Luke 5:1 - 11
My dad was an ardent fisherman, something he had in common with my grandfather. Until my grandfather developed lung problems from smoking, the two of them would go out in the very early morning and spend most of the day fishing. I remember my dad proudly bring hime two or sometimes three nice fat brook trout which my mother would fry up for supper. There were also times when he brought home nothing. My dad tried to get me interested in fishing. I’ll never forget the first time -- I think I was about six or seven. He got me out of bed at 4 in the morning on a Saturday. I dozed in the back seat of the car until we finally reached the little Bighorn river. He gave me my new fishing pole and put a worm on the hook and told me that I was sitting near a good fishing hole and he would go up the river to another one. He promptly disappeared in the early morning mist and I felt pretty abandoned, hoping that I would not get eaten by a bear and also that I would not be confronted with a fish. It seemed like several hours whent buy and he finally returned and we went home. I must have made a fuss because he didn’t ask me to go fishing again for a few years. I never became an avid fisherman.
Peter and his partners didn’t fish in mountain streams for recreation. For them fishing was hard, backgreaking work. You went out onto the lake in a large round boat. You and your partners threw a very heavy net over toe side and as it sank you pulled on ropes to get the net to close around whatever it caught; you pulled the net back on the boat and sorted out whether there was anything worth keeping; and this went on as long as you could put up with it. And when you got back to shore you would go over the net repairing tears and cleaning it up, and you would clean your fish and set them out to dry over a fire. And sometimes you didn’t catch anything.
Peter and his partners were at the end of a bad day. I’m sure all they wanted at that point was to go home and rest up. But that’s when Jesus entered their lives, at least in the story that Luke tells. And Jesus takes over. I wonder what was going through Peter’s mind. I’m sure he didn’t think he could learn anything about fishing from this wandering preacher who had been teaching the crowd. Maybe he agreed to try one more time because of the people who were watching from shore. Whatever the reason, the result was an overwhelming catch of fish.
I suspect most people who go to Mass on Sunday have been involved at some point in their lives in ministry. Maybe teaching faith formation, maybe belonging to a service organization; maybe just helping out once in a while -- I see some people staying after the last Mass on Sunday morning who just tidy up the church. And for those who don’t do forma minstry, I’m sure that there are times when one’s faith pushes you to do something you’d rather not. We all know that faith is not just belief, but it is action based on belief.
But we get tired; we try something and fail; we make great plans and see that things don’t change much. Several years ago our diocese launched a major effort to revise the parish council system. There were workshops and publications and practice sessions. I remember that in Saint Mary’s we spent a lot of time learning about this. This was true of other parishes as well. All that effort came to nothing. Parish councils have not really changed from before n terms of impact, structure, or utility. This sort of thing is reflected in the secular world as well. I went through three such attempts at re-aligning everything while I worked at Baystate. These were all interesting and we hoped, promising, but things settled back into the original groove eventually.
Saint Peter and his partners had done everything they knew how to do to catch fish and put food on the table for their families. And they failed. And Jesus came along and rescued the whole sad situation. And that’s something we can take away from this story in the scriptures. When we step out to change things, we always start out by doing what we think will work, what we think is the best way to procede. And when we fail, we feel like giving up. And that’s when the Lord offers his help. That’s when we need to pray, to look around and see what he is telling us to do, to listen to the Holy Spirit. That’s when we need to put out into deep water and lower our nets, expecting that He will show us the way. We see the success of so many saints who operated in this way. Mather Angelica, the founder of EWTN, seemed to live a charmed life, with someone coming to rescue her over and over again when she was up against the wall. And she expected that. We celebrated the feast of Saint John Bosco this last week. He died at the end of the 1800’s, having established an educational system for the poorest of the children, and an order to carry on his work -- all because he left things in God’s hands. Read about your favorite saint and you will see that their successes were usually from allowing Jesus to lead.
So on this fifth sunday of ordinary time let’s resolve to put out again into the deep and lower our nets - and let the Lord work through us, which is when success is going to take place.
