Sermon — February 9, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
From time to time, when I’m just walking down the street, or halfway through getting a haircut; when I bump into a postal worker on the street, or someone calls to ask about a wedding, I’m asked a certain: “What are you again?” As in, “What do I call you?” Are you a priest? A pastor? A minister? Father? Reverend? Greg? And I often give the useless answer, “Yes!” Yes, I’m a priest, albeit not a Roman Catholic priest. Yes, I’m the pastor of this church. And yes, of course, I’m a minister. To most people that’s what “minister” means: an ordained clergy person in some kind of Protestant church.
But in its most basic sense, “ministry” means “service.” And the Episcopal Church believes that all of us, ordained clergy or not, are called to serve. And so if you turn in the Book of Common Prayer to our Catechism, as I’m sure you often do—You’ll find that when it asks, “Who are the ministers of the Church?” the answer is, “The ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.” (Nice order, right?) Clergy aren’t the only ones who serve the Church and the world. Laypeople have their own essential ministry: to bear witness to Christ wherever they may be; to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their part in the life, worship, and governance of the Church.
You’re doing it right now! This is “life and worship.” In fact, if you stay for Annual Meeting, that’s “governance” checked off, too. And while I’ll do more than my fair share of talking, the Annual Report is full of shorter reports that reflect our ministry, not my ministry. And there are also many ways in which each one of us serves the world that will never be captured in an Annual Report—ways that we may never have thought of as “ministries” before.
And so I want you to think. How is it that you try to love people in this world? How is it that you participate in God’s work of reconciliation? And what rings true for you, in what I’m about to say about the Gospel, about what your ministry is like?
I see three miniature moments of what ministry is like, inside the church and outside it, in the Gospel today.
First, we see Jesus navigating the dynamic of distance and closeness in his work. Jesus stands on the beach, trying to teach to a crowd. He’s down, on their level, and he can only see maybe ten or fifteen faces in front of him. He can only talk to a few at a time. The physics of sound mean that those who are closer in will block his voice from those who are further away. “The crowd is pressing in,” Luke says, (5:1) and I almost get the sense of Jesus being pushed closer and closer to the water’s edge, as the hubbub of those trying to get closer to hear completely drowns out anything that he’s trying to say.
Have you ever felt this way? Is the urgent noise of the world ever so loud that you can’t hear yourself think? Does the crowd of urgent tasks ever press in so close that you cannot see the big picture? Even if your calendar is more empty than full, even if what’s crowding in on you are your own thoughts, it’s just the same. Our ability to love and serve other people well can be drowned out by a thousand small demands.
So Jesus steps back. He boards a boat. And from up there on the deck, he can see the crowd in a new way. He can speak and be heard. But he needs to take that step back, to give himself a little from the people he’s trying to serve, in order to be heard by them at all. And I think that this is an important skill, for any of us who try to serve: sometimes we need to step back, in order to really engage.
The second scene captures a very different feeling: the sudden lurch from unfortunate scarcity to dangerous abundance. Jesus finishes teaching, and tells Simon to head out from the shore to deeper waters, and to cast his nets. They’ve been fishing all night, and they haven’t caught a thing. That’s not good. But it’s not the end of the world. If you spend one night on the boat and catch no fish, you’re not going to starve. A month, or a year with no fish, that’s trouble. But one night? That’s just annoying.
A day with too many fish is actually a bigger problem. Simon starts to catch so much that the nets are going to break. If you break your nets, you have no fish, and no nets; you’ve only got what you managed to salvage from the catch, and some serious capital expenditures ahead. So the other boat comes to help them out. But now the problem’s even worse. Now there are so many fish that the boats begin to sink—and they’ve gone out to the deep water and there’s a pretty good chance that none of these guys can swim. The miracle seems worse than the problem to me.
I think this has a lesson for us, too. We often work for a long time, with relatively little in return. And then there comes a time when everything happens all at once, and it can almost be too much. Our lives are organized for the everyday and not for great success, and sometimes, if we can’t handle the sudden opportunity, we just don’t miss out on something good—we sink the boat.
This is true for churches that are growing, as they try to make sure that newer members feel welcomed, and no one slips through the cracks. It’s true for nonprofits, like the Clothes Closet, trying to navigate the huge volume of donations people want to make. It’s true, I think, for many parents, who spend so much of their time bouncing from good thing to good thing that, even though each individual activity or event is wonderful on its own, it’s hard to keep your head above the water. When our nets are so full of fish that our boats begin to sink, it can begin to feel like too much of a good thing.
And so we come to my final, favorite scene. Peter—dear, dear Peter—is amazed. And he throws himself down at Jesus’ knees, and says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (5:8) Now, the main benefit of having a Rector who is learned in Greek is that you get to hear the funny parts of the Bible more clearly than you do in translation, and this is an important one: strictly speaking, Peter doesn’t “fall down at” Jesus’ knees, he “falls toward” them. It reminds me of an ancient posture of distress, that you find in Homer’s epic poems, among other places, in which a person would throw himself down and clasp the knees of someone else in supplication. I like to picture the scene that way: “Go away from me, Lord! I am a sinful man!” Peter says, falling toward Jesus’ knees. “If I went away from you, Peter, I would fall down,” I imagine Jesus thinking. “You’re holding onto my legs.” But what does Jesus say instead? “Be not afraid. From now on you will be fishers of men.”
Peter feels, as many of us have, a sense of inadequacy when confronted with the task at hand, and the abundance of God’s grace. How could I be enough for this situation, in which God has placed me? How could I be enough to do this work, to which God has called me? How could I be enough to deserve the amazing gifts that God has given me? Or, in the inmost thought of every parent ever sent home from the hospital with their first-born child, “Are you really going to send us alone home with this?” Get away from me! I’m not enough for this!
And yet God draws us in with the great paradox of grace. God’s goodness and perfection draw us closer, however inadequate and imperfect we may feel. And God doesn’t punish us for loving and serving one another imperfectly. God gives us even greater gifts: “From now on, you will be fishers of men.”
So maybe you wrote one of those Annual Reports. Maybe not. Maybe you’re just passing through today. But whoever you are, you are as much a minister as I am—God has some way for you to love and to serve, some way for you to bear witness to Christ, wherever you may be.
And when you find yourself serving, when you find yourself doing your best to love the people you find around you, I pray that you may have the space to step back from the shore onto the boat and take a breath; that when your nets begin to overflow, you do not sink; and that, no matter how much you may feel that you are not enough, you fall not away from but toward the God who trusts you and who is inviting you into even greater things. Amen.