.” He asked, “How can those who don’t understand you be praising God along with you? How can they join you in giving thanks when they don’t know what you are saying? You will be giving thanks very nicely, no doubt, but the other people present won’t be helped.” Paul’s words would make sense to anyone whose got their brain turned on. Why would you go to church and then spend all your time doing something that nobody else can benefit from? How can you worship with other people when you are not giving them the chance to worship alongside of you? It is clearly better to speak five words in church that actually make sense to the congregation than to speak ten thousand words that make no sense at all. Anyone who does not get that is simply immature. God gave adults the ability to think like adults, and that is what you are called to do once you reach adulthood as a child of God. It will do no one any good if a normal, thinking person came to visit us in church and left with the feeling that Christians have to park their brains outside in order to worship the Lord inside a church. Of course, with that example, and with many others from the Scriptures, we make sure that we do in church are the things that balanced people do. We study God’s Word. We search the Scriptures with the promise that God will guide us to find Jesus Christ crucified in them. We teach the Word. As members of God’s household, we do as we have been instructed in Ephesians 2:20, we build, “on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone.” We work together and organize things and manage things in such a way that we know the truth of God’s Word and where that truth comes from. We don’t have to point to ourselves or our own feelings or our personal experiences to give an answer to people who ask what we believe. We can point to something outside of ourselves that has been made clear in the Scriptures, has been summarized in the creeds, and has been laid out in simple form in writings like the Small Catechism. It makes sense to have a balance, though, between what happens outside of us and what happens inside of us in faith. Paul understands the need for that private experience. He said, “I will pray in unknown tongues. I will sing in unknown tongues.” He said he also spends time praying in the Spirit alone. There is a very great deal to be said for your private religious moments and your private religious feelings of closeness with Jesus. It is good to have time to meditate on God’s promises all by yourself. It is good to pray to Him in your own bedroom, and not in public, bringing to God all those things that are very personal. Jesus said in Matthew 6:5-7, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogue and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen, then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” There is a real danger in allowing religion to be only some outside thing that everyone can see. There is something wrong if your experience of the faith is only through what other people pray and what other people do. The faith God gave you should indeed be so personal to you that you pray on your own and study God’s Word on your own and have a real sense of a personal experience with Jesus as you feel the forgiveness and the love and the grace that God has showered down on you personally. It should be this way, but it can’t be just that way. Your faith and your experience of it is both private and public. If it is not both, it is not right. You can see that illustrated in our first lesson for this morning. Isaiah had a very personal experience. He experienced a vision of the Lord with His angels. Isaiah’s first response was a very honest one. He said, “Woe is me, for I am undone because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of people with unclean lips! For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Isaiah’s first response in connecting with the Word of God in such a very personal way was to respond with the awareness of his sinful nature. He knew right down to his soul that he was not pure. He confessed that he was not good enough to be in the presence of God. He realized that only God’s grace given to him personally would give Isaiah any chance at all before His Lord. The next thing that happened is that God responded to that personal confession with forgiveness. God said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged.” Literally, this says, “your wickedness has been removed and your sin taken completely away.” God provided Isaiah with a wonderful gift: He applied the salvation that He had promised to all God’s people together in such a way that it was a personal experience for Isaiah himself. Now comes the other part of this balance. The Lord asked, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah replied from the heart of a forgiven sinner, “Here am I! Send me.” There is a formal thing that happened here. There is an organized thing that happened here. God Himself organized things so that believers would be called to speak to other people, not just for personal reasons, but for God’s reasons. They are sent to speak for God. So, this is what you are called to do. You are called to be a living, feeling, emotional and thinking person who rejoices in God’s love toward you. You are called to share you faith in such a way that it makes sense to other people so that they can grow in maturity and understanding, and so that you can grow that way, too. You are called to be an independent believer who belongs to an organized group known as the family of God. You are called to be a member of a group that functions in such a way that people from outside of that group can observe you and even join you with some kind of a sense that they can understand at least most of what is going on. That is how God has arranged things and that is how God has promised it will work. You are saved and you are sent. You are in the balance that comes by the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Still, there are times when things just don’t seem to be working, even if you think you have that balance. There are times when you keep doing what has worked in the past, both worshipping God in very personal ways and worshipping Him in very public ways, and the nets come up empty. You can be discouraged because you don’t feel as intensely about Jesus today as you did once upon a time. You can be discouraged because the people around seem to have lost interest in the public part of their faith and they leave you feeling isolated and lonely as they shrink into some dark corner somewhere. You can be discouraged because the music is as good as it’s always been, the preaching is good, the pastor is approachable and the congregation is friendly and active in many ways, but the people you want to invite to church just don’t seem to care about church anymore. The things that used to work and the things that we were sure would work so much better once we sorted out the old barriers of tradition and what a person could wear in church and the problems of too much formality and too much informality and all those things still don’t seem to work like a person had hoped. In our Gospel lesson, we don’t know if the disciples argued with one another when their nets came up empty. We don’t know if they blamed Simon, their leader, for rowing the boats out to the wrong part of the lake. We have no idea what things they tried when their usual way of fishing simply didn’t work. We can assume, of course, that every day wasn’t a good day and that some years were better years than others. We can assume that because everything has its season and nothing stays the same just from the experiences we have in every part of life. All we know for sure is that it finally got to the point when the Disciples realized they had done all they could do. They struggled all night and finally decided it was time to give up and wait for a better day. When things don’t go as we had hoped when it comes to growing a congregation, we have our own responses to that sense of disappointment. Maybe the problem is that the leadership isn’t doing its job. Maybe the problem is that the congregation is not being faithful. Maybe the Pastor isn’t good enough in his preaching. Maybe he isn’t popular enough or kind enough or approachable enough. Maybe the sermons are too shallow. Maybe they are too deep. Maybe they are not sincere enough. Maybe they are not faithful enough. Maybe the hymnal is the problem. Maybe we should be in the hymnal more consistently. Those are all indeed very serious questions and they should be addressed because we should test what we are doing to make sure we are being faithful to God. Then again, maybe it is just a case that the fishing isn’t very good right now. The disciples were professional fishermen. They knew what they were doing. They knew that if there were fish to catch, they should most definitely be able to catch them using their skills and the lessons they had learned from many years of experience. Maybe it was simply a case of doing what they always did and then trusting that God would provide the blessing in God’s own way and in God’s own time. The disciples certainly got such an answer in our Gospel lesson this morning. After Jesus finished looking after the needs of the crowd that had gathered to hear His preaching, He told the disciples to “launch out into the deep and let down their nets for a catch.” Jesus simply told them to do what they had already been doing. He told them to do what they always did. If anything was different, it was the fact that it was harder to catch fish in the daytime and harder to fill the nets in the deep water, but still, what they were told to do was not very different from what they had been doing. The results were different, though. This time around the nets were full. It was astonishing, because it went way beyond what experienced, knowledgeable people would have expected. They knew that this was a miracle. What was the response of Simon Peter? “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” Peter had done everything right the first time, but there was something that was not quite right. He had not remembered that what we do still needs God’s blessings if it is going to work out right. God is still in charge. God is in control. When we do everything as well as we can and it still doesn’t work, things are that much worse if we don’t remember that God is in control. There is a reason why things don’t work as we had planned when we’ve otherwise done our best. God knows that reason and He knows what we need. Yes, our sins do get in the way and our failure to see what we hoped to see may have a lot to do with our sin, but there are times when things don’t work, simply because it is not the right time for them to work. There are times when God has something to teach us. What Peter and James and John had to learn was that they were indeed sinful men. They had to learn that their sin was in believing that they could figure everything out and not trusting that God has His own plans for them. God’s plan was to teach the proper humility to Isaiah so that Isaiah could be prepared to truly let God lead him. The plan of Jesus was to teach the proper humility to Peter and James and John so that they would be ready to let God lead them. They needed to be assured that they were under God’s call to do God’s Work. They needed to understand that God Himself would be the one to catch the men that God knew were out there to hear God’s Word and believe. When you are discouraged, this is what you need to learn, too. Is the problem because you are not trusting that God has the desire to bless you and to keep you personally? Is your own sense of your sin holding you back in such a way that you are holding back from reaching out to the congregation so that we are all held back on account of it? Is the problem really that we are not doing what God has commanded us in working together as a congregation, or is the problem that we are not willing to wait for God’s timing? Are you feeling lonely in your faith because you have made yourself alone or is it because you have been abandoned by those who have been called to embrace you for the sake of Jesus Christ? Are the nets empty because you have been only half-hearted in your fishing or because there simply aren’t too many fish in the waters around you? Whatever the answer may be, there is one thing we know for certain. Paul reminds us in 2 Timothy 2:19, “God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription, ‘The Lord knows those who are His.’” He knows those for whom He has died. He went to the Cross for people who thought that God did not know what He was doing. He was crucified by people who thought that there wisdom and experience made them more qualified to judge God’s Will than God Himself. Jesus went to the Cross for people who meant well but faltered in their faith when they did not see the success they were hoping to see. Jesus died for people who were astonished at what happened to Him. He died for people who were so discouraged and so disappointed to see someone with such promise suffer so horribly that they ran from the sight of Him. He died for them because He understood them. He understood the problem and He knew that this was the only way their sins could be purged and their iniquity taken away. Jesus knows those for whom He died. He knows you. He knows you and He forgives you. He knows you and He loves you. He knows you and He provides you with the grace to say, “Master, I have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless, at Your word I will let down the net.” You see, that is what saving faith is all about. It is about trusting that God’s way is the right way. It is about the willingness born from faith to, nevertheless, seek out the guidance of God’s Word even when it doesn’t seem to be the best way to get things done. Saving faith is about what God Himself has in His control as He guides you in His love by the very Word of God that has called you and changed you and made you to be the very person who you are in Christ Jesus, our Lord. There are times when the smart thing is to keep on doing the same thing because what you are doing is the right thing. May God give you the wisdom to recognize such times and the courage to continue in doing the right thing for Jesus’ sake. Amen. |
