Failure to Launch

A Sermon Based Upon Luke 5: 1-11

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Epiphany 5, February 10, 2013

 

“When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” (Luk 5: 4, NRSV)

 

 While on vacation in Tampa Florida back in 1990, I heard on the news on that on the day we were to leave, the space shuttle was to blast off from Cape Canaveral.   This was my chance.  So early on the morning of our departure we drove straight across the peninsula to the Cape.   When we arrived the crowd was already gathering.  Traffic along the interstate was at a standstill.  I had timed it just right.  Then came the countdown.  “T-minus 15 seconds and counting, 14…13…. .  Then, there was a silent pause.   My heart skipped a beat.  The counting ceased.  We were in a holding pattern at T-minus 13 seconds, the loud speaker said.  All that money spent, all that planning, all the preparation was at risk of failure.  Besides all that, I got everybody up at 4 in the morning while on vacation and now, we had a failure to launch. 

 

Our Bible text today is about the ‘launching’ of Jesus’ ministry.   Jesus took over a fishing boat and made it into a pulpit.   Since the acoustics were better out on the water, Jesus asked Peter to put the boat out a little ways off shore.   Now that Jesus has everyone’s attention, he asked Peter again, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch” (5.4).  The King James uses the very specific, singular and stronger word “Launch.” Jesus begins his ministry with a call for his disciples to ‘launch’ out into deeper water.  

 

 But Peter, being a fisherman, perhaps also realizing Jesus to be a carpenter, politely question’s Jesus request: “Master, we have worked all night but have caught nothing.” (5.5).   Our text tells us they were already “washing their nets” (2) so they were preparing to quit for the day.   They had let Jesus use their boat, but maybe they were thinking, “Come on Jesus, its quitting time!”  Besides that, everyone knows in this hot climate that the fish feed at night.  If this is what they were thinking, Peter is still remarkably polite saying, “if you insist, I will let down the nets” (5.5b).

 

 I guess there are always very good reason not to go too far with Jesus.   Religion can be dangerous stuff.  Remember David Koresh and the Camp Davidian compound in Waco, Texas?  Religious people can become fanatics, can’t they?  It can also complicate our lives to get more than casually involved with Jesus’ mission.   We are so busy with so much to do ourselves and have ‘better things’ in mind for our time.   There are only so many hours in a week.  Such excuses are never hard to come up with, as with Moses or like Peter, we’ve all got our reasons for not going any further with Jesus than we have.   The truth is that many, if not most, understand baptism as a finish line, not a launching pad.   Our ship, if it ever goes out, stays close to shore or it remains on the launching pad because it can be costly to go all the way with Jesus.  

 

 

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him to come and die!”   That’s how Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it, and he meant it, and paid for it, with his own life, when he opposed Hitler in the name of Christ and was hung for it.   Following Jesus can be dangerous.  But it can also be just as dangerous not to launch out at all, can’t it?   As Churches, as Christians, and disciples of Jesus, we’ve got all this wonderful, inspiring history behind us, and we have this unparalleled opportunity before us, and we also have great potential within us, and it is a ‘crying shame’ that we are not doing all that we are capable of doing in Jesus’ name.   What will it take for us to ‘launch out’ and to ‘go deeper’ and to take a risks beyond the normal; to against the odds and to ‘let down’ our nets for a great catch in the name of Jesus?

 

 Of course, if you don’t know by now, this is a message about the core mission and main purpose of the church—our church, every church.   The church is called to be an ‘evangelical’ church.   An evangelical church is one that believes the good news of God changes and saves lives.   We also believe that it is our ‘calling’ as the ‘people of God’ to be faithful to ‘this gospel’ and hear God’s call in our own lives to ‘drop our nets’, leave the safety of shore, and to go ‘out into the depths’ of this world and fish.  In a way, today’s text is like the fellow who was catching a lot of fish, so much that the game warden wanted to see what he was doing.  They were on the boat together and the fellow dropped a stick of dynamite into the water, and all kinds of fish came floating up to the top.   “You can’t fish like that,” the game warden insisted.   The man hands the game warden a stick of lite dynamite and asks, “Warden, are you gonna talk, or are you gonna fish?”

 

Our text is like a stick of dynamite in the hand of a confused, conflicted, complacent church: “From now on, you will catch people,” Jesus told them and reminds us.  The reason for Christ’s mission is unmistakable.   Are we going to ‘talk’ or are we going to fish?  Our mission is not to enjoy the boat ride, but it is go out into the deep of this world, out into in the elements and to go up against the odds and to ‘let down our nets’ so that we too can catch people into the net of God’s love.   This is our definitive calling, purpose, our reason to be, and it is our most basic mission.   But the question is what might a ‘launch into the deep’ look like in our lives and in our churches today?  How can we overcome the ‘failure to launch’?   It is this ‘failure’ which is the greatest threat to the church of Jesus Christ today, much more of a threat than any evil out there in the world. 

 

WE MUST ANSWER THE CALL

Whatever we can say about how the gospel of good news get from ‘the world of the Bible’ into the ‘world of our lives”, we must say that it requires that a human ‘answer’ to the call of God in our lives.   In this story, even against his better judgment, Peter must make himself and his boat fully available to Jesus’ commands.  Peter must make Jesus ‘master’ and ‘commander’ of his ship.  There is no room for discussion.  Peter must immediately give Jesus full control of the direction and outcome of his life.  The way, the work, and the call of God, demands our full human cooperation or there will be no miracle, no catch and no result.

 

Among the many other angles we can take on what it means to answer God’s call in our lives, the one thing Luke seems most concerned with Jesus’ distinctive call.   The call that comes from Jesus is a call for us to go deeper, go further, do more and go the ‘extra mile’.  The call of God is not only definite and descriptive, it is most of all demanding.  True discipleship places real demands upon our lives.  Discipleship exacts a high ‘cost’.

 

I mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer a moment ago.  He wrote one of the most important books ever written outside of the Bible.  His book, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ was written as Hitler and the Nazis were gaining power in Germany.  In German the book is given a one-word title, Nachfolge, meaning one who “follows”.  The point Bonhoeffer was making is that following Jesus will ‘cost’ you.   One of the great phrases of the book is  Bonhoeffer’s term “cheap grace”.   Do you know what cheap grace is?  Let Bonhoeffer define it as he does in the book:  “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, and communion without confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”   The  big problem with ‘cheap grace’ is that among other things, it is a lie.  It preaches a lying gospel which says that ‘you are a sinner, but you are forgiven and now you can stay as you are and enjoy this forgiveness without doing anything else with your life.  The ‘defect’ with such a proclaimation is that it says you can be a Christian without being a disciple---you can have Jesus without ‘following” Jesus.  But this is not biblically correct, Bonhoeffer asserts: “Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart.  It is costly because it compels a person to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden it light.”  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Discipleship).

 

This are ‘hard’ words, and Jesus did say the way that saves is a ‘narrow’ and ‘hard’ way, not the easy way, or the way of least resistance.  But following Jesus saves us many more times than it kills us.   We need to understand that what the ‘call’ of following Christ means is that we will hear and answer the inward call to rise above what is wrong in this world, in our lives, and even in our religious faith, and we will do the ‘hard’ things that will bring hope, reform and the newness of God’s grace.   This is exactly what Bonhoeffer did.  When most of the German church choose to follow Hitler, to bless the ‘powers’ rather than challenge them, Bonhoeffer recognized the true nature of the Nazi ‘lie’ and establish a ‘confessing’ church to answer God’s call to stand with Jesus, rather than with Hitler, with God rather than with his own countrymen.  It was not easy then, nor is it easy now, but the church that marches to the ‘beat of a different drum’ is the church that does not seek self-comfort nor accolades, but the church that risks all to rise above the culture and hear and answer the call of Jesus in today’s world.   But now, how do we do this?

 

WE MUST OVERCOME OUR FLAWS

The first thing we must do is what Peter had to do in this text.  He had to face, confront, and confess his own weaknesses, doubts, and flaws before God.  Of all things, he had to be ‘honest’ and ‘clean’ with Jesus.   It is a powerful message also for us, isn’t it, that we too must confront and work to ‘overcome’ our own flaws before we can follow Jesus in greater and deeper ways. 

 

There is something ‘holy’ and ‘good’ in Peter’s reluctance to follow Jesus.   By confessing his own ‘hesitations’ before the miracle and by confronting his own sin and negativity after the miracle, Peter comes clean before God and answers the call of Jesus with honesty rather than pretense.  Peter’s confession of his own flaws and sins do not keep him from answering God’s call.  Peter hesitates when he realizes ‘who Jesus is’ and ‘who he is not’, but also, Peter’s flaws do not hinder him, from answering the call and claim of Jesus on his life.

 

Unfortunately, many people see their ‘sins’, ‘shortcomings’ and ‘weaknesses’ and reasons not to follow Jesus, whereas, they should be seen as obstacles which by overcoming them will make us strong and better people.

 

A great example of a ‘flawed’ person who admitted, challenged and overcame his own flaws is the character Jean Valjean in the classic Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables.  Jean Valjean was put in prison for hard labor for stealing bread.   When he got parole, he got caught again ‘stealing’ silver from a church, but instead of having him arrested, the priest forgave him, gave him grace, but then challenged to go and overcome his weaknesses by answering a higher call in his life.   Valjean does just that, as he helps a dying prostitute by adopting her daughter and raising her as his own child.  Valjean lives his whole life, now, not by living for himself, but by giving his life, even risking his life for others.  In the end, this is what has made him a person who has sinned, but now who can die with no regrets.  He overcame his own ‘flaws’ by answering the ‘higher call’ in his own life.

 

Isn’t it the same for us?  When we take our eyes off of Jesus and we only think about ourselves, we often sink,  like Peter did when he tried to walk on water.  But when we keep our focus on Jesus, and own the calling we are to answer, the power to live is given to us so that even ‘heavy burdens’ and ‘failures’ can become launching pads to new heights of life and living.  But to get to this point, we can’t go on in life pretending.   Like Peter, we have to give ourselves to God, with doubts, fears, frustrations, and failures –all.  We don’t hide them, but we share them, bear them, and we take them to Jesus and let him transform them into stairways rather than roadblocks.   We launch out, not as ‘perfect’ people, but as people who know our strength and our weaknesses, our possibility for good and our potential for evil, and we bring all this honestly, openly, and bravely to God, asking him to help us each step of the way---and he will, and he does.

 

WE MUST DARE TO CARE LIKE JESUS  

Answering the call of Jesus in our lives will enable us to be better people than we thought we could be, and it will also give us a better reality and a better world than we thought we could have.  At Christmastime, a news report told of two ‘old soldiers’, war heros, who were going into schools trying to teach children how they too could be ‘heros’ by doing good things and being good in the world.   One little elementary student understood precisely their message when she told the reporters, “They told us that we are heroes too, when we do the right thing, we make the world a better place.”

 

But what is the ‘right thing’?   What does it mean to answer the call of Jesus, or to overcome our own flaws and weaknesses and become better people?  How do we define it?   The truth is we don’t need to ‘define’ anything any better than Jesus defined what it meant to be his disciple.  In this text, we see clearly that answering the call of God is not just hearing a spiritual message, nor is it only about being a better person who saves their own neck, but answering the call of God to get off the launching pad can only be understood in the most practical terms of hearing Jesus’ call to ‘catch people’ or to become, as the old King James Bible said, “fishers of men”.  

 

This can mean, but does not only mean that you must become evangelists, that you must learn how to witness to people or bring people to church.   It can mean that, and for some of us with the ‘people skills’ it should mean that too, but what Jesus means is even bigger, broader, and more inclusive of every person who has decided to follow Jesus.   When Jesus calls Peter to put down his ‘fishing net’ and pick up the ‘gospel net’ and go fishing for people, Jesus is asking Peter and each of us too, to rise above our normal life of working for a living, and he is calling us to work to live, and to find a ‘calling’ in our own lives that will not only make us better people, but will be a ‘work’ that will help people, and ‘catch others’ in the net of God’s love.  Peter did not leave his fishing boat for good, but later we see him fishing again, to make a living.  But God wanted Peter, and wants us to, not to be content of working to survive, or living only to work, but Jesus wants Peter to take a step of faith and to dare to care, not just about his work, but to enrich his life and the to, as the little girl said, ‘make the world a better place’ by caring for others.  

 

Will you just live your life to survive, or will you learn to thrive, by daring to take a step beyond the doldrums of everyday life, and to ‘exponate’, (is that a word?), or to booster, to better, or to enhance how things are by caring for others in the name of Christ?   I have on my desk a new book I’m reading entitled, “The Aims of Christ”, by Ben Meyer.  However your summarize the most basic mission or aim of Jesus, it was not about saving Jesus, but Jesus’ ministry was about saving Israel, and about bring God’s saving mission into a decaying, dying and tragic world.  

 

 

What made Jesus different than all other religious leaders or would be messiahs, is that Jesus build his ministry not upon high religious ideals, but Jesus build his ministry upon responding to the real needs of real people.   Remember Jesus’ words that got him into hot water with the authorities:  “Man is not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is made for man”.  In other words, the greatest need in the world is not simply giving God what we think God wants, but the great need is meeting human need head on in the name of a loving, forgiving God who eats, drinks, and calls sinners to repentance and salvation in the love of God.  It is this love the caught people’s attention then, and it is still this love, this dare to care more about the needs around us, than making ourselves more comfortable, that will bring about the rule of God in the world. 

 

 

This ‘love’ lived-out, acted upon, and demonstrated, in us, as it was in Jesus, is the dare that Jesus is still calling us to answer, one person, one need, and one day at a time.   How can you answer that love right now?  How can you get your life and this church off the launching pad and out into the deep of the world’s needs?  Will you answer?  Will you overcome your flaws?  Will you dare to care, like Jesus did?  Amen.