“Put Out into the Deep
Water”
Luke 5:1-11
First
Presbyterian
The Reverend
Thomas A. Sweet
February 4,
2007
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A
farmer’s barn burned down and so his wife called the insurance company.
She exclaimed to the agent, “We had that barn insured for $50,000 and I
want my money!” The agent said,
“Wait a minute. Hold on there.
Insurance doesn’t quite work like that.
First, we have to determine the value of what was insured and then we
provide you with a new one of comparable worth.”
There was a bit of a pause before the woman said to the agent, “If
that’s the way insurance works, then I’d like to cancel the policy I have on
my husband.”
There
are more than a few Christians who not only use religion and the church, but
Jesus, too, as insurance policies to pay off in heavenly bliss at the end of
their earthly lives. But that kind
of thinking, to use this morning’s gospel imagery, is akin to fishing in
shallow water where the catch is very thin.
It misses the point of the gospel that, according to Jesus, is this
world and this life. As we
have said from this pulpit many times, okay, as I have said, a religion
that accounts personal salvation as its primary raison d’etre not only
is inherently selfish and second-rate but also, finally, blasphemous.
Saved from what? A God whose
love is fickle and fleeting and wants nothing to do with us if we are less than
perfect, our only hope being the sacrifice of an unblemished Lamb named Jesus?
Do
we tell our children that our love is conditioned on their being
perfect? Or do we love them no
matter what? Do we expect God to
love us with a lesser love? Jesus
didn’t. So he told a parable about
a steadfast father whose love for his prodigal son never wavered no matter how
deep and disappointing the child’s wayward life became.
Moreover, it was the father’s unconditional love, not the threat
of permanent exclusion from the father’s life, that provided the space for the
child to come to his senses and then to come home.
So why has the church continued to claim that God’s love for us is
conditioned on our acceptance of the proposition that Jesus died for our sins,
or else we are destined for eternal hell? That,
in my estimation, is a dishonest gambit the church has used to leverage its own
importance, influence, and wealth. The
church as the keeper of the keys of eternity.
The
word salvation means “to make whole.”
Our journey toward wholeness is fueled by revelation, not rescue.
The last book of The Bible is called “The Revelation to John”
and John begins his first sentence by writing “ApokaluyiV
Ihsou
Cristou”-
the revelation of Jesus Christ. Salvation
comes to us via enlightenment, not vicarious rescue.
That is why in John’s rendering of the gospel of Christ he portrays
Jesus as saying that he, Jesus, is the light of the world, the light of the
world who enlightens life, who illumines for us what it means to be truly and
fully human.
Jesus
is no insurance policy we take out as protection against divine wrath.
If we are going to use the language of salvation in reference to Jesus,
let it be, then, that he saves us from a life that is unnecessarily small.
Let is be, then, that Jesus reveals to us a bigger, larger, more
expansive way of perceiving God and world that sets us on a path to wholeness
and the world on a path of peace. Let
it be as one who reveals the essential unity and interconnectedness of all life.
Let it be as one who insists that love is always the right thing to do,
even when it leads to a cross. It
is, to me, a supreme irony that the One who opened to us the deep waters of
divine mystery has been used by the church to gull us into paddling around in
the shallow water of ecclesiastical certitude.
Frankly, that makes me mad.
Certainty
is very seldom certain except in our own minds.
How can it be? We only can be
certain for the present moment. Most
of what has been labeled as certainty across the eons later has been modified,
replaced, or updated as new discoveries are made, more knowledge is obtained, or
as further experience dictates. A
few weeks ago, Elder Richard Redington introduced in the adult education forum a
fabulous poem by Heather McHugh entitled “What He Thought.”
In the poem, a group of
self-impressed American poets was in
The
statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his
belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All
things
move. “If God is not the
soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world.”
Such was
his heresy. The day they
brought him
forth to die they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so
his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is
how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
And poetry—
(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—
poetry
is what
he thought, but did not say.
Four
hundred years after Bruno was burned at the stake, so certain had his
accusers been of his heresy, official expression of “profound sorrow” and
acknowledgement of error at Bruno’s condemnation to death was made during the
papacy of John Paul II. Bruno, after
receiving the guilty verdict at his trial on his knees, stood and said, “Perhaps
you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I
receive it.” Is it not fear
that causes us to shout “Certainty! Certainty!”
when there is no certainty? What the
church through the years has been afraid to admit is that assertion does not
make its assertions so. There is
always more to see, more to learn, more to explore, more
to comprehend, more to love. “Put
out into the deep water,” Jesus exhorts us.
The church too often has been the barrier to deeper discovery about life
and God and spirit, not the broker of it, and that, to me, is Sin with a capital
“S”.
On
how many faces has the church placed a metaphorical iron mask, banishing from
sight and silencing those who dare to question “the tradition”?
What incalculable poverty have we collectively suffered through the
centuries because too many of those who have dared to live deep into God’s
mysteries have been cowered by the church not to give voice to what they have
discovered and discerned there? How
many questions have gone unasked and how many sacred searches have been
abandoned because of the church’s heavy-handedness?
All
the while, the voice of Jesus echoes through the history of the church:
“Put out into the deep water.”
Shallow water is appropriate when we are small and just learning to
swim. But no swimmer worth his or
her salt wants to stay there forever. The
deeper water beckons for that is where both the refinement of our skills and the
adventure of swimming are experienced. Susan
and Jenny Bentley and Katie Rice and all of our other swimmers started learning
to swim, at least I presume they did, with kickboards in the shallow end of the
pool. But they grew and learned and
honed their skills and left the kickboards behind.
In a similar way, as the circumstances and experiences of our lives
change and accumulate, the theology of our earlier years is no longer adequate
to interpret them. So we are invited
to move into the deeper waters of faith where there is always so much more
to see, more to discover, and more to learn about the wonder and
wonders of God and life.
In
our gospel passage today, Peter senses the gap between his own timid faith and
the courage of Jesus, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful
man.” Peter’s “sin” was
that he was not willing to venture far from the theological shore of his
tradition and therefore was constrained and limited in what he could know about
the many and myriad ways of God in the world. He committed the too-common
mistake of taking the part of the truth he knew and making it to be the whole
truth. But God always is more than
we can ask or think or imagine. Until
we know that in the bones of our being, our theological nets are going to hold
only a slim catch. Certainty with
its formulaic religion is in reality an inoculation against God.
Who needs God when we are so sure of ourselves?
And being so sure of ourselves, we then inflict our certainty on others,
demanding that they become like us. It
is when we put out into the deeper waters of divine mystery that we come to
greater faith and greater humility than ever we have known or experienced.
It is then that we sense ourselves, like Bruno before us, not to be the
center of all things but a part of a rich, variegated, luminous creation made
for harmony and oneness and joy.
Can
you hear the call of God today? “Whom
shall I send? And who will go for us
beyond the shallow waters of certainty that yield so small a catch into the
deeper waters of faith and mystery where the nets get filled to overflowing with
life and hope? It is my
continuing prayer that the ministry of this church will give you the courage to
stand up and say, “Here am I. Send
me.”
Amen.
© 2007 First Presbyterian Church