From Epiphany to Purpose

[This message was shared during worship celebrations with the people of Friendship Lutheran Church, Amelia, Ohio on February 3 and 4, 2007.]

Luke 5:1-11
Today’s Bible lesson, the scholars tell us, can be divided into three sections. I’ve given them names:

• the hunger,
• the sign,
• the call.

I want to talk about each one with you.

First: the hunger. We see it in the first three verses of the lesson. Read it out loud with me, would you?

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of 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.

At this phase of Jesus’ ministry, we learn, from a few verses at the end of Luke 4, that His focus was more on teaching than on giving miraculous signs. He was sharing God’s Word with people. That might not seem very exciting to us. Maybe that’s because our lives and conditions aren’t as desperate as those of the crowds who hungered for God’s Word from Jesus even more desperately than many of us are anticipating a certain football game that’s happening this weekend.

Sometimes, it takes a cataclysmic event for us to realize that we hunger for God.

The call came to a pastor friend of mine in the middle of the night. It was an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. The friend revealed between sobs that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis wasn’t good. Was there something his pastor friend could say? He wasn’t looking for miracles. Just a word from God that could help him.

Once I got a call from a colleague. “Mark,” he said. “There is something really evil happening in this church. I don’t know what it is. But it’s ugly. People are gossiping about one another. They’re undermining all the good things that God has been doing here. I know that you pray. Would you please pray for us?” That pastor was hungering for the presence and power of God to work in his church.

The crowds that flocked around Jesus hungered for the word of hope, of peace, of strength for tough times that only the God we know in Jesus Christ can bring.

I’ve found that stress has, at three different junctures of my life, afflicted me in major ways. My body reacted so badly during one of these episodes twenty-two years ago, that I was taken to a hospital emergency room with a suspected heart attack. It came at a time when there were eleven people from the congregation I then served in various hospitals from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Ann Arbor, Michigan. My wife also just had our second child. But, believing that I was super-pastor, I agreed to visit a man from another parish who was in the Cardiac Care Unit of a hospital in Toledo.

While visiting that man, I became hot and weak. My face turned red. The nurses in the CCU told me they feared I was having a heart attack. I thought, "Then it's good I'm in the cardiac unit." But they threw me onto a gurney and took me down to the ER. There, they gave me an antihistamine, a medicine that always hits me like a tranquilizer dart. Then, they gave me a shot of adrenaline. Then, shaking all over, they told me, "Okay, Mr. Daniels, you can drive the forty miles back home." It was all caused by stress!

But each time stress has overtaken me, the cure has been the same: I call on God and to remember Jesus’ promise: “I am with you always, even to the close of the age.”

Or I remember the fantastic words of the joy-filled twenty-third Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff— they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

God's Word brings us peace, the assurance that God is in our corner.

I’ve learned that when the hunger leads me to God, He always feeds me blessings. Sometimes that’s an insight that leads me to repent for a sin. But even then, the result is the same: the peace of God that, even in the fragmentation and the chaos of life, helps me feel whole. That’s what the crowds hungered for. That’s what we hunger for.

The next section of our lesson shows us a sign. Would you read the next few verses with me?

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. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

Peter, a professional fisherman, knew that the fish were swimming so far down in the sea that he and the others couldn’t possibly snag any fish if they lowered their nets again. Yet they did lower them because Jesus said that they should.

When Peter saw that their boats nearly sank from the haul of fish, he fell at Jesus’ knees and gave Jesus worship. Peter became aware of his sins and of his unworthiness to stand in the presence of God. But Jesus didn’t leave Peter, even when he begged Jesus to go away. He won’t leave you either!

Sometimes it’s only when we venture into the deep, trying things for God that we may feel sure that we can’t do, making ourselves of service to others in Jesus’ Name, that we really see Christ.

I love being in the community and hearing reports about the good things that the people of Friendship do. It happened again on Friday. I was talking with the director of the West Clermont Unit of our Clermont County Boys and Girls Club. He told me how much he appreciated a member of our congregation who does a lot to help out. “Tim T.,” he told me, “is a fantastic person!” I agreed!

Against their better judgment, at Jesus’ command, Peter and the other disciples launched out into the deep, saw God do wonderful things through them, and in Jesus, found themselves in the presence of God Himself. God wants us to have the same experience every day!

We’ve talked about the hunger and the sign. That brings us to the final section of today’s lesson: the call. Read again with me, please:

For [Peter] and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.”

In first century Judea, the sea was a dark, foreboding place, even for fishermen who earned their livelihoods from it. The sea conjured up images of the chaos that the Old Testament book of Genesis says existed before God created the heavens and the earth. There, a churning deadly sea--Genesis calls it “the deep”--was the stuff to which God gave order and peace and life. To God’s people, the sea was a deadly place full of evil and monsters they called leviathan. When Jesus told Peter--and us, “From now on you will be catching people,” He was really giving us our mission as Christians.

We’re to go into the deep places of life...

• the places where people work and play,
• where they laugh and mourn,
• where they know success and failure,
• where they struggle with problems and challenges...

and we're to fish them out of chaos, into the waiting arms of the Savior Who died and rose to give all who believe in Him new life that lasts forever. We’re to be the open arms of God, letting all know about Jesus Christ.

And Jesus wants our nets to be teeming! He wants this sanctuary to be filled each weekend with people who, just like us, are...

• hungry for the Word of God;
• anxious to see and experience Jesus’ presence; and
• because of His goodness and grace, willing to push themselves into the deep to tell the whole world about Christ.

You “will be catching people,” Jesus tells His Church, including our church. In other words, "You will be my witnesses."

On April 6, 2000, Ricky and Tony Sexton were taken hostage in their own Wytheville, Virginia home. A fugitve couple on a crime spree roared into the Sexton’s driveway as Tony stood outside with her dog. Brandishing pistols at Tony, Dennis Lewis and Angela Tanner ordered her back into the house.

Once inside, the Sextons did something utterly unexpected: They demonstrated Christ's love to their captors. They listened to Dennis and Angela's problems, served them dinner, read to them from God's Word, and even prayed for them and cried with them.

During negotiations with the police, Ricky Sexton refused his own release when Lewis and Tanner suggested that they might end their standoff by committing suicide. But the whole thing came to an unusual end: Before surrendering to police, Angela Tanner left $135 and a note for the Sextons that read: “Thank you for your hospitality. We really appreciate it. I hope [Dennis] gets better. Wish all luck and love. Please accept this. It really is all we have to offer. Love, Angela and Dennis.”

Sometimes we wade into the deep chaos of our fallen world.

Sometimes it comes through our front doors, unbidden.

But no matter what our circumstances, our call to fish for people for Jesus Christ remains the same. Ricky and Tony Sexton knew that. So do we.

God wants our nets to be full. He wants our church to be full. That will happen...

• when we feed others’ hunger with God’s Word;
• when we allow ourselves to be signs of Jesus’ presence through our service and our love; and when we go fishing, asking others to join us as we follow Jesus.

Friendship is already well known in this community for being a serving church. I pray that we will be known too, as a fishing church, a witnessing church, that never tires of calling others to believe in Jesus, the one true hope for all people.

[The true story of Rick and Tony Sexton came from The Roanoke Times, April 8, 2000 edition, and is presented in Perfect Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion.]