2-6-19 - Too Many Fish

(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)

I was going to call today’s reflection “Abundance,” but I’ve used that for quite a few posts already. It’s hard to get away from it in the Gospels - abundance is a core principle of God-Life. It is one of the ways God most often shows her hand – when there is unexpectedly enough, and even too much. That is what Simon Peter and his fisher-friends experienced on the lake that morning, when Jesus said,

“Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.

I experienced this abundance when I was preparing to go to seminary at Yale and invited fellow congregants at my church to help me pay for it. I thought I might get a few hundred or thousand dollars to help defray the costs… and the money just kept rolling in, sometimes in four figures at a time. In the end some $20,000 was given to support my theological education, and every time I expressed astonishment, I could sense God laughing and saying, “See? Now do you believe me?” I've had a similar experience in our recent pledge campaign. God is amazing, and so are God’s people.

If abundance is a principle of God’s realm on earth, why is there so much scarcity? In part, it’s because we’re more wired to see scarcity, to expect scarcity than we are abundance. We default to “not enough” – that’s what Jesus’ disciples saw when faced with the challenge of feeding a crowd of thousands. But God invites us to look beyond the “not enough” in front of us to the “what else?” all around us. God invites us to look beyond what we can see, period, and call God’s power to flow into situations of need.

Scarcity on a global level is due to human choices and sin – greed, fear, and the damage to our planet which those forces wreak. The earth has the capacity to feed everyone on it, but some nations hoard food and water and play havoc with the environment, and most often the ruinous consequences of disease, famine and flooding fall upon the poorer nations. We can make choices as people of prosperity – if not because Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors, then because it is in our own best interest. Bono, the lead singer of U2, has written, “In the not-too-distant future, the rich world will invest in the education of the poor world, because it is our best protection against young minds being twisted by extremist ideologies - or growing up without any ideology at all, which could be worse. Nature abhors a vacuum; terrorism loves one.” We are still waiting for that day.

I have wandered far from our lakeshore and its boats sinking with the weight of such a large catch. That day in Galilee, the abundance was all from God. It was a sign to these fishermen in their own language that Jesus meant business, that this was what they could expect in a life in God – along with hardship and hunger. Over all, there would be enough, and often too much to handle.

This miraculous catch of fish, as the story is often entitled, was Jesus’ work. Yet it could not have been fulfilled without the participation of the men on those boats. Abundance comes from God – yet God always reveals it through people. Are you ready to catch a boatload of fish?

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