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Daring the Depths

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
June 13, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 43:1-7
Luke 5:1-11

“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.’”

On this Sunday before the summer solstice, when we turn toward the season of neglected novels, sand between the toes, lightening bugs in the back yard, fishing lines cast off a pier and swimming lessons for the firstborn, I imagine days spent—with the help of the poet and the urging of Jesus—daring the depths: the depths of not-knowing, the depths of another’s need, the depths of life’s meaning and purpose, the depths of trust and letting go.

“The first real live poem I ever remember hearing aloud,” writes poet Catherine Haley, “is ‘For Julia, in the Deep Water.’ It’s about my friend Julia,” she goes on. “Her father was a poet….If memory serves, Dr. Morris came to school and read this poem to our sixth grade class.” Published in 1976 in The New Yorker, the words remain bracing and prescient in this season when some of you will embody their truth as you stand waiting at the deep end of a pool:

“Put out into the deep water,” says Jesus to Simon, and I imagine another instructor, sent to us because he does love us, who will never do anything harder than lead us to follow him, where the water is darker and we are over our head, screaming as we learn our way toward him, learn how/in the helpless water/It is with faith/We live in what kills us.

By the time Jesus reaches the Lake of Gennesaret in Luke’s gospel, he has acquired quite a reputation. His inaugural sermon, delivered to a congregation in his hometown of Nazareth, elicits amazement “at the gracious words that come from his mouth,” says Luke. But then, as Jesus begins to plumb the depths of the text and get specific about the demands of the gospel, “all in the synagogue are filled with rage. They get up,” writes Luke, “drive him out of town and to the brow of the hill on which the town was built,” intending to rid the community of this disturber of the peace, to scapegoat him for the things they cannot face in themselves.

Jesus eludes them and next appears in Capernaum, a city along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. On the sabbath, he goes to the synagogue where his teaching is interrupted by a man with a demon. Having (perhaps) heard of the recent disturbance in Nazareth, I imagine the man’s demon is his fear of the depths, for he cries out, “Let us alone! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” Again Jesus addresses the deep end of human existence, rebuking not the man but the darkness, the unclean spirit, the fear, saying simply, “Be silent, and come out of him!” Again, the crowd is amazed and says to one another, “What kind of utterance is this?” It brings to mind the oblique but calculated, “Well, that was a sermon!” said to preachers in so many words at the church door.

Needless to say, word about Jesus spread throughout the Galilee. Likely some who heard about this preacher determined never to come near him, so accustomed were they to the shallows. A few may have realized, early on, the threat he posed to the world as it was and so were already plotting his demise. But others sought him out. The others, according to Luke, were those who were sick and knew it, were possessed by demons and could bear the darkness no longer, were outcast and sensed in Jesus the presence of one who might be a friend to sinners, were lost and had been found by him who left the ninety-nine in search of one, in search of them. By the fifth chapter of Luke’s gospel, this latter group had grown exponentially and was pressing in on him to hear not just any word, but the word of God: to hear news of a new heaven and a new earth where their tears would be wiped away and where there would be no death, neither sorrow nor crying nor any more pain. In other words, they were those who had already dared the depths because the depths were where they dwelt and where God had come to join them.

We know that it was morning when Jesus appeared at the lake because the fishermen were just in from a night of work. Cleaning their nets made of linen, nets that were visible to the fish during the day and so were only of use in the darkness, they were ready to call it a night, a disappointing night, an unsuccessful night. But oh what a day, what a life they were about to be given! Lacking a pulpit, Jesus climbs into Simon’s boat and asks him to row out so that he might teach the crowd. Yet it is neither the crowd nor Jesus’ teaching of them that holds Luke’s attention. Rather we are made privy to a conversation at the deep end, where the water is darker and we are over our head, where we will learn our way toward him, learn in the helpless water/it is with faith/we live in what kills us.

“Put out in the deep and let down your nets for a catch,” Jesus says to Simon who had already heard of, if not witnessed, Jesus’ healing of his mother-in-law. Two things to notice: Jesus steps into the space where Simon lives and moves and has his being: Jesus comes to us in the life we have chosen to live without him; second, Jesus instructs Simon to do that which is completely counter to his understanding of how things work in the world: Jesus’ words mean to effect repentance, a turning away from the life we have chosen and know so well, a turning to the life, to the God who, in Christ, has chosen us and is about to catch us alive.

Now like an instructor (who leads you into the deep water, the deep end where the water is darker—her open and encouraging arms that never get nearer), Jesus is throwing Simon into the deep end of the pool where he is over his head. Bonhoeffer puts the matter starkly: “When Christ calls [you], he bids [you] come and die.” Simon, wasting his valuable breath, not willing to let go of his chosen life, says “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” Linen nets in the daytime? Here we would teach Jesus a thing or two about survival in the real world. Truthfully, this is where the conversations ends for most of us with him. He asks us to change the way we are living our life, asks us to trust his words instead of our “know how”, asks us to die. Most of us never manage the turn, never dare a toe in the water or a net cast in the daylight and the deep because we know better. We know the life we have chosen and even if we are failing because we are succeeding, even if we are not drowning because we are floating on the surface in the shallows, even if we and those we love are running well in a race to nowhere, this is the life we must lead given the circumstances, the expectations, the insanity to which we have surrendered.

But in the next breath Simon does relent, repent, turn reluctantly and without expectation: “Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” Simon obeys without believing. Nevertheless, the catch is overwhelming and meant, by Luke, to signal God’s eternity glimpsed for a moment in time. The boats are so weighed down with fish that they begin to sink. So does Simon Peter. He falls to his knees and, like the man with a demon in Capernaum, he cries, “Go away from me!” But unlike the man with a demon, Simon confesses in the presence of mystery that he is in over his head: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” The amazement that had caused the crowd in Nazareth to seek this instructor’s death, and had called out of the congregation in Capernaum mild consternation at his power, now finds Simon Peter and James and John on their knees before a teacher in whose net they had been caught alive, a teacher whose first words were, now that he had the attention of their trembling minds, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” From now on, you will be inviting men and women and children to dare the depths where the water is darker and they will be in over their heads, screaming, learning their way toward God, learning how/in the helpless water/it is with the gift of faith/they will live in what kills them.

Thus “They are made his witnesses,” writes Karl Barth: “not idle spectators merely watching and considering; not for the enjoyment of a spectacle granted to them; not for the vain increase of their knowledge…; not inquisitive reporters; but witnesses who can and must” obey when told to put out into the deep waters and let down the nets and catch people alive, for Christ’s sake, lest they die without ever having lived.

On this Sunday before the summer solstice, as we mark the completion of another year wherein teachers have led our children to him who instructs them to put out into the deep end where the water is darker, where mystery catches them alive on their knees learning how in the helpless world it is with faith that they will live in what kills them: on this Sunday I imagine God as a mother, waiting in the thin air, down at the deep end, doing nothing. God has never done anything harder than watch God’s children (meaning you and me and our children and our children’s children) learn our way toward faith, toward the life that is free because we have put all of our trust in him.

The temptation, of course, is to save our children and our children’s children from the depths, from the darker waters where they will scream for us and we will do nothing as they learn their way toward God. That is why the instructor into whose open encouraging arms we must trust them is the instructor God has sent, who loves them more than we do, and who teaches them, as we are drowning forever in the thin air down at the deep end, teaches them with the words Luther once imagined Jesus saying to us:

Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension and I will help you comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is true comprehension. My comprehension transcends yours. [It] is the way of the cross. You cannot find it yourself, so you must let me lead you as though you were…blind….Wherefore it is not you, no [mortal], no living creature, but I myself, who instruct you by my word and Spirit in the way you should go. Not the work you choose, not the suffering you devise, but the road which is clean contrary to all that you choose or contrive or desire—that is the road you must take. To that I call you and in that you must be my disciple>.

My deepest prayer is that this church be given the courage to wait where the water is darker as he instructs our children, the trust to watch down in the thin air at the deep end, as they learn their way toward him, learn how, in the helpless water, it is with as faith dares the depths that we find ourselves, with them, caught alive in the net of his love. Thanks be to God.

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