Sermon: Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Luke 5:1-11

February 9, 2025 
Faith-La Fe Lutheran Church
Pastor Jonathan Linman

Sometimes in life, for any number of reasons, personal or professional, local or global, we get fed up and become tempted to give up, to quit. Enduring the current news cycles and all of the chaos swirling about us, we may want to throw up our hands and surrender, bowing out of the struggle. 

Simon Peter was perhaps at that point in today’s gospel reading. He and his companions had labored all night long – they pulled an all-nighter, getting no rest, and yet they caught no fish. Then Jesus suggested to Simon Peter that he should try putting his nets into deep water for a catch. At that suggestion, Simon retorted, maybe with exhausted resignation, maybe with some cynicism, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” 

That’s the attitude of quitting, of giving up. You hear this kind of talk in church, too. “Well, we tried that several years ago, and it didn’t work then.” The implication is that it won’t work now either. Despite our best efforts, a lot of times nothing seems to come of our labors. Ours can seem like the work of Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill only to have it come tumbling down again. And again. And again.

There are many versions of this experience. Surely you can recount occasions in your own life when you were ready to say, “I quit.” And maybe you have quit sometimes. There may well be good reasons to quit some things and people and move on. 

But at its worst, the impulse to quit is a temptation to despair, to give up on life as a whole. Life can get hard and complicated and overwhelming. It seems especially acute these days with so many deaths of despair, people, especially men, who drink themselves to death or overdose on drugs, or actively commit suicide. 

Fortunately, Simon Peter didn’t give in to the impulse to quit, for he went on to say to Jesus’ suggestion to try again: “Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” 

In that statement of willingness to give it another try, we see evidence of a seed of faith. And it’s centered on that simple word, “yet.” As if to say, there may yet be hope…. 

And then it’s even more significant that the “yet” was directed to Jesus: “if you say so, Jesus.” Simon Peter may not have given the same courtesy to his working partners. But to Jesus, yes.

That “yet if you say so” in faith, in trust, opened the door to abundance. When they let down the nets into deep water “they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.” And the boats were so full of fish “that they began to sink.” 

What led Simon Peter to say “yet if you say so?” Maybe Simon Peter heard something in Jesus’ teaching that inspired him to respond favorably to Jesus’ suggestion. He was there busy washing the nets, but maybe something Jesus said in his teaching caught his ear. I wonder what that might have been? 

Maybe Jesus reiterated themes from his sermon at his hometown synagogue about good news to the poor and release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and letting the oppressed go free (cf. Luke 4:18-19) Maybe all of that sounded really encouraging, really hopeful. Maybe that re-ignited Simon’s own hopefulness.

Or maybe it was the fact that Jesus had visited Simon’s house and cured his mother-in-law of a high fever. Simon Peter saw Jesus in action fulfilling the kinds of healing promises he made in his teaching. 

Christ’s teaching revealed in scripture and our own experiences of Jesus’ healing mercies may have the same kinds of effects on us, too, especially when we’re ready to give up. We may have our own versions of saying to Jesus, “yet, Lord, if you say so.” 

And that little bit of faith, inspired, provoked by God’s word and the presence of Christ, can make all the difference in returning us to a sense of hopefulness, a willingness to try again and keep going. 

And like Simon Peter, we may come to perceive in our renewed hopefulness features of God’s abundance that we did not see before. For Simon Peter, it was an amazing, awe-inspiring overly abundant catch of fish. For us it may be different kinds of experiences of God’s abundance, like a renewed sense of the great extent of grace, mercy, love, and compassion, and that even amidst calamities, we nonetheless have an abundance of divine blessings in our life. It’s a return to seeing the glass as half-full, or maybe even seeing it as overflowing with God’s good gifts to us even amidst the limitations of our life circumstances.

Here’s the divine abundance that the apostle Paul saw and named as we heard in today’s passage from First Corinthians: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4) There is ultimately nothing more abundant than resurrected, eternal life in Christ!

Then marveling at how the risen Christ appeared to him even though he had persecuted the church, Paul concludes: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:10a) Through Jesus, the word of God made flesh, by his fullness, in his abundance, we all have received grace upon grace upon grace” (cf. John 1:16).

And look at what the experience of abundance provoked in Simon Peter: in amazement at the abundance, “he fell down at Jesus’ knees saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’” The amazing, abundant grace of Christ shown it the catch of fish inspired Simon Peter to confess his sin, his mortality, his shortcomings. 

Indeed, awe inspiring, holy occasions and experiences can provoke us to acknowledge our sin and mortality. The same thing happened as part of the call of the prophet Isaiah as we also heard this morning. Isaiah had a vision of the Lord in the heavenly temple with seraphs flying about singing the Holy, Holy, Holy, with the pivots on the threshold shaking and the whole place filling with smoke. That’s when Isaiah confessed: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” (cf. Isaiah 6:1-5).

We, too, may be provoked to make our own versions of confession in response to experiences of God’s glorious abundance. For I believe that knowledge of the radical extent of God’s grace is what really frees us and inspires us to acknowledge the truth about who we are. And this confession inspires us to take the plunge into the deep waters of baptism to be raised by Christ along with a multitude of others. We are caught alive, held in divine love in company with an abundance of saints such that the ship of the church through the ages is overflowing with those whom Christ has saved from the deep.

And the story doesn’t end there. Both the passages from Isaiah and Luke are call stories. In Isaiah, it was not about the light show and special effects. And in Luke it’s not about the crazy big catch of fish. No, it’s about God’s call both to Isaiah and to Simon Peter to be sent on a mission. In Isaiah’s case, it was to preach a hard word of judgment to his people. And in Simon Peter’s case, it’s Jesus’ call to him and his companions summed up in Jesus’ words: “Do not be afraid; form now on you will be catching people.” So it is that they “left everything and followed him.” 

And this call comes to us as well. We may work all night long trying to advance the well-being of all, and yet come daybreak we discover that we have nothing to show for our effort. That’s when we are struck by God’s word afresh here at church Sunday after Sunday such that we say “yet if you say so, Lord” we’re not going to give up. 

And we go out again at Jesus’ invitation to traverse the deep waters to seek to catch people. Not to entrap them, or eat them, or subdue or kill them, but to offer them the means to abundant life in Christ.

And perhaps in these our ministries of loving service for the most vulnerable and in seeking justice for them, and as we resist the powers that be that want us to give up and quit, we may in fact end up inspiring others with the hope and courage to say to Jesus, “yet if you say so, Lord” we’ll all keep trying another day, trusting that God in Christ will abundantly provide what we need. God help us. God save us. Amen.