Fishing the Deep Waters

A sermon preached in Christ Chapel on February 12, 2004, by the Rev. Jane Lancaster Patterson '93, Interim Director of Theological Field Education

Epiphany 5-C

Judges 6:11-24a; Psalm 85; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

Jesus said, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

            I once attended a house blessing at a transitional shelter for women and children, where the presider, after blessing the rooms, shooed us all into the kitchen to make Eucharist. She pulled a whole wheat tortilla and a bottle of wine out of her bag, cleared off the formica-topped kitchen table, and started rummaging through the kitchen cabinets for vessels. A paper towel became a corporal; a paper napkin took its place as purificator. A tea cup with a faded design on its rim became a chalice, a melamine salad plate the paten.

            I was thinking about all of this this morning when Jesus asked Peter for the loan of his boat as a preaching platform, a bimah for this makeshift synagogue on the beach. I can just see Jesus, an incongruous Rabbi, bobbing up and down on the waves as he preaches. He needed a place from which to preach. There was that boat, cleaned out and ready, since its owner hadn’t been able to catch any fish. Jesus could use that boat.

            One warm evening on the west side of San Antonio, Christ took on flesh and blood in a kitchen, among castoff women and children, gathered around a rickety table, passing a tea cup and a plastic salad plate among them. One day on the shores of Gennesaret the Word of God was truly preached and truly heard among a crowd of nobodies, gathered to listen to a rabbi on a boat.  It seems that God, who is at every moment working to draw us near, will use absolutely anything that is at hand to reach us. Sometimes I can almost hear God chuckling and saying softly, “Yep, I can use that.”

            After preaching from the boat, Jesus decides that he can use those fishermen – Simon Peter, and his partners, James and John – as disciples. And the interesting thing to me is that he doesn’t plan to re-make them into something completely different. He isn’t going to ignore all that they’ve been in the past, even while he initiates them into the ways of following him. He’s going to show them how the things that they already know are going to be the entry point into their new discipleship. He says, “Do not be afraid; from now on, you will be fishing -- for people.” What does Jesus see in these three? How does he know they might make good disciples? He knows because when he asked them to row out into the deep water for a catch, they did so. And they are going to be deep-water fishermen all their lives, from this point on, setting their nets for people whose lives are spent in the deep water.

            I got to spend time this past January with some of our Middlers, while they apprenticed as deep-water fishermen. The first group I joined was in LA, with the Jubilee Consortium, an organization of four Episcopal parishes in Hollywood, Inglewood, Long Beach, and South Central Los Angeles, some of the most socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. What is it like to fish the deep waters? I’ll tell you about one of the parishes, Saint Stephen’s, the one in Hollywood. I realized as I took the exit off the freeway and started down the street I was told to follow, that this was not the same Hollywood that Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz visited in the fifties. It wasn’t all sunshine and palm trees and limousines. It was like a place forgotten, in decay, tumbling down around its unlucky inhabitants. When Jaime Edwards-Acton (a graduate of this seminary) came to be Rector of Saint Stephen's about four years ago, the congregation had dwindled to seven regular attendees. The occupants of the rectory were a sexton who was generally drunk before noon, and a tenant who used the rectory as the base for a thriving business in crack cocaine. The alleyway on the side of the church was the promenade for the local hookers, and the parish hall was so full of accumulated junk that Jamie had no idea there was a stage in there until someone referred to it, and he spent a couple of days pulling away enough stuff to see it. Every surface needed cleaning and painting, but was it even worth it for a congregation of seven?

            This is when Jaime knew he had some deep-water fishing to do. In the deep waters around the church were families who didn’t speak English; children with no place to go after school, and not enough food in their stomachs; adults who couldn’t live on the money they made if they could find a job at all; people caught in all kinds of addictions; and a distressingly large population of homeless teenagers.

            How do you fish there? You begin to speak the language of the people who live there, and then you start to feed them, body and soul. Saint Stephen's began offering a service in Spanish, a service which now regularly draws one hundred and fifty people on a Sunday. The English-language service has a regular attendance of forty. A professional theater company refurbished the parish hall with theater seats and lights and the rediscovered stage. In addition to their public performances, they provide programs and instruction in drama for children on weekday afternoons, and occasional dramatic pieces for church services. The director of the company was raised in the Episcopal church, and is now a regular communicant at St. Stephen's. There is a working garden for the neighborhood children, to teach them all those miraculous things that only a garden can teach. The alleyway has been cleared, planted with grass and flowers, and was awaiting a couple of barbecue grills when we were there, so that the neighbors could have a safe and beautiful place to gather with their families.

            To fish the deep waters you may have to do some things no one ever told you about, like pulling out the last ten pews of the nave so that you can hold cheerleading classes and yoga in there, just in case your parish hall has become a theater. You might have to have two completely separate preschool programs leasing space in your basement. You’ll definitely have to learn how to squeeze every bit of good out of every dollar you have, because it will become clear to you that your church is a boat in deep water, and a lifeline for those caught in the undertow.

            The week after I stood in the nave of Saint Stephen's, listening to the cheerleaders warming up, I was in Atlanta with our Middlers at the Crossroads Center of Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church. Saint Luke’s is located on the side of a hill, with its front doors on Peachtree Street. From there, it stretches back and down the hill a full three stories to Courtland Street, where the doors of Crossroads open onto a long line of homeless men and women, who are waiting for their 10:30 meal. To spend time at Crossroads is to realize why most people shy away from the deep waters, but also why some wouldn’t fish anywhere else.

            The first morning that I joined our team, we were ushered into the office of Dominic Heard, who is the Director of Spiritual and Social Services at Crossroads. Dominic was clearly shaken to the core. A family (two adults and three young children) with whom he had worked extensively four months previously had somehow come completely unglued. The parents and two of the children were found wandering the streets naked in the middle of the night in below-freezing weather, and their middle child, a six-year old girl, was found in their abandoned apartment across the street from Crossroads, beaten to death, with torn-out pages of the Bible strewn around her body. Both parents and their nine-year-old child had been involved in the brutal beating. Dominic spread his hands out, “I don’t understand it,” he said. “They were beautiful children. The little boy looks just like his daddy. They were sitting right there where you are. Beautiful children.”

            Fishing the deep waters is hard soul-work, because you don’t always get to stay in the boat. Some days push you overboard, falling out of the world you know, into the depths you had only suspected. The day we joined Dominic in his office to pray for him, for the family in crisis, and for the ongoing work of Crossroads, we all fell out of the boat. Walking out of his office, we were stripped down into a state of simplicity. None of our education or warm coats or full stomachs separated us from the raw human need of the people we served that day. Our neediness and inadequacy met theirs, eye-to-eye. But still, we fished as we could. And IDs were applied for, and bus tokens were found for a woman to get to work, and three hundred people were fed, and four people were accepted into drug rehabilitation programs. And when night fell, the people whose concerns we had taken on for a time found their uneasy sleeping-places in shelters, and under bushes in the park, and in alleys and doorways all over downtown Atlanta.

            Philip Simmons, an author who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in his mid-thirties, used his newfound acquaintance with frequent falling to talk about the falling overboard that we all must do, that we will inevitably do. He says:

We are all—all of us—falling. We are all, now, this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water’s surface shimmer. And so let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death, let us also fall toward life. (From Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, p.12)

In the days to follow, Dominic showed us how a fall toward pain and weakness might become, in the slow, patient work of compassion, a fall toward sweetness and strength. Jesus calls his disciples to know the deep waters, because the deep waters are where Christian virtues become not a matter of an assent of the will, but a fact of life: thanksgiving, generosity, simplicity, an open acceptance of the neighbor. In the deep waters, we know ourselves not only as the ones who fish, but as the ones who are – wonder of wonders -- caught in the net of God’s mercy. In the deep waters of our own and others’ helplessness, we are transformed into people capable of discipleship.

            Jesus said, “Put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.” God can use even you.