This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 2/9/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 5:1-11. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
In our reading this morning from the Gospel of Luke, we’re past the part where Jesus has preached at his childhood synagogue in Nazareth and provoked the people there to the point of trying to kill him. Jesus has returned to Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee – aka the Lake of Gennesaret – and while he’s there, he performs some healings. Among the people that he heals is the mother of Simon – and it doesn’t say so explicitly, but it sounds to me like he stayed at Simon’s house overnight.
Later, when Jesus tried to retreat to the wilderness, the crowds came looking for him. So he continued his tour of preaching and healing in the synagogues of the surrounding cities. Jesus is making quite a name for himself. People want to be close to him. So much so that he can’t even sneak off to take a break: The crowds coming looking for him in the wilderness.
How many of us wanted to be famous when we were kids? I know that I did. I thought it would be cool to be a movie star or some other celebrity. I imagined that being well-known and celebrated was one of the main perks of being an actor or a musician. But as I got older, I realized that celebrity is in many ways a curse. Bob Dylan or Beyonce can’t just go to the grocery store or take a walk on the beach. Crowds would gather. People would want autographs. If Brad Pitt wants to go enjoy his favorite coffee shop, he’s going to need a security detail. Or more likely, he’ll just not attempt it. After all, how enjoyable is a trip to a cafe when everyone is staring at you?
At this point in time, in the region of Galilee, Jesus was Brad-Pitt famous. Everyone knew who he was. He had been preaching in their synagogues and he had been healing people of blindness, disease, physical disabilities, and mental illness. Jesus was changing people’s lives; anyone who got close to him could be transformed.
This wasn’t a metaphor. Jesus was a healer. Being near him could mean a new beginning for people who were poor, broken and desperate. People with no other place to go, no other help on the way.
At this point, as Jesus is becoming renowned in the region for his healing ministry, he’s facing the challenges of celebrity. You know, Jesus really feels most spiritually in-tune when he can retreat to the wilderness. He recently spent forty days there. But now when he leaves town, the crowds follow. I imagine that Jesus loves long walks on the beach, but he just can’t be anonymous anymore. Crowds are gathering.
It makes sense that Jesus is feeling the need for a little distance. All these people are surrounding him, making demands on him, touching him. It’s hard to live that way. So there on the beach, as the crowds are pressing in on him, he sees Simon’s fishing boat there just a little ways down the shoreline. And I imagine he called out to them: “Hey there, Simon! You remember me? I stayed at your house last week. I healed your mom? Hey, yeah, do you think I could borrow your boat for a little while? I need to do some preaching.”
And that’s what they did. Jesus jumped into the boat with Simon and his buddies and pushed off from the shore – just far enough so that the crowds could hear him, but not swamp him. From there, on Simon’s little fishing boat, Jesus preached to the crowds.
When Jesus had finished speaking, he told Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” I can imagine the exhaustion in Simon’s voice when he told Jesus, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
And it says that when Simon and his friends cast their nets, they were immediately filled with fish to the point of bursting. They had caught so many fish that they had to call out to a neighboring fishing boat to come and help them pull in the catch. They pulled in so many fish that it filled both boats, to the point that the boats began to sink! Now, whether you take that last bit as hyperbole or not, this was a miraculous event. Simon and his friends had been out all night and hadn’t caught a single fish, but now when Jesus tells them to let down their nets, they draw them up again completely full. Now that’s a message!
It was so clearly miraculous that it says that Simon and his boatmates were astounded. They were scared. What on earth was going on here? At this point, Simon falls to his knees in the boat (probably squishing some fish along the way) and says to Jesus, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But Jesus said, “Do not be afraid. From now on, you will be catching people.” When Simon and his compatriots James and John reached the shore, they left everything and followed Jesus.
(As a side note: We’ve got multiple stories in the gospels where Jesus miraculously feeds thousands of people, but this story isn’t counted among them. It should be. When Simon, James, and John left their boats to follow Jesus, they also must have left all that fish. I’ll bet the crowds gathered on the beach were able to eat for a week from that catch!)
So what’s the message here? We know that Jesus had become Barack-Obama famous in Capernaum at this point, where he couldn’t go anywhere without being swamped by crowds. We know that the region was full of desperate people seeking healing and food. We know that Jesus chose Simon and his friends to join him as disciples, and that they responded by leaving everything to follow him. We know that Jesus called them by fulfilling their profession – giving them the greatest catch of fish they could ever hope to have – and then redirected their catching profession from fish to people. With Jesus, they would be fishing for other human beings.
I remember hearing this story as a small child, maybe five or six or seven years old. I can remember what a funny image this was for me: Fishing for people. I imagined standing at the shore with a fishing pole, reeling in human beings. What a bizarre idea! As a kid growing up in 20th century urban America, the fishing I was familiar with was small-scale sport fishing, with fishing poles, lines, and bobbers. But that’s not how commercial fishing generally works. That’s not the kind of fishing that Simon and James and John were doing. It’s not the kind of fishing that Jesus was calling them to, either.
While it’s cute when a small child misunderstands the story and imagines Simon standing out there with a pole and reeling in grown men on a fishing line, it’s less adorable when you see grown people misunderstanding in the same way. Whether or not we’ve consciously realized it, much of our understanding of this passage has been based on a pole-fishing model rather than the authentic, gospel way of fishing that Jesus and his first disciples understood.
Amateurs use fishing poles; professionals use drag nets. This is critical, this is central to the message of Jesus in Luke: Jesus is not an amateur pole-fisher, and he’s not gathering amateur fishers as his disciples. Jesus is preparing Simon, James, and John for a serious industrial operation. Jesus is preparing the disciples for a day that is coming when the Holy Spirit will draw thousands of people to shore in a single morning, a day when the nets will be so full that the boat will start sinking under the weight.
In the ministry of fishing for other people, drawing other people out of the chaotic waters of the world and into the boat of God, Jesus implies large scale.
It’s a message that we in the church have often missed. We’ve imagined ourselves to be pole-fishers. We want to reach the right sort of people. We want to spend our time with a certain kind of person. We want to share similar interests, culture, language, and values. But that’s not the model that Jesus gives us for ministry to the world. That’s not the path that he chose when gathering the disciples.
The disciples were a motley crew. A lot of Jesus’ closest disciples were fishermen, which was a very normal job back then. Maybe today they would have been baristas, bus drivers, and construction workers – regular working folks. Matthew, on the other hand, was a tax collector: a traitor to his people. Tax collectors worked with the Roman occupation, and typically extorted extra taxes from the people to line their own pockets. Few people were more hated than tax collectors.
Another disciple named Simon the Zealot was, well, a Zealot. The Zealots were revolutionaries against Roman occupation and swore oaths to kill people like Matthew, since tax collectors were collaborators with that very occupation. (Clarence Jordan once said that he suspected that Jesus had to sleep between Matthew and Simon the Zealot many nights, to make sure that Matthew didn’t get a knife in the ribs before dawn.) These are not people you would expect to see walking around town together!
Yet Jesus brought them together. Jesus caught them all in his drag net. Because that’s what drag nets do. At the end of the night, you end up with a lot of fish, but lots of other things, too: Crabs, shrimp, jellyfish, octopuses, and sea turtles – not to mention all sorts of rocks and shells and debris. With pole fishing, you generally have some idea of what you’re aiming for; with a drag net, you’re likely to get a whole lot of surprises.
The Kingdom of God is like a drag net, but we tend to be pretty fond of pole fishing. We like to pick and choose. That’s not the kind of fishing that Jesus teaches.
The way that Jesus calls us into is promiscuous. The Kingdom of God is not selective. God invites everyone. When we lower our nets, they’re going to come up full. And the contents of those nets are going to surprise us. As followers of Jesus, our lives should be filled by surprising, unlikely people. If people judge us by the company we keep, they should come away deeply confused.
The Kingdom of God is like a net, not a fishing pole. We want the fish, but we also want crabs and squids and mermaids. We are called to haul in everyone that God puts into our nets, every person that God places in our lives. No need to worry about seeking out the fish; if we lower our nets, God will fill them.
But so often we don’t lower our nets, because we want to remain in control. We want to pick our friends, not have God pick them for us. If we’re Zealots, we don’t want to hang around with collaborators and traitors. And if we’re tax collectors, we don’t want to hang around with judgmental people who threaten us and draw a circle that leaves us on the outside.
The Kingdom of God is a drag net that draws us together with the most unlikely people and makes us into an organic community, one body in Jesus. It’s a net that catches us and connects us. It’s a net that pushes us outside of our comfort zone and into the boat of God’s great adventure.
Adventure is exciting, but it can also be disruptive and frightening. I understand why Simon begged Jesus to go away. It’s scary to open up the floodgates to the people God wants to put in our lives. (After all, what kind of desperate, hungry, lonely people might show up?) But the fellowship that Jesus models for us among his first disciples shows us the kind of blessed community that can emerge when we cast our nets wide and trust God to fill them.
This week, I want to invite you to examine yourself: Are your nets lowered, or are you still using a fishing pole? Are you ready to surrender control? What might happen if you let God fill your nets?