Sunday, February 10, 2019 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Seeing in the Mirror Dimly

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 138
Luke 5:1–11

People say that the net full of fish is the miracle of this story, but the real miracle of this story is that Simon decided that God was God and that he would live that way beginning immediately.

Robert Wright, “Why Some People Don’t Catch Fish”

Simon and Jesus had met earlier in the week. Jesus had traveled to Capernaum and ended up at Simon’s house. While there, Jesus ate and healed Simon’s mother-in-law from her fever before setting out once again on the ministry circuit. This familiarity between the two of them is why Jesus’ decision to board Simon’s boat shouldn’t surprise us that much.

Furthermore, Simon’s initial reaction of veiled irritation to Jesus’ request probably should not surprise us either. Simon and his colleagues had been working tirelessly throughout the entire night. Their nets had come up empty. They had just docked their boats and were cleaning up—smelly, frustrated, tired—when Simon saw Jesus walking towards him. After enduring such a long night, Simon was, I imagine, ready to go home, clean up, and go to bed. So when Jesus got into his boat and requested that Simon row him out a bit so he could teach, well, Simon had to bite his tongue. Yet perhaps because of what Jesus had done for his mother-in-law, Simon politely did as he was told.

But later, when Jesus told him to start fishing again, Simon could not stay politely silent. “Master,” he said, “we have fished all night long and caught nothing.” Yet even though he protested, something in Simon—maybe a sense of still needing to be polite or perhaps just a strange curiosity—something in him opened a small bit to Jesus, and he again did as he was told and let down his nets one more time.

Once again, we shouldn’t be all that surprised by Simon’s overwhelmed reaction to what happened next. In that one seemingly futile attempt, they caught so many fish that the two boats were filled to overflowing and threatening to sink! Immediately in the face of that surprising, grace-filled abundance, Luke tells us, something clicked in Simon’s heart. Something changed within his soul. Luke clues us in about Simon’s internal change by giving him a new name—Simon Peter. It is a small change, but in scripture a change of name always indicates a change of heart, a change of vocation, of purpose.

With open-mouthed surprise, this changed Simon Peter suddenly found he could no longer look at Jesus face-to-face. He had to avert his eyes. He could no longer simply call him Master. He felt compelled to call him Lord. And he could no longer stand as an equal. He fell to his knees. As I sometimes say in the liturgy that surrounds our prayer of confession, in the face of God’s great goodness shining through Jesus, Simon Peter saw clearly his own sinfulness, the myriad of ways in which he fell short of being who God had created him to be. In response to that insight, he uttered words of prayer: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

Do you wonder if that prayer was possibly the first real prayer Simon Peter had uttered in his life? It was totally honest. He held nothing back. In just a few words, he told Jesus exactly how he felt. “Look,” he prayed, “I do not know exactly who you are, and I do not know exactly what you want with me, but you need to find somebody else. I am nobody, a regular person who’s just trying to make ends meet. I cannot be who you want me to be. Please just go away.”

But Jesus did not answer that prayer the way Simon Peter pleaded for him to answer. Jesus did not go away. He did not leave and abandon Simon Peter to his feelings of unworthiness. Instead, Jesus stayed right there with him and told Simon Peter he did not need to be afraid. As a matter of fact, Jesus had a mission for him.

Jesus’ response was almost the complete opposite of what Simon Peter has prayed for. And Jesus’ refusal to do things Simon Peter’s way might just entangle us like those nets entangled the fish, for I have no doubt that you, like me, have had moments in your own life when you have prayed fervently for something to happen, only to have it fizzle; when you have been on your knees praying with every cell of your body for someone to get well, only to have them get worse; when you have felt so overwhelmed by what was going on in your life that all you could do was just lift up your empty hands and hope God would act, only to not see any immediate changes you could detect.

I am sure that many of us have had the experience of praying for one thing or another, only to wonder why God did not respond the way we requested. We have had moments in our lives in which we have implored God to do as we ask, only to find God doing something else. And usually our discovery of God’s response does not even occur until years or decades or even an entire lifetime later.

Whenever I think about our prayers and God’s response, I cannot help but think of my preaching professor Lucy Rose. Those of you from this congregation have heard me speak of her before. She died after my first year in seminary from a cancer that had gotten into her bones and could not be eradicated by medicine. She kept a journal of her last year of life that her family later published on her behalf. In it, she wrote of her own spiritual struggles and triumphs. In one section, she wrote about her particular prayers regarding her cancer. Listen to her testimony to us:

If God does not utter the word and melt the cancer away inside me, I will by grace still be faithful. Because God is love, I surrender to the love of God that has surrounded me, encircled me, washed through me, and claimed me. If God does not utter that word, God has reasons far beyond my limited understanding, reasons that will result in grace extending to more and more people and in increasing thanksgiving to the glory of God. That is my hope and my joy and my all—glorifying God in life and death, by my living and dying.

. . . By God’s grace, I will be faithful to God even if God does not deliver me from the cancer. (Lucy Rose, Songs in the Night: A Witness to God’s Love in Life and in Death, pp. 11, 21)

I am not certain if that was hard for Lucy to pray and to write, but I have to tell you it is hard for me to speak that prayer out loud, even though they are her words. But I do so because I know that throughout her last year of life, Lucy continued to try to pray always out of the perspective that God knew what God was doing, even as she continued to be honest with God that her desire was to be released from the cancer so she could fully live here, in this life, with her family. But through it all, she prayed always grounded in her trust that God’s all-surrounding love was her hope and her rest.

I remember once sharing home communion with a member of a previous congregation who was living the last few months of her life. Her name was Myra. After communion was over, Myra relayed to me a conversation she had just had with a friend on the phone. This friend was a fervent Christian, a daughter of missionaries. Her friend said this: “I have been praying for you, for your healing, but God is not listening. God is not doing it the way I have asked.” In response, Myra replied, “Well, I just have to trust that God knows what God is doing better than we do.” Like Lucy, Myra spoke a word of trust and faith in God’s ability to be God even when she did not understand and even when God’s response seemed different than what she requested.

Now, I must make one thing clear before I continue. It is one thing to have Lucy or Myra say, “God knows what God is doing even through my death.” It is a whole other thing for anyone else to say that about their illness. No one has permission to make comments like it is God’s will that they got cancer so that they could teach us about faithfulness. Or that God gave them cancer to increase their faith. The God I believe in, the God of Jesus Christ, does not will anyone to experience an untimely death or pain or illness. God’s will is for life and dignity and wholeness and justice. Cancer, or things like it that happen to our creaturely bodies, are neither God’s punishment nor God’s will for anyone. I’d be very wary of trusting anybody who tries to tell you otherwise.

Yet what our sisters in faith do teach us is that even in the midst of great pain and great struggle, God can still be at work. They teach us that even in the midst of something as profane as cancer, God can still sow trust and faithfulness. Perhaps God knew that what Lucy needed at that point of her illness was to be set free from that body that was holding her captive and to come home. And it was that innate trust in God’s faithfulness that set Myra free on most days from her own fear and anger as she, too, moved into her death.

To me, the miracle of these two women’s stories is that they were open to the possibility that God was still at work in and through them, even in those moments they could not see it clearly. Like Simon Peter in the boat, every single day Lucy and Myra continued to cast their nets into the deep waters of life and faithfulness simply because God asked them to do so. They continued to cast their nets into the deep waters of life and faithfulness, leaning into what they learned of God’s promise through Simon Peter—that there would be something of grace-filled abundance to catch. And because Lucy and Myra were open to God’s activity even in their dying, generations are now learning more about faithfulness and trust in a way we might not have known without their courageous witness.

God did not answer Simon Peter’s prayer the way Simon initially wanted. If God had, then Jesus would have walked away, leaving Simon Peter in the midst of his comfortable unworthiness, surrounded by stinky fish. Instead, Jesus stayed there. And he reached out and told Simon Peter not to be afraid but to trust and follow, for in doing so, he would find a whole grace-filled abundance of new life and new purpose—one he could never have imagined on his own.

Now, I still wish God had answered Lucy’s prayer the way she initially asked, that God had uttered the word to melt the cancer within her, and not just within Lucy, but in countless other saints whom I have buried throughout the years. But I think Lucy would tell me that she is able now to see God’s wisdom in a way I simply cannot understand just yet. And that is the promise we hold onto, isn’t it? That even when we do not understand, even when we feel betrayed by God, even when we feel God has ignored our requests, we hold on to scripture’s promise that there will come a day when we will see fully and Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians will ring true: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.” It may take an entire lifetime or perhaps even our own death, but our collective testimony of faith is that someday we will see things fully as God intends.

One last thing: Last Sunday, Shawn Fiedler and I visited with an adult education class, and one of the images I offered was that I often imagine that what we see now of our lives and this world is like the back of a tapestry. All we see are the knots and tangled threads and different colors seemingly randomly mixed up and scattered. It looks messy and chaotic and makes no sense. But when our day of fullness comes, we will finally get to see our lives and the world the way God sees them. We will finally see the other side of the tapestry—the side that shows us the beautiful, colorful picture in all its glory—and seeing that whole picture will lead us to understand why God responded to our prayers the way God did.

But until that day comes, our job is to help each other trust that God really is as good as Jesus says. Our job is to help each other trust that God does know what God is doing. And we do that knowing there will be some days on which we do that well; other days on which we are barely hanging on; and still other days on which we will have to hold that hope for someone else until they can claim it for themselves again. But that is exactly why we keep coming here to be together, as church, so that we can do that spiritual work for one another and for ourselves.

If he ever reflected back on that moment in the boat, I’d guess that Simon Peter felt deeply glad that God had answered his prayer differently than what Simon Peter had hoped. For that different response led to a whole new, unexpected life—one full of grace-filled abundance. Perhaps one day we will be able to say the same. Amen.