“HIS GREAT DRAUGHT”
Saint Luke 5. 1-11
5th Sunday after Trinity: 24 July Anno Domini 2011
Fr Watson SSP
If you've ever seen a litter of young pups either trying to nurse from their mother, or if they're a bit older, trying to gobble down their doggie chow from a bowl…you understand "HOW" Christians are likewise to delight in gathering around the Word of the Lord. The Word is your bread, your milk, your meat, your sustenance and life, your "eternity chow!" The Word is as satisfying and "tasty" (delightful; delectable) as food for starving young dogs. Do you scramble anxiously, daily, to be so fed? Are your own "spiritual" tails wagging in sheer exuberant joy to be fed by Christ?
Repent of your sinful boredom and callousness.
"And it came to pass on July 24th 2011 that people from the Kansas City metro area and its suburbs are pressed upon Jesus to hear the Word of God, He stands by the Pulpit at Augsburg of Shawnee."
Jesus again talks with you and loves you through His word of preaching. "He who hears you hears Me."
The Lord points out two ships to you this morning. One ship, belonging quite possibly to James and John the "sons of Zebedee," is beached and not working. Man's efforts to do good, to fulfill the Law, to earn peace and salvation will always be moored to the "dry-dock" of damnable sin. Any fishing for the food of life done by your own "good works" is a scuttled and sinking enterprise. It matters not how well you mend or wash "your" nets, or how much fancy, new-fangled fishing gear and equipment you stow on your scrubbed and varnished (white-washed?) decks.
The other vessel, the ship Jesus enters this morning, on your behalf, is the Ship of His One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. This small, modest, and to the world-"silly, embarrassing, and ineffective" boat is the vessel of His Grace and His Good News. The ship of Simon and Andrew Bar-Jonah is simply Jesus with His own followers doing Jesus' work and will. Jesus can communicate with His children, His brothers and sisters anywhere He chooses to do so; of course. But He delights in speaking with you, FORGIVING YOU and FEEDING YOU from the boat…from the Holy Church. You might look for Him and for His "messages" in the clouds, the silence of nature or esoteric eastern meditation, but you will find His Words of Peace and Life only spoken from His boat.
That ship of the Holy Spirit is His pulpit, font, communion rail, and Holy Testament of Scripture.
Even as the old page 5 service was an artificial construct that has no real legitimacy in the Church, save as a "stop-gap" measure in times of pastoral death or sickness, so too Jesus simply talking with you and then leaving to go elsewhere is an "unding," i.e. a "non-thing." Jesus only begins to teach in order to work up your appetites. True love is not in just verbal interaction but also in the joys of sharing time and closeness at Table. It is a Table which is "close" but which is also closed. The Table is for Family Festivities. But since the Family is always trying to adopt new children, the closed reality is but temporary.
Who will be at the Banquet Feast of Jesus? Who will be admitted to the relief of pardon and peace; the satiety of fullness and revitalization; the supernal joy of belonging and being loved? The "pups feeding from the Mother Church" will be all those whom the Lord calls and gathers.
Simon and his successors, Clergy and Laity alike, will mutter in exhaustion and self-importance "Master, we have toiled all the night" (even when we have not!). But it's not your toiling, your concern, your money, your exertions at witnessing, your synod or its "programs" and emphases (even those prepared by Presidents of your liking) that catch anything but awkward glances from the Angels. It is only Christ Who is the Great Fisherman!
Thank the Lord that like the Blessed Virgin Mother, Saint Mary of Nazareth, you too have been given Grace by the Holy Ghost to say with her and with Saint Peter: "…nevertheless at Thy Word I will let down the net."
His Word is the net! Jesus Himself is the net! Christ is the Boat in which you journey and are kept safe from the flood of sin, self and world. Christ is the bait that captured and destroyed the devil-fish when Jesus lured the old snake to a head-crushing from the Holy Lure of Calvary. Jesus suffered and died on the wood, the same wood in which He was laid in at His nativity. The wooden crèche, the manger from which the barn animals fed (puppies at their dinner bowl?) points to the wooden cross from which the Bread/Body of God and the Wine/Blood of God flows out in sacrificial meal. That food, that "Holy Meal" is what gathers all the little fishes into the net(s) of Christ's Holy Hands. That Word of God in the Flesh, in the Absolution, in the Preaching, is what He fishes with this morning in His Bible story and in His Bible Banquet of the Holy Mass.
You, like your "old nature" role-model Simon Peter, have already been convicted of your own innate unworthiness by the Miraculous Catch of fish-YOU and those just like you! You have already fallen on your spiritual knees and confessed: "I a poor miserable sinner… justly deserve temporal and eternal punishment;" "depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord."
But He didn't-and He won't!
Because of Jesus' love in action: Teaching and Feeding, He gives you the catch-of-the-day (from your + Baptism on) everything He won for you at Calvary. He gives you Himself!
You like those Galilean fishermen fear not. You follow Him. You follow Him to the Feast.
In the Name of The Father + and of The Son and of The Holy Ghost