I’ll never forget a sharp rebuke given to my PhD supervisor from someone who read an article he’d written about how deep faith in the West often only develops when someone goes through a catastrophic event. The person doing the rebuking thought it was abhorrent that he would suggest such a thing. And yet if we look at worldwide statistics, and those in the West, there is certainly evidence that catastrophe, suffering, and faith, have a strong positive correlation with each other.
From experience talking to hundreds of Christians and doing a lot of reading, I’d suggest that the root of this correlation has to do with people having nowhere else to turn. They come up empty in life, much like the nets of Jesus’s disciples in our gospel reading this morning. They are stretched beyond their ability to cope or to make sense of the world. It often happens when they lose someone they love, or in a struggle with disease, with addiction, some health issue, safety and security, maybe an existential struggle for meaning, or simply having to face their own or a loved one’s death.
I was recently talking to a friend of mine who was raised Catholic but left the church at a young age. Throughout his life he’s flitted around from job to job, interest to interest - acting, writing, cab driving, sales, day trading, crypto currency, packing, driving and delivering goods. He’s had a few health scares. But it wasn’t until he really hit rock bottom and moved back home with his mom and watched her decline, that he came up completely empty; unable to even motivate himself to keep going.
We’d had many discussions over the years and I could tell he was grappling with how to make sense of the world and find a place in it. But Christianity was the one thing he just couldn’t explore. But our paths crossed. I spoke, over time, of why I believed in God who sent his Son and came into the world, of why that was necessary, of what sin is in as we saw it unfolding in the world before us, of why I believed that Jesus willingly chose to save our lives which cost him his own, because loving his Father brought him perfect peace and love even through suffering and pain and death. It sounds unbelievable he’d say. I know, I said. I once found it completely unbelievable too.
I told him about how much anguish I experienced in losing my friends and my family; about how it left a hole in my life not just of their presence, but of our life together and of their future and mine with them. I told him about being ready to let go of this life because I didn’t see a point anymore. And I did let go. I stopped trying to chart it all out and explain it and direct it and control it. I fell apart and cried out without even being aware I was doing it: “have mercy on me, caught in a world of confusion and chaos and death. Have mercy on me even in my unbelief. Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
I don’t know if my friend remembers how I talked to him about this because that self revelation happened over years. But this year, just after Easter, I heard from him. “I had nothing left to do here,” he said. I was ready not to wake up, he said to me. But I woke up one day and went out for a hike. And I saw revealed in front of me, Jesus. He was just there. He did nothing. He was just present there. I saw him.
And he explained how he then started slowly venturing back into the physical church; how he slowly started reading more theology and watching theologians and priests give lectures online. I spoke to him just the other day and he said how he had encountered the work of a very famous Anglican Bishop, NT Wright, who has helped many people come to faith. He talked about the importance of decoupling nationalism and capitalism and corporate interests from Christianity; how only God in Christ can save us from our own worst tendencies to try and make the world in our own broken images. Conversion 101!
My friend’s own life, and ours together, is a specific example of what is going on in our Gospel lesson this morning. The disciples are fishing and they keep coming up empty. This represents all of us when we try to rely on ourselves to get through life and we inevitably come up empty. Jesus says to them, cast your nets now. Having little choice and nowhere else to turn for the food they need to eat and to sell, they accept his seemingly impossible promise. Of course they end up drawing enough fish to feed them and to feed many others.
This is precisely what Paul confirms for us in his letter to the Corinthian Church: I was fished for by the disciples. At my worst - my greatest arrogance and sin maybe built up because I was defensive about the thorn in my flesh, not even realizing how far astray I’d gone, I was struck blind - I was fished for. I was handed the gospel: that Jesus Christ came into this world and died for me, and was raised on the third day, so that I might have life with God. And then I saw Jesus on the road to Damascus. I saw him at my worst, when I had nowhere else to go just like Peter, to whom else can we go, like my friend, like me, where else can we go.
And that is when we saw God and in a moment, our lives were all fundamentally changed and none of us can help but tell others what we have seen and heard. Such is the power of God that it is at our worst, where we realize our emptiness and poverty, that we are able to see the full net of hope and love coming up from the depths of the raucous sea in which we live. Having seen that net at some point in our lives, let us recall the one who fills it and share that food of life with others AMEN.
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