Today I’m going to preach
about a full stop. Just one little, tiny dot in today’s Gospel reading.
That’s probably cheered you
up no end, because it sounds as if it will be a short sermon – but I’m afraid
that may not be the case, because this particular full stop contains the whole
of the Good News of Jesus Christ. If we can grasp what this full stop is about,
we have grasped the Christian faith.
So where is this wonderful
piece of punctuation?
It’s between the first two
sentences which the fisherman, Simon, says to Jesus. “Master, we have worked all night long, but have caught nothing - There’s
the full stop - Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
Simon, of course, will
eventually become Peter, St Peter, the Rock on whom Jesus will build his
church, one of its first and greatest leaders, but all that is in the future.
At this point Simon is just an ordinary working man, one of many fishermen who
earned their living around this lake. He’s doing ok for himself. He’s
prosperous enough to own his own boat, but not so wealthy that he doesn’t have
to work in it himself. He’s mending his nets on the seashore when Jesus comes
along. Jesus is right at the beginning of his ministry but he’s already
attracting a crowd. In fact, so many people want to listen to him on this day
that they are “pressing in on him”,
says the story. No one can really hear or see him clearly. So he asks Simon to
take him out in his boat a little way from the shore, so he can use the boat as
a platform to preach from. Simon is happy enough to help – he can mend his nets
just as well in the boat as sitting on the sand.
We aren’t told what Jesus
says to the crowd, what he is teaching. We aren’t told whether Simon is really
paying attention to it – he wasn’t one of the crowd who’d sought Jesus out that
day– though presumably he can’t help overhearing it. When Jesus finishes
whatever it is he has to say, he turns to Simon. What is he going to say? “Thank you for the loan of the boat? Could
you row me in to shore again now?” But
no, Jesus says to Simon “Put out into the
deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”
Now, if I was Simon, at this
point I would be thinking “Who does he
think he is?” Jesus may be a good preacher. He may be a halfway decent
carpenter. But he isn’t a fisherman. What does he know about fishing? Why does
he think Simon is going to accept fishing tips from him? It would be like me
turning up at Stonepitts Farm and telling Martin how to grow strawberries. He
would be daft to take my advice, because I don’t know anything about strawberry
farming.
And anyway, Simon happens to
know that there are no fish to be caught. He’s tried. “Master,” he says “we’ve
worked all night” – we fishermen, we who actually know what we are doing,
as opposed to carpenters and preachers who don’t - “but we’ve caught nothing”.
But then comes that full
stop. A pause. A moment when, perhaps,
Simon realises what he has just said. He, an experienced fisherman, has caught
nothing. All his skill, all his hard work, have come to nothing. There is not
so much as a minnow for supper, let alone any fish to sell. The full stop isn’t
just on the page, it is right there in Simon’s life, a failure, something
beyond his power to change.
We all come to a full stop at
some point in our lives – most of us come to one many times over.
We come to a full stop when
the relationship we are trying to mend can’t be mended, because the other
person doesn’t want to mend it. There is nothing more we can do.
We come to a full stop when
our business runs into difficulties because of global political and economic
forces that are beyond our power to change.
We come to a full stop when
illness or bereavement strike us out of the blue, and all our plans for our
lives crumble into dust.
Full stops come in many forms
– small ones and big ones – times when there is no solution, no magic wand,
nothing we can do, try as hard as we might.
And eventually death itself
brings us all to a full stop. No one escapes it.
It doesn’t matter how skilful
we are, how powerful, sooner or later life reminds us that we are not
all-powerful, and never can be. There are limits to what we can do – limits of
time, energy, ability – and we can’t get past them, no matter how clever or
dedicated we are. There’s a common mantra around these days , often repeated to
children, that “you can be whatever you
want to be, if only you believe in yourself and try hard enough.” It’s an
appealing idea, and of course no one should squash anyone else’s dreams and
aspirations. But sadly that mantra isn’t true. We can’t be whatever we want to
be. I might want to be an Olympic pole vaulter, but at 58, and built more for
comfort than agility, I think I can cross it off the list of possibilities. Not
everyone can be a famous footballer or rock star or brain surgeon or rocket
scientist. You’ve got to have the aptitude, the basic natural ability, as well
as the opportunity and a dose of good luck. It’s not just about self-belief.
And even if we achieve our dreams, sooner or later we have to let go of them
again, like Andy Murray, who spent so long working to get to the top of the
tennis world, but is now having to face the fact that his body won’t let him
stay there. It’s not the end of everything, not the end of the world, but my
guess is that it feels like a pretty big full stop for him.
For Simon the fisherman, the
full stop comes in the form of empty nets. “We
have worked all night long, but have caught nothing.” It may just turn out to be a one night
failure, but what if there are no fish the next night, and the night after
that? How long will it be before he and his family are in serious trouble? It’s
a dilemma which faces many people today, subsistence farmers, zero hours
workers, people who can’t be sure where the next meal or the next pay packet is
coming from, or whether it is coming at all.
 |
| James Tissot. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. Brooklyn Museum |
In the Old Testament reading,
Isaiah has a similar, transformative, full-stop moment when he is confronted
with God’s glory. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips…”.
St Paul’s full-stop moment
came on the road to Damascus, when God confronted him with his own hatred and
prejudice, which was leading him to persecute the followers of Jesus. “I am the
least of the apostles” he says in his letter to the church in Corinth. But,
like Peter and Isaiah, he found that his full stop was the beginning, not the
end. He lost his grip on his own life, but that enabled him to fall into the
hands of God, who gave him a whole new one.
The word Paul uses for that
discovery is grace. Grace is God’s gift of himself to us. We can’t earn it or
deserve it, but it’s there for us, at all times and in all places. Like Paul, Isaiah and Simon, we often only
discover it when all else has failed and we find ourselves at a full stop, but
the more we learn to look for it and be open to it, the richer and fuller our
lives can be and the more that grace can overflow from us to others. “Put out into the deep water” says Jesus to
Simon, not just the deep water of the lake, but the deep waters of love and joy
and peace and purpose to which God calls him and calls us all.
I said at the beginning that
this little full stop around which Simon’s life turns is really all we need to
know. In it we find the whole of the Gospel, the good news of Christ. It
reminds us that we are frail and fallible and mortal, people who get it wrong,
mess it up, fail and fall, but that when we do, we fall into the hands of God,
who, in his grace, holds us and heals us and guides us into new life with
him.
As our collect today put it:
O God, you know us to be set
in the midst of so many and
great dangers,
that by reason of the frailty
of our nature,
we cannot always stand
upright:
grant to us such strength and
protection
as may support us in all
dangers
and carry us through all temptations;
through Jesus Christ your Son
our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with
you
in the unity of the Holy
Spirit
one God, now and forever. Amen
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