Breaking the surface

A sermon for St. John Lutheran Church, Cedar Falls

 Luke 5:1-11

             I have a not-so-serious rule for preaching that every sermon needs Jesus and every sermon needs trout, so I should be good to go with this one. Fitting fish into the Good Samaritan story takes some gymnastics, I tell you, or last time I was here, I seem to remember the text was on divorce. No fish to be seen, though I could preach on that one again, if you’d like.

            No, today we have fish, so we’ll stick with this one. Not trout, mind you, but close enough.

            I love watching fish in the water. There is something holy about looking through that barrier between the airy world where we live and the watery kingdom where they are lords. We live in two realities, yet, as every fly fisherman knows, we see one another through the surface—where air and water meet. What we understand as normal—living in the world of breath-air-spirit—that Hebrew word, ruach, that means all those things—is only a partial world. It reminds me of the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005 called “This is water,” which begins with Wallace telling a story that goes like this:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

 

            This might seem all so metaphoric and poetic—and perhaps not so useful—until you stand on the river bank and cast a fly upon the surface where air and water meet and watch a trout rise, breaking through from one plane to another, rising like Christ—like us—toward something unknown and scary, yet beautiful. So many who fish this way have discovered there is no substitute for calming our anxieties. Of course, Simon Peter and the disciples are not fishing for trout, and they are not fishing for relaxation. The story breaks down in the practicalities of making a living, which is where we too struggle to reconcile our stories. Sure, it would be nice to stand on a river bank casting a fly all day or atop the A-Frame bridge at Ewalu, watching the trout swim to-and-fro over the sandy river bottom (which all of you are welcome to do, by the way—just stop by the office and we’ll give you a magic visitor’s pass that allows you to stand on that bridge all day, watching trout. It might be the best free thing you could do, come to think of it). But I suspect most of you will not take me up on the offer. After all, we have so much to do and so much to worry about—things that feel legitimate.

            We live in a particularly anxious time in an anxious world, and it feels so because we can do so little to change things. We cannot even fix ourselves, yet we see a world so broken by inequity full of leaders so hypocritical and dishonest, and we feel the need to fix the world. Then, since we can do almost nothing about it, we feel anxious and we feel angry. Then we feel guilty, because we feel like we should be doing something—and we turn to the news and we feel outrage. Human beings are not meant to feel all this—not every day of our lives.

I suspect Simon Peter felt something similar after Jesus had the fishermen throw their nets on the other side of the boat—after he saw all those fish. “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” he said. A common theme in the Gospels is how the disciples continuously fail to believe the right things—how they demonstrate a startling lack of faith for those who are closest to Jesus. Yet, Jesus’ response to Peter is telling. He does not critique him for his lack of faith. Rather, he begins by saying, “Do not be afraid.”

Jesus uses that phrase—“Do not be afraid”—several times throughout his ministry. That, in itself, is worth noting, but what makes it even starker is that Jesus never once says the opposite. He never remarks on the positives of fearing the Lord. Not once. You can find references to the fear of the Lord in the Old Testament, for sure, but when Jesus comes, that fear disappears. He knows that we do not need God to justify us in our fears. We are afraid already—far too often. What we need is something different—what we need begins with fish.

But I want to get back to Simon Peter for a moment here, because his response, “I am a sinful man!” is the very reason Jesus chose him in the first place. The only thing we ever bring to God is our sins—not our victories, not our little successes. When we stand before God, we are not going to be able to brag about all the good stuff we did. Jesus knows the good, but it is stained by our basic and fundamental human limitations—these things we call “sins.” At first this sounds like terrible news, because it means we cannot justify ourselves before God. This is a great insult to the world out there that is telling you to climb that mountain of righteousness, become an idol, and don’t backslide, or else! No, all those people who live like idols—also sinners. The only thing we ever bring to Jesus is our sins. Like Simon Peter, we know what Jesus should do with us—he should turn his back on us, walk away, and go find someone better—but the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that he does no such thing. Instead, he turns to Simon Peter and almost like that David Foster Wallace commencement speech I quoted earlier, you can imagine Jesus, too, saying, “This sin? This is water.” This is the reality of the world—the air you breath; the water that fish swim in. Yet, here is what you will do—you will continue to fish, but this time for people.

You see, the trout is beautiful, but it is the connection between us through the surface that is divine. I do not know what is in the mind of a trout, and perhaps they too can appreciate beauty, but from my limited, airy perspective, their beauty is observed only by little, broken human beings like me, who are the very creatures so often harming their world. We are sinners, but we are also appreciators of beauty. It doesn’t justify us in the harm we cause—it just means we are complicated—saints and sinners.

I love watching trout from that A-frame bridge, but even better than watching them myself is that experience of bringing someone else—a child or even an adult—an Ewalu camper or one of you—and watching you see that trout swimming the water. This is why we have camp. Not just for trout, but for moments like these where the holy collides with the mundane between the air we breathe and the water that hints at something greater.

I suspect the Holy Spirit moves all over the place if we are attentive to it, but we seem to only notice it in these great transitions—between air and water where the trout swim—between life and death when we hold the hand of a loved one as they take their last breath—between our imperfection and God’s grace when we splash a baby’s head and proclaim them drowned in the waters of baptism. We see God when we break the surface.

Ewalu does not have any secret sauce for this kind of interaction—it’s just a space we create. Camp happens very near the surface—not necessarily between the air and the water, though sometimes there as well, but quite often at the surface between the physical and the spiritual—between heaven and earth. But this morning I feel compelled to share a little less about how camp is special for this, because I have found that so much of this available to us day to day. For me, sometimes it is trout, but it can be so many other arenas in our lives where we break through the surface. In all of these spaces, whether they happen in your garden, or on a trail, or even at the dining room table with your morning coffee, the interwoven thread is our inability to break the surface ourselves. Like Simon Peter, we come before Jesus and, at our best, we recognize that all we have to say is “I am a sinner.” And it’s enough.

            As it happens in Luke’s Gospel, the religious leaders of the day begin showing up following this story. The Pharisees and Sadducees and whoever else we want to lump in as Jesus-haters all begin to show up soon thereafter. The miracle of the fish earns Jesus some disciples, but the moment you break the surface, people get upset, and for those of us who live in the airy world, breaking the surface is dangerous. But it is also where God shows up. I am reminded of the old African-American spiritual, “Wade in the water”

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s a gonna trouble the water

God’s a gonna trouble the water. For the slave, that meant God’s intervention, recalling the literal life and death route of rivers followed by escaped slaves in the antebellum American south. For us today, it is a prescient reminder that God does not come to us in the status quo. God’s grace shows up not in the serenity of the river but in the breaking of the surface. We feel it sometimes when we come near one another in relationships, risking rejection and our greatest fears of our inadequacy, because we know we are sinners. Yet, God’s a gonna trouble that water, because it was never really about the object of our desire. It was never about the trout. It was only ever about breaking the surface. The trout shows us resurrection, rising like Christ, because we are too busy and full of ourselves to see where God is breaking every other surface in our lives.

This story is ultimately a hint at the unstoppable force that is Jesus Christ on his way to the cross. Jesus shows us that nothing will separate us from the love of God, as St. Paul says in his letter to the church in Rome some years later, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

God’s a gonna trouble that water and break that surface. The barrier between life and death will be obliterated on the cross so that when we come before God—sinners that we may be—those sins are all we ever need to bring. Beneath the surface lies new life—grace—forgiveness. The trout will rise. We will cast on the other side of the boat. And boy, will we discover something greater—something this groaning world full of tyrants desperately trying to accumulate more is desperate for—Christ’s word, “Go fishing, but this time for people.” That is what grace-drenched, surface-dwellers like ourselves get the incredible opportunity to do—look at a world that is forever looking to the skies, aspiring to see themselves in the stars, and show them the surface. We are not stars—we are people of the dirt, cleansed by the waters, gazing through the surface.

This is water. And God’s a gonna trouble it. And the trout will rise, like Christ. And we who get the grace to watch will find grace upon grace to one day enter in, breaking the surface from death to new life.