"Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, 'Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.' Simon answered, 'Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.' When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break."
We all encounter failure in life. I think it was Thomas Edison who said something like, "If you haven't experienced failure to a sufficient degree, you aren't trying hard enough." Failure is common but discouraging, especially if it is spiritual failure we're talking about.
Simon--we also know him as Peter--was a fisherman by trade and had worked all night on the lake with his partners to catch some fish. Not a bit of luck. Discouraging but not uncommon, I suppose, if you're a fisherman. Whatever your occupation, sometimes things just don't work out. Jesus, in the morning, encourages them to "put out in deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Don't you love it when someone from another occupation, who knows nothing about the intricacies of your work, tells you how to do your job? Simon complains initially that they've tried all night, but this was Jesus after all who is doing the asking, so they do as he says. They catch an abundance of fish. Immediately, we become aware that this is not a story about the occupation of fishing. It is a story about the spiritual life and ultimately about the kingdom of God.
Is your spiritual life dry and lifeless? Do you feel like a failure in following Christ? Could this text be inviting you to go deeper? How might you do this? I'll talk about these matters in the sermon on Sunday.
Maybe because my denomination was different at my baptism, I'm sometimes reminded of Luther's quote to “sin bravely.” I believe he suggests that God wants us to keep trying, without fear of failure. I'm also reminded of Frederick Buechner's quote that we'll be happiest when we find the intersection of the world's greatest need and our best skill. I think finding our best skill involves a few failures on our journey.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Failure is essential to success in our lives and our spiritual lives.. We do not learn from what we already know. We learn from what challenges us and from what we don't know. If one thinks that life is going smoothly with no bumps in the road, we are just sleep walking through life. What is Luke trying to tell us about failure? Maybe God does not want us to give up, but to keep trying. I know that I am always trying to figure out how to present reading and writing strategies to 2nd and 3rd graders. No one tells me how to do it. I have to figure it out myself. It took a lot of failures and restarts and talking to people to figure out what I needed to do and how I needed to do it to get to an acceptable plan. So failure is not a sign to stop, like what Simon did. Failure is a sign that says that ones strategies are not working and need to to reframed. Our community of faith is our link to God's encouragement to find, again, our spiritual path.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to reflect an observation based on one of Wes' sermon points last Sunday. We do indeed use our freedom succumbing to the secular marketing by filling our closets with i-pods and other electronic gadgets. The secular world also makes us feel like the devil will fill our idle hands, unless our every waking moment is busy doing. Janis Joplin singing “Freedom is just another word for nothing else to do,” captures the pulling away from our testing the contemplative waters. Lent offers us a chance to rediscover ourselves as a “human being,” rather than a “human doing.” I hope Wes' friendly invitation will encourage some of the hesitant to use their freedom to sample these springs of living water during the Sunday evenings of Lent. A shameless plug for the adult class during Lent – we will complement the evening spiritual exercise time with classes on learning spiritual practices you've always wanted to try.
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