Finding God in the Boat

Sermon for Feb. 6, 2022

Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11

If you want to find God, where do you look?  That question has come to me in conversations with several people recently; and when that happens, it makes me think maybe God is trying to get my attention about something. 

I wonder whether the disciple Simon Peter had given much thought to that question, about where to look for God, before the story we just heard about the miraculous catch of fish.  We don’t really get much backstory about Peter, but this morning’s reading is the second time he appears in Luke’s Gospel.  The first is just a few verses earlier.  Jesus had begun performing works of healing as he took the good news of God’s love on the road, and one of those healing miracles happened at Peter’s house.  Jesus came there, though we aren’t told why, and he healed Peter’s mother-in-law, who had a high fever.  There’s no indication of what Peter thought about that, or how he responded, but you’ve got to figure it must have made an impression.

Then we come to today’s story.  As it begins, we get no sense that Peter’s looking for God or for anything else, for that matter.  He just happens to have come in from a long night of fishing with his partners, James and John.  It wasn’t a good night because they’ve come back emptyhanded, and I imagine Peter’s trying to get his equipment cleaned up and put away so he can go home.  But Jesus gets into Peter’s boat and asks him to put out into the water a just a bit, to put a little distance between himself and the crowds he’s teaching.  Peter does that – maybe he figured he owed Jesus at least that much for healing his mother-in-law. 

So, although he just wanted to go home, Peter finds himself listening to Jesus teaching about God with wisdom and authority and power.  When Jesus is finished, as the crowd is talking among themselves, Jesus suggests Peter should head back out onto the lake and try his luck again.  Peter says, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.  Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.” (5:5)  So, Peter, his partners, and Jesus head back out, and they haul in this overwhelming catch, enough to make two boats start sinking.

Now, later on in the Gospel story, Peter shows himself not always to be the sharpest knife in the drawer.  But here, even Peter gets it – that this isn’t just a wise rabbi there in the boat with him, not even just a talented healer.  Peter finds himself in the presence of the divine, and it’s not a warm and fuzzy feeling.  He knows he’s not worthy to be in God’s presence, and he’s afraid of what might happen to him next.  But Jesus completely reframes that moment for Peter.  It’s not that Peter has stumbled into the heavenly throne room and needs to get out before someone locks him up for trespassing.  Instead, Jesus has come onto Peter’s everyday, run-of-the-mill fishing boat to inhabit his everyday, run-of-the-mill life.  “Don’t be afraid,” Jesus says.  “I’m not here to judge you.  I’m here to join you.  Come on; let’s see how rich, how meaningful, life can really be.”

So, Peter found God in his fishing boat.  What about us? 

Well, for me, God shows up in many ways, thankfully – in reading, in prayer, in being with you.  And it happens when I get together with friends, including friends I’ve known quite a long time now – six of us who grew close in seminary.  We called ourselves the “Six Pack,” and we pledged that we’d keep getting together after seminary, too.  Apart from a COVID hiatus, we’ve done that every year since we graduated, which was 20 years ago this May, and we talk a couple of times a month, too.  In fact, I’ll be on vacation this week and next, and part of that time Ann and I will spend with these friends.  At the ordination service for one of us, one of our seminary professors was there to preach, and she said, “I’m not sure what the six of you get together to do, but I do know you eat well.”  Honestly, the six of us don’t know what we get together to do, either.  Rarely do our trips involve cool activities or pilgrimages to sacred sites.  We just get together to … get together, and check in, and eat chips and queso.  It doesn’t sound like much, especially not repeated 20 times.  But when we get together, we always leave refreshed and renewed for the crazy, wonderful, exhausting, holy work that lies ahead back home.

I think for many of us, maybe for most of us, if we were going to write a story about God coming and calling someone into divine service, we wouldn’t write a story like what we heard in this morning’s Gospel.  It would be more like the Old Testament reading, with smoke filling the Temple, and the building’s foundation shaking, and giant cobras flying around.  (Well, maybe without the giant flying cobras.)  We like a good Hollywood treatment for our significant moments, so we figure God must work that way, too.  And God does, sometimes.  You do hear stories of people experiencing the equivalent of the voice of God booming out, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:8).  But most often, Jesus comes to us to share some chips and queso instead.  He comes when you’re out in your fishing boat, at the end of a long, unproductive night.  Jesus inhabits normal life, even the least compelling parts of it. 

And there, when you least expect it, Jesus calls you to reimagine what your normal life could mean.  The call to Peter and James and John wasn’t something completely beyond their experience.  He didn’t say, “Don’t be afraid; from now on, you’ll be nuclear engineers.”  Instead, he recast their experience, taking how they lived and what they knew and orienting it toward realizing God’s purposes and priorities for the people around them.

All this is to say: It’s great to seek out a mountaintop experience.  There’s a lot to be said for looking for God by climbing to the heights and seeing what you find.  But it’s good to remember that, as Christians, the truly astounding thing we claim about God is that the same Lord who fills the Temple and shakes its foundations with awesome power also comes to inhabit the day-to-day-ness of our lives. 

So when you’re at work, when you’re doing the laundry, when you’re putting the kids to bed, when you’re sharing chips and queso with your friends – listen for the voice of God.  You won’t so much hear it rattling the rooftops as whispering in your ear.  Listen for the ways God might be asking you to use precisely who you are to bring the light of love into someone’s darkness.  For you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14), created in God’s own image and likeness.  And you never know when the presence of you, showing up at the opportune time, just might be the presence of Jesus for someone who needs love precisely the way you bear it.