Come and See
Luke 5:1-11
On many occasions when I introduce myself as a pastor to someone who I have never met before and who has never been to a church or has long ago rejected the Church, I hear something like, “Oh, well I am quite sure that the roof would cave in or that something crazy would happen if I should ever enter the door of a church.” At first I laughed it off as silly and then I heard a comment like this again and again. Sometimes it is the roof and sometimes it is the floor that it is in jeopardy of crumbling. Sometimes it is lightning that will strike in the middle of the service and sometimes it is a wild wind that could threaten to uplift the pews and tear down the walls. Even this past Christmas Eve as I was standing at the door to shake hands and greet each person in the name of the new born Christ, a man looked at me and said, “Well I came and the roof is in still in tact.”
If you ponder this statement and others like it, the underlying theological assumptions are intriguing. First, such a statement assumes that God exists (which is a frequently cited reason for not coming in the first place), and it also assumes that God is active in the world, albeit in a frightening way. But perhaps the most interesting part of this statement is that people, that many intelligent and thoughtful people, genuinely harbor a fear that God is ticked off that you aren’t in church. And furthermore, that God is ticked enough not only to punish you for having missed church but to tell you that you were missed by threatening to harm you with rubble from a collapsed roof in a public setting!
To be sure, most of us would say that this is ridiculous, but the number of times I have heard something similar to this, makes me think that even rational people can conclude that God is of somewhat questionable character. People the world over and maybe even some of you, have issues with God. Even though I grew up in the church and consider myself to be something of a church dork, I understand profoundly questions about the character of God. Anyone who cares about eliminating suffering in the world wonders about the character of God. We look around us, we look at Haiti, we look at the conditions in AIDS ravaged Africa, we look at the number of people right here on Cape Cod who are homeless and we wonder to ourselves, who is this God? What is this God that created a world that includes all of this? And for those among us, for those who are introduced to God for the first time by some of the preachers we hear in this country, we might think that God is more like a jealous teenage girl than an energy and a life-force that has been bringing the best possibilities to bloom in and among creation for billions of years. We might think that God is a lot like us, sitting in a quiet room, looking over a list of all of the people who have ticked God off, looking over the list and plotting ways to seek revenge. We might think that God is as small and as caddy and as judgmental as we are. We might think that maybe God is the kind of power that would force a roof to crumble or a wall to collapse all in an effort to show the world who is in charge. But the God that we human beings have crafted, the God that we hear about from televangelists or news commentators, the God that we are told causes earthquakes and tsunamis is not the God we know in Jesus Christ.
The God we know in Jesus Christ is not a God who would hit your hands with a ruler for asking a question. The God we know in Jesus Christ is not a God who would stop your seeking heart from entering this place and wanting to know more. The God we know in Jesus Christ is not a God who would pull the ground from under you as a way of showing you who is boss. No, our God is a God who says, Come and See…Come see for yourself what I am about. Come in and look around and see what you find. Come in and dare to bring your biggest hopes, your deepest fears, your heaviest sorrows. The God we know in Jesus Christ is not busy running around punishing those who have been questing alone, those who have been searching for life’s answers without a community with whom to journey. No, our God is a God who says, Come and See. Come see for yourself what I am about.
And because for us as Christians, Jesus is the one through whom we see God, it is of little surprise to us that he shares a similar tactic for roping people in. Just like many of us, the crowd that found their way to Jesus was a bit fickle. Many of them didn’t like their lives, but they weren’t doing much to change them. Many of them had little to show for their years of toiling in the fields, but toil away they did. Many of them feared stepping foot in a Synagogue, but they were hungering for a place to ask the deep questions of life. So when they heard word that one of their former classmates, one of their neighborhood friends, one of their fellow Jews was spreading word of a life different than the one they knew, they found their way to him.
And on one sunny, Galilee afternoon, they found Jesus doing his thing on the shores of a lake. There were boats on the shore and the smell of fish was in the air. There were shouts and whispers about who it was that was standing with his feet buried in the sand. He looked familiar but he also looked strangely different. The group that had gathered was waiting to hear more from Jesus, more about the life he was describing, more about the healing he could offer, more about the hope that they had never heard before. But Jesus’ eyes are fixed beyond the crowd. He saw two boats that were empty. The fishermen had gone to wash their nets. And for some reason Jesus is drawn to the empty boats and he goes out to them. I suspect that the people on the shore with him started to gossip amongst themselves.
“I heard this guy was a bit loony, but this is proof!” Jesus goes into the water, wetting the bottom of his clothes, climbs into one of the boats and commands the men to whom the boats belong to push themselves further out into the water. What is most annoying is that Jesus then proceeds to teach from the boats. And if I had been in that boat with him, I would have wanted to say something like, “Who are you? And why have you come into my boat to use it as a platform for your wild ideas? I have fish to catch. I have a family to feed. I don’t have time to waste!”
But Jesus goes on. And after he decides that the people waiting on the shore have heard enough, he turns his attention to the men in the boat. He says, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Of course frustrated and confused, the man in the boat who is called Simon answers back, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
The scripture goes on to tell us that with Jesus by their side, they caught so many fish that their nets started to break and they beckon their friends in the other boats to join them in their fish catching extravaganza. But I guess Jesus didn’t think about the consequences of so many fish and the boats began to sink. And maybe just like a lot of us, just like those of us who fear that God will force a roof to crumble or a wall to collapse all in an effort to show the world who is in charge, Simon, who is also called Peter freaks out. He loses it because he is afraid that his life up to now will not be impressive to Jesus. He is afraid that Jesus is as small and as caddy and as judgmental as he is and so he falls down to the bottom of the fishy, grimy sinking boat, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” We don’t know how long Jesus let him stay down there with a heart overflowing with fear, but he grabs Simon Peter, he looks him in the eye and says, “Do not be afraid… do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching people.”
Surrounded by fish and broken nets and a sinking boat, Jesus introduces them to God, but not the god they knew from Caesar, not the god they thought would strike them down for living as they had been. Jesus introduces them to the God that he knows, to the God who sent him, the God who beckons us in and invites us to focus on people, to ground our lives in one another. Jesus introduces them to the God who invites us to catch hearts, not to condemn them. When everyone around him is preaching doom, telling the world that God will destroy them for one thing or another, telling the world that Rome will have the final say, Jesus quietly whispers, Come and See. Come see for yourself what I am about. Come in and look around and see what you find. Come in and dare to bring your biggest hopes, your deepest fears, your heaviest sorrows.
And it seems to me that Jesus’ whole life was about catching people, about meeting us in our sinking boats, surrounded by our drowning fears. Jesus came to point us to our God. Jesus came to introduce us to our God. Jesus came to turn us away from our fears and turn us to faith. Come and See. Come see for yourself what this God is about. Come in and look around and see what you find. Come in and dare to bring your biggest hopes, your deepest fears, your heaviest sorrows. Come in and see the One who is about catching all of us so we can be caught up in Him. May it be so. Amen.