OVERWHELMED BY ABUNDANCE
(Preached on Sunday, February 4, 2007)
For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken;... -Luke 5:9
Have you ever noticed how your eyes open a bit wider when you are surprised? It is as if you had been asleep, merely daydreaming or sleepwalking through some routine activity, and you hear your favorite tune on the radio, or look up from the puddles on the parking lot and see a rainbow, or the telephone rings and it=s the voice of an old friend, and all of a sudden you=re awake! Even an unwelcome surprise shakes us out of complacency and makes us come alive. We may not like it at first, but looking back, we can always recognize it as a gift. Humdrum equals deadness; surprise equals life. In fact, a marvelous name for the One we worship in wonder C one of the few names that truly does not limit God C is Surprise.
Too often we live without any expectation of surprise.
With all the technological marvels, the shrinking of the globe through air travel, telephone and internet connections, and radio and television signals, we seem incapable of being surprised. But I was surprised as I worked on this sermon yesterday, sitting at my desk. Looking out the window beyond the computer I suddenly spied a hummingbird flitting about a cactus plant growing in the neighbor=s yard beyond the fence. I was stunned, actually, because I had recently marveled at some beautiful pictures of hummingbirds in National Geographic and was left with the impression from a migration map in the article that hummingbirds did not live in Florida. I could not ever remember seeing any here, so I assumed they were correct. So it was truly amazing to suddenly spy that little bird outside my window!
Simon Peter was surprised. In fact, he was overwhelmed.
What he experienced that day was the last thing he could have imagined. His response is awe and terror. Simon Peter moves from the security of fixed, failed reality C AWe fished all night and have nothing@ C into full, open, new, uncontained reality. In a moment Peter senses the gap between his world and the new creation of Jesus. He is overwhelmed not just with the catch of fish, but with the abundance of the catch, so many fish that it threatens to swamp his boat and the boat of his partners. It is more than he can handle.
It is always overwhelming when Easter happens.
That=s right, I said Easter and no, I haven=t lost my mind, I know we are still in the season of Epiphany. But this is an Easter story. In fact, John=s gospel, the only other gospel to record a miraculous catch of fish, tells the story as a resurrection appearance of Jesus to his followers on the Sea of Galilee, sometime after Easter.
Easter is all about God=s abundance that it death-defying. In Easter we witness Jesus moving from failure and scarcity to life and triumph. Truth be told, that is always a bit overwhelming for us.
After all, we live in a world built on the myth of scarcity.
Theologian Walter Brueggemann picks on Nike ads to detail that myth, (but there are many corporate ads we could point to): AAccording to the Nike story, whoever has the most shoes when he dies wins. The Nike story says there are no gifts to be given because there=s no giver. We end up only with whatever we manage to get for ourselves. This story ends in despair. It gives us a present tense of anxiety, fear, greed, and brutality. ... It tells us not to care about anyone but ourselves C and it is the prevailing creed of American society.@ He continues by sharing the story of some young friends he and his wife know who have a 4-year-old son. ARecently the mother told us that she was about to make a crucial decision. She had to get her son into the right kindergarten because if she didn=t, then he wouldn=t get into the right prep school. And that would mean not being able to get into Davidson College. And if he didn=t go to school there, he wouldn=t be connected to the bankers in Charlotte and be able to get the kind of job where he would make a lot of money. Our friends= story is a kind of parable of our notion that we must position ourselves because we must achieve, and build our own lives.@
That myth of scarcity is so strong it has infected us all, even all of us in the church. William Willimon tells a story about Sojourners Evangelical activist Jim Wallis, speaking to a pastor=s conference, giving a lecture on AThe Renewal of the Inner City Church.@ Wallis simply stood up and told story upon story of once declining inner city churches that had, by the grace of God, rediscovered their mission. They were inspiring stories of churches that worked. Yet in the conversation afterwards, one pastor after another rose to criticize Wallis=s speech. They accused him of looking at the church through naive, rose-colored-glasses-idealism. One even implied that Wallis lied. At dinner that evening, Willimon told Wallis that he was appalled by the group=s reaction. AI wasn=t,@ Wallis said. AThat=s the reaction I always get from mainline, liberal pastors. They are amazed when God wins. Just scared to death that Easter just might be, after all, true.@
Many of us know the misery of night fishing when we have fished all night and just not caught anything. A marriage is strained or breaks, a child moves away and you cannot reach them, a job is lost, a grief settles down like a fog, you worry about the state of the world. Regardless of how much you work and try, sometimes our nets produce nothing.
But these disciples told this story from their own experience. After a night when professional fisherman must have been terribly frustrated, Jesus asked them to put their nets into the water yet again. They stood there openmouthed. There were so many fish, it looked like the nets would break and the boats began to sink. But Jesus was there. They learned a powerful lesson. Night fishing with all its empty frustrations does not have the last word. No wonder they left their nets and boats, everything it says, and followed him. They had found, a vision of nets full and running over that carried them through the hard days ahead. In time they would learn that even during and after the dark days when nothing seemed to work, God was there. God=s presence, God=s abundance, would fill all the needs of their lives.
Rabbi Michael Lerner suggests that we are much closer to embracing that vision of God=s abundance over the myth of scarcity than we might believe. In traveling America he has discovered that he is hearing the same two things from just about everyone he meets. The same two things from everyone, everywhere. AThe first is that people want a society different from the one we have. They want a community, a nation, an economy, a world based more on the values of community, generosity, compassion and love, and less on hierarchy, acquisition, and win/lose competition. ... The second think is this: they think they are alone. They think that they=re the only ones who feel that way. They look around them and they see no reflection or support of the values they want, so they decide they=re just being unrealistic, and that they just have to get a grip and adjust to the world as it really is. And so the world goes.@
Such a world is ripe for those who would hear Jesus= words, ADon=t be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.@ People want to be caught by those who have caught the vision of God=s abundance that will be enough; people who are not overwhelmed by that abundance, but who live accepting it as the true promise of the world God has created for everybody to enjoy.