Thursday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
The sentence that stands out for me in the reading from Luke is the one in which Simon says “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets.” What is so powerful in that sentence is that Simon tells Jesus that he is at his limit. He has worked hard all night and has caught nothing. And then he says that at Jesus’ command he’ll drop the nets again. He does so, of course, convinced that once again they won’t catch anything.
I am by no means a great fisherman! But I was blessed to grow up in a family that loved to fish. Every summer when I was little, my mother would pack up our clothes and boxes of canned food and other imperishables and my dad would pack fishing poles and his two outboard motors and somehow load it all into a cartop carrier and into the “way back” of an Oldsmobile station wagon. And we would head out long before dawn for Ely, Minnesota for two weeks of fishing on absolutely gorgeous lakes on the Canadian border.
What was strange about those “vacations” is that they didn’t really seem like vacations. They seemed a lot more like work. When I think of a vacation, I think of time off. Time to just enjoy the beauty of nature. And there certainly was a lot of beauty on the Canadian border. Pine trees and birch trees and gorgeous lakes and grizzly bears (we would go to the garbage dump to watch them find goodies in the trash we humans produced). But we had a task. We had work to do. And that was to catch fish. Walleye and Northern Pike and Bass. We always went in early June before temperatures got too warm for good fishing. And most days we had good luck. And at the end of the day my grandfather would be “cleaning” a lot of fish and my mother would soon be cooking it up for dinner.
But not always. Some days we wouldn’t catch a thing. And we would return to our cabin with nothing, saying something like “well, the fish just weren’t biting today.”
So, when I read that sentence from Luke, I have some idea what he is talking about. You can be out all day fishing. You can be casting this way and that with your best fishing lure or put in the water what looks to you like a super juicy worm with a bobber and you get nothing. You position your boat in a really promising spot—you’ve got some weeds nearby. You’re in a nice little bay. And you catch nothing.
What I love about this story is Simon’s faith. “Master” he says. “We have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command we will lower the nets.” That’s a lot of faith. You’ve been out all day fishing. You haven’t caught a thing. But you are going to lower your nets one more time as if, at the Master’s command, the fish are going to suddenly appear in your nets. Really? What are the chances of that?
Can you think of a time in your life when you knew better than to imagine that something good was going to come of that moment? I can.
When Bill and I got married thirteen years ago, there was a lot of pain, all over the place. Our children from our previous marriages had every good reason to hate the fact that we were completely messing with their lives—undoing relationships, moving two of them to Dayton, asking them to consider loving a new “dad” or a new “mom.” More than this, I had gone from being a tenured faculty member and chair of the Communication Department at Bluffton University to being a lecturer in the English Department at UD, with no guarantee at all that the position would be permanent.
But now our children love us. Even more crazy, they love one another. We are both professors at the University of Dayton. And, heck, people actually think we’re respectable.
Life is hard. And oftentimes our nets are empty. The nets of too many of our brothers and sisters are empty. And there are also graces. God fills our nets in ways we can’t possibly understand. More than that, we know better than to think such a thing possible.
Every now and then, God is just ridiculous. Way beyond reason. Good in ways we cannot understand. Can you think of a moment like that in your life? When you knew you weren’t catching any fish. And then your net was so full that you thought your boat would sink?
I hope so. We worship the God of excess. The God who so loved us that he sent his only son to be with us. To know us. To die for us. Amen.
- Sue Trollinger