blip : Being Lonely In Paradise :

The churches in Chapel Hill, NC tried a pulpit exchange this year. I preached at the Baptist church in town, and the pastor of the United Church of Christ preached at our church. It was a great idea—grassroots ecumenism.

Anyhow, below is the sermon I preached. Three passages from three different theologians were in the back of my mind during my sermon preparation. I’m discovering that I have to preach to myself just as much as to the congregation if I want to stay honest. So, this sermon is somewhat how I worked out these passages:

D. M. MacKinnon: “So the imperative is clear to go forward, not clinging to external protection but embracing insecurity, and to go forward in hope” (The Stripping the Altars, p. 37).

John Milbank: “here we give up everything ‘absurdly’ to God in order to confess our inherent nothingness and to receive life in the only possible genuine mode of life, as created anew. Here we hold on to nothing, here we possess nothing securely… Here instead we render ourselves entirely a prey to the mere good fortune that it might turn out that we have been ethical” (Being Reconciled, p. 161).

Thomas Muntzer: “Christ has shown no more winsome love to his elect than this: that he has labored to make them as sheep for the slaughter.”
————————————————————————————————————
Title: Irresponsible stewards
Date: Feb. 4th, 2007
Place: University Baptist Church
Texts: Luke 5:1-11; Psalm 138; I Cor. 15:1-11

We heard a line earlier in our service from Psalm 138, and I want to read it again. It’s the closing verse of that passage: “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.” It’s a comfort to know that the love of our God is steadfast, it endures forever, and that God does not forsake us.

The story of the miraculous catch of fish in Luke, the passage I just read—that story displays the sovereign care of our Creator for creation. It is Jesus who demonstrates the steadfast love of God declared in Psalm 138. It is Jesus who shows us the character of God.

And in this story from Luke we find a Jesus who exercises frivolous love, indiscriminant grace, love that knows no boundaries. It’s not premeditated; it’s not methodical. The way Luke tells this story, Jesus doesn’t seek out these fishermen because he has this crazy idea to blow their minds with a miraculous catch of fish. That’s not his goal. That’s not it at all. Instead, Jesus seeks them out because he needs to get a little ways out into the water so he can address the gathering crowd. Verse 3: “He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.”

And when Jesus finished, he sat in Simon’s boat, and we can almost see a smile flash across his face. It’s the sort of smile that you get at Christmas time when you know you’ve bought the perfect gift for someone. You know they are going to love it. And they pick up from under the tree, and you can’t help but smile—you know it’s perfect for them.

Well, that’s the smile I see on Jesus’ face as I read this story. Jesus wanted to bless this random fisherman beyond his wildest dreams. If only he would listen, and obey. But obeying Jesus probably wasn’t an easy thing for Simon to do at this point in his day. He was tired, exhausted after a long day’s work. The text says that Simon and the others were already finished with their strenuous work, and were washing their nets. They were ready to call it quits for the day and head home for some rest. So they could do it all over again tomorrow—and hopefully they would find more success. It was a bad day at work.

But Jesus comes up with a whimsical idea—miraculous fish, a multitude of fish. So, he tells Simon to go out further into the deep waters and try for another catch. I can imagine Simon’s curious and fatigued face. He had already done this traveling preacher-man a favor. He took him out into the sea in his boat so Jesus could preach to the crowds. And after all that, after his generosity, this guy wants to go on a fishing trip.

Verse 5: “Simon answered, ‘Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.” You can hear the reluctance in Simon’s voice. But despite himself, he calls Jesus his master and goes where Jesus desires.

This story teaches us something very important about God’s grace, about the way God interacts with us. Simon is not among the seekers; he isn’t among the interested crowds who gather around Jesus and get to listen to the word of God from a distance. Simon isn’t there. He isn’t one among the crowds. He’s around the corner minding his own business. He’s working; he’s a laborer; doing what he always does; he’s cleaning his nets after a tough day at work.

Simon doesn’t seek after Jesus; it’s Jesus who seeks Simon. And that’s grace. Grace means that God acts first. It means that God offers us something we weren’t even looking for. Grace is this Jesus who comes after us and offers us a chance to participate in the wonderful work of the kingdom, something we couldn’t even dream up, something beyond our imaginations

And when God’s grace has moved in our lives, all we can offer our Lord are willing hands; hands that are ready to do his work, and receive his miraculous gifts. Grace is Jesus coming up to Simon, even though there were probably others who wanted intimacy with Jesus more than he did. Grace is God coming into our lives, when there are probably others who deserve it more than we do. And when grace moves, Simon goes wherever the call leads.

Jesus shows us what God’s grace looks like. Jesus seeks after us; he sees us in the distance, and comes to us and draws us into the kingdom of God… If we are willing to call Jesus master, like Simon does. That’s the question Jesus asks us: will we call him our master?

But what does it mean to call Jesus our master? Would our lives look different? Does Simon’s life look different?

If we continue with story, we learn one way that Simon’s life looks different when. It’s hard to miss. Simon’s life looks different because all of a sudden he’s got tons of fish, more fish than he knows what to do with. I think this is definitely a sermon that could use a flannel board at this point. I don’t know about you, but I loved those things in Sunday School growing up. It was much more fun to see the bible stories instead of reading them. I’m sure there are some great images of Simon and the multitude of fish. But I guess we were supposed to graduate from those things; so preachers can’t use them. Too bad.

But we’ll have to use our imaginations. Simon let down the nets as Jesus commanded, and now I’ll pick up the story in verse 6: “When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.”

What an image of Jesus’ extravagant grace, right? I mean, this is overboard, extreme. What a blessing. Jesus gives an over-abundance, more than enough, too much even. The boats start to sink from the weight of the fish. Simon calls Jesus his master, and look what happens to him: he gets more than he could ever imagine. Simon’s life looks different when he opens himself to the movement of grace because now he has more fish than he can handle.

(short pause)

I wish I could leave us with that message; leave us there on the shore with Simon and Jesus and that multitude of fish. I wish I could set up a flannel board with that wonderful picture on it, and leave it here as the last word, the last image, of this story—something to contemplate. I wish I could leave us with a gospel that says that being a Christian means that God makes us rich, that God blesses us with wealth if we follow Jesus. But that’s not what grace means, and that’s not how this story ends.

(long pause)

I’m actually only employed half-time as pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite. And with the other half of my time, I work for a builder as a carpenter. It’s a small crew. We remodel, or build additions, or decks—those sorts of things.

The livelihood of the crew depends on the work we have. And we are only able to do the work because we have tools. My boss has a trailer he pulls around with a multitude of tools for every task we may encounter. Now, if you’ve ever been to Home Depot or Lowe’s, you’d probably noticed that tools aren’t cheap. I’m sure my boss is still paying of some of those specialty tools. But we need them in order to do our job, to make a living.

Now, what would happen to us, to our small crew, if our boss one day after a very productive day on the jobsite, decided to leave all the tools there on the street corner and move out of town? To just get up and leave, on a whim. We would be out of a job. No way to pay the bills. It would be completely irresponsible of my boss. No concern for us, nor for himself.

But that’s how our story from Luke ends. This is exactly the sort of irresponsibility we are left with at the end of the story. Yes, this is an amazing story of a miraculously productive fishing trip, but it is also a story of a miraculously irresponsible surrender of all blessings, all profits, all economic gains, all earned income, for the sake of a journey into the unknown.

The punch-line of the story comes at the end. After Luke tells us of this amazing miracle, and this wonderful blessing that Jesus gives Simon and his friends, something crazy happens, something completely irresponsible, totally absurd. Jesus invites Simon and his business partners to join him in his work, and this is what the last line of the passage says, verse 11: “So they pulled their boats up on the shore, left everything and followed him.”

They left everything. Think about it. They just caught the most fish they’d ever seen. They could take that catch to the market and make some real money. Maybe this was the break they were looking for. Now they could finally expand their business, make more profits, buy another boat, hire more workers. I’m sure they could have provided a handful of needed jobs for the unemployed in their village. That would have been a responsible decision—a choice that would help themselves while helping others. That’s probably what it would have meant to be good stewards of the gifts God had given them.

But that’s not what they do. Instead, they throw it all away. They don’t even give it to the poor. That probably would have been better. That’s what Jesus tells the rich young ruler to do later in Luke’s gospel, in chapter 18: “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” But that’s not what happens in this story. This is not about charity. This is not about being good, about being pious, about storing treasures in heaven.

This is much more irresponsible. They leave their miraculous catch to rot on the shore. It’s bad economics; poor stewardship. And what’s worse, they leave their nets and their boats too. They leave their jobs, their investments, their livelihood behind… and for what? They really don’t know. So they can follow this man they hardly know into what will turn out to be a bleak end to their earthly life—the cross. Jesus, and Simon like him, both get killed on crosses.

This isn’t an easy passage. Sure, there are ways to make this easier to swallow. I could spiritualize it; turn it into something psychological, something that happens in our head. I could say: well, this is about how we need to be willing to give up all we have for the sake of the gospel—it’s about our attitude toward wealth; we can keep it as long as we don’t let it control us. I like that message better. And I wish I could preach that. I mean, if I’m honest, that’s the way I live—I have lots of things, like the nice car my wife and I drove this morning. But that’s just not what this Scripture says.

This story shows us what it means to believe in the shear grace of God. But it’s a mysterious grace, a dark grace, the darkness of the cross—that’s the best image we have of God’s grace, a blood-stained cross. This is a grace that calls us and empowers us to leave behind all our securities and follow this mysterious man from Galilee into a hazy future, into a land we can faintly see over the horizon, something we can see only through a glass darkly.

It was God’s gracious call that led Abraham to leave his country, his people, and his property and trust that God would bring him into unimaginable promises.

It was God’s gracious call that led the people of Israel out of Egyptian slavery and across the Red Sea, only to wander for 40 years in the wilderness, where they lived only by the daily grace of manna and quail.

And in Luke’s Gospel this morning, we hear the gracious call of God, down by the lake, which leads Simon and his friends to leave behind all their securities, all their assets, all that they have, and follow this unpredictable savior.

God’s loving grace is about saving us. It saves us by helping us let go of everything, to let go of our lives, to lose control of our selves, and step into a new life and a new path. And we go forward into the unfamiliar, the unknown, because we’ve heard a strange story—it’s the strange story that Paul tells us about in I Corinthians 15. We’ve heard that this man was buried, and “that he was raised on the third day according to Scriptures” (v4).

God’s grace leads us to our death, the end of our selves and the way we sustain our selves, and leads us into a new life that depends completely on that same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. The grace Jesus offers us is the same grace he offered Simon—it’s a grace that calls Simon to leave everything behind and follow Jesus to the cross, and hope in God’s miraculous power to raise us from the dead. Like his master, Simon’s earthly life ends on a Roman cross.

(short pause)

Luke 5, verse 11: “So they pulled their boats up on the shore, and left everything and followed him.”