Saturday, January 21, 2017

Fish the deep water

Luke 5:1-16

“Put out in the deep water, Simon,” Jesus says. “Try the deep water.”
            I don’t know how big Simon’s nets were, but I imagine fishing in deep water with hand nets is a lot more challenging than shallow water. There’s just more water to cover, it’s more work, and, frankly, the fish tend to congregate more in the shallows. “Try the deep water,” says Jesus. “Fish the deep water.”
            It’s easy to spend all our time focusing on the shallows with one another, barely scratching the surface of who other people are. Most of our conversations take place in the shallows. “How are you doing?” “Terrible weather out there, isn’t it?” Keep casting your nets in the shallows and you know what you’ll get: the same answers, the same general greetings. It will definitely be the same, but will it be enough?
                Jesus has a different idea. It requires more work and it calls us to venture further into a place we fear. Jesus calls us to deeper water; water that is more mysterious, water that is untested, water that can drown us as surely as it can save us. Jesus calls us to throw our nets that way, into the unknown. This calls to mind that famous Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

But of course the most familiar part of the poem is the ending:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


                What Frost discovered is what Jesus knew—that to take the road less traveled and to fish in the deeper water are two ways of saying the same thing: We must venture deeper into the unknown. We must risk losing our old self to find our new one. Then, when we find ourselves most disconcerted we will understand that no effort in the deep water will ever be in vain. To fish in the deeper waters is to be authentic in faith, in friendship, in relationship. Jesus suggests it is, simply, the only way to be.
            There is something unquestionably romantic about that Frost poem. Who among us doesn’t love the idea of taking a road less travelled, of finding that place without hindrance, of discovering who and what I really am by heading off into the unknown? We love the idea of it. But when it comes to actually walking that path in our lives? Perhaps not. Especially as we age we become more bound to things and places—that’s not bad; it can be quite good!—but it also means we can fail to take risks we need to take. It becomes harder and harder to step out in faith; it becomes harder to fish the deep water. The shallow waters are always beckoning and they look like Cancun in January.
            Jesus calls us all the same: Fish the deep water. We’re all in need of somebody to fish us out of the deep from time to time. The deep water is where we sometimes sit in pain. It’s where we are vulnerable—most vulnerable—and it’s where we understand our need for somebody to come fish us out. Vulnerability: that’s the defining characteristic of the deep. It’s no surprise that we find ourselves in the deepest, most meaningful relationships with people who we have struggled alongside and with people who have been with us in the depths. When you’ve swam in the deep together you are changed.
            This is what it means to fish for people; not to say some prayers, not to knock on doors; it is to swim in the deep with them. Telling people about Jesus won’t stick unless you’re swimming with them. It’s not enough to leave a bobber out in the deep water; you have to work the nets yourself. But it’s hard to know what to do with that, because most of us don’t have a simple choice of fishing shallow or deep. Most of us, unlike Simon Peter, aren’t given so stark a choice. We have a harder job. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. It’s the path of discipleship. And, in that way, our choice is a lot like Simon Peter’s: Fish shallow or fish deep.

No comments:

Post a Comment