Cliff Loesch

February 4, 2007

Working All Night

Luke 5:1-11

Bruce McPherson suggested that the movie, “Big Fish” offered some helpful insights or parallels to the passage in Luke I am considering today: Luke 5:1-11. (http://www.cathedral.org/cathedral/worship/wbm040208.html) I had never seen the movie and decided to rent it and watch it for myself—hoping it might yield some good story to share today. I picked up the movie while I was out doing some visiting on Friday—and later that afternoon, I had some time before our Ministry and Counsel meeting and decided maybe that would be a good time to get started with the movie. I popped it into the computer and got it started—but just a few minutes into the movie the entire system froze. So now it’s time to do some computer troubleshooting. I managed to exit out of everything and then restarted the computer and tried again. But I got to the same spot in the movie and it froze again. Then I went looking to see if I had some other player—some other software—installed on the computer that I could try to use to play the movie. I found another option and tried again—and this time skipped ahead to the next section to start the movie on the other side of the glitch. I watched a few minutes more of the movie, but then everything froze again. This time I pulled the disk out of the drive and inspected it. It looked like it had quite a few scratches so I thought it must be a problem with the disk. So I drove back to Blockbuster and traded it in for a different copy. The girl at Blockbuster agreed that the first one I took looked like it might have a problem—too many scratches—but she assured me that the second one I was about to walk out the door with looked pretty good. So I came back and tried again—and it looked like it might be working this time. But now it was time for Ministry and Counsel. And I had just spent over an hour spinning my wheels. Wasted effort.

Little did I know how well that movie would help me relate to this passage. In verse five, Simon told Jesus, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” There are some days that you look back over the day and feel a great sense of accomplishment. So many things done. It’s a good feeling. Yet there are other days where you look back over the day and you wonder where the time went. So many things you intended to finish that day. But interruptions or computer glitches or some other minor emergencies kept springing up—and looking back it seems like you’ve accomplished practically nothing. We can relate to Simon Peter’s cry. Sometimes we have worked all night but have caught nothing. It’s a cry of frustration, perhaps of defeat. Of lost time. Of wasted effort. It might even be a cry of fear—after all, in the case of these fishermen, they had nothing to sell, which meant (I imagine) their families might have nothing to eat.

And then came the request from Jesus to use the boat as a speaking platform. Peter probably thought to himself, “Why not? I can’t seem to use it to catch fish.” So now there were more unproductive moments—or what might have seemed to be unproductive—just sitting in the boat while Jesus spoke to a crowd.

Is it significant that in this passage there is nothing whatsoever about the content of Jesus’ message? Was what he said not really that important? Or was it just a repeat of things he’d said many times? Anyway this passage is all about the logistics surrounding Jesus’ message and about Simon’s fishing difficulties. We really don’t know what Jesus told the crowd of people that day. But important lessons abound in the periphery of life.

As frustrating as computer glitches happen to be, I have to say that I learn more about them when things go wrong. I now know that I have at least three different programs on my computer that can play DVDs. And I know a little bit more about how to operate them. Without the glitches on Friday I would not have figured out quite so much. And I got a firsthand lesson—or reminder—of the frustration involved in spinning your wheels. It must be somewhat like the way Simon Peter felt that day. And then as I started watching the movie later that evening—Molly wanted to see it, too. So we watched it together. And that was really good. Is it too big of a stretch to see that several positive things came about as a result of that hour of frustration?

Now, why would anyone work in the middle of the night? Let’s think about that. Actually, there are lots of reasons—but almost never because that’s when you happen to feel like working. You work in the middle of the night in order to make a deadline. Or you work at that time because the nature of the work calls for it. My dad used to bale hay in the middle of the night because the humidity was just right at that time, whereas in the daytime it was often too dry. Likewise, Simon must have thought it would be a good time to find some fish (although it didn’t work out that way). And people work in the middle of the night to take care of emergencies. And they take jobs in the middle of the night if a daytime shift is not available—or because they need the extra pay that sometimes accompanies middle-of-the-night shifts. I know some people actually prefer those hours. But not most people. If you work all night it’s out of necessity or out of emergency, not usually out of choice. It signifies a commitment to get the job done, or a willingness to take care of emergencies whenever they arise.

I should also mention that unless you’re accustomed to overnight work—the next day you feel a lot of exhaustion. So Simon was washing up his nets one morning after a hard night’s work that yielded nothing. No fish. He’s frustrated and exhausted. And then Jesus asks the sleep-deprived Simon if he’ll launch the boat out a little ways so he can speak to the crowd gathered on the shore.

I wonder if Simon had any trouble staying awake after that long night. But after listening to Jesus teach for however long, Jesus then turned to Simon Peter and simply said, “Why don’t you row on over to the deep water over there and throw out your nets for a catch?”

Simon was very polite, and said, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” But I wonder what he was thinking? In his exhaustion, the thought of throwing out those nets again might have been overwhelming. And he might have grumbled inwardly, wondering what Jesus really knows about fishing anyway. But he told Jesus, “Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” And you know the end of the story—in a short time they found so many fish that their nets started to break, and they filled up two boats so full with fish that both boats started to sink.

I think a lot of people will say this story is primarily about obedience. When Jesus asks us to do something, we accept that it’s the right thing to do and follow his guidance. And I think this is an important point. That is one thing, and possibly the most important thing, that is taught in this passage. We would do very well if we could learn to obey the leadings that God gives us.

But there is quite a bit more in this passage, too. For one thing, it’s about a way of seeing. The movie that Molly and I watched the other night, called Big Fish, was about a son and a father who had not spoken to each other for many years. The father had a way of telling the stories of his life over and over and over again. And the stories were so colorful and fanciful that, in the son’s opinion, they couldn’t possibly be true. The son was sure they were exaggerations. Or simply made-up stories. When the father was on his deathbed, the son came home to see him. They started talking, finally, again after many years. The son listened to the same stories again. And they talked about other things. He started hearing the stories, I think, from a slightly different perspective. But they still weren’t true—he was sure of that. But just as his father was passing away, his thoughts about these fanciful stories really began to change. And after his father was gone, his doctor—the doctor who had delivered him—told him the facts about his birth. “You want to know how you were born?” he asked. And he told him. It was an ordinary, uneventful story—like anyone’s birth. And the doctor asked, “Now which version would you rather tell? This one? Or your father’s? The one where you popped into this world so fast that you slipped right through my hands and went sliding out the door and down the hall and there were nurses and doctors and orderlies chasing after you trying to catch you. Now which version would you rather tell? And which one is more true?” And even at the funeral as all the different characters—and I do mean characters—of his father’s past began to show up, it became clear that there was a lot more factual truth to his dad’s fanciful stories than he used to think was possible. And the son’s way of seeing the world also began to expand a little.

With this passage in Luke, Jesus tells Simon—if I may embellish just a little—“Sure, you worked all night and have nothing to show for it. But all is not lost. It’s a big lake. There are lots of fish out here. There is always another day, another location. Give it a try over here. And there are other kinds of fish to catch. Come with me and we’ll catch some people. People are even more slippery and sometimes harder to find than fish.” But here in this one little story we see hope and faith rekindled after a frustrating night; We see a new perspective on life—that today is a new day and opportunities abound. We see willingness to follow Christ’s leading, and a willingness to try again. We also see that Simon let go of fear. No need to fear not having enough to eat; no need to worry about never catching any more fish ever again; no need to fear. And we see a change in the direction of life. Not that they never did any fishing again—certainly they did. But with their new way of seeing life, Simon and James and John were free to just leave their boats for some other day and follow Jesus.

No doubt we are a lot like Simon. The unproductive, frustrating nights or days consume us. Or we are filled with the fear of being unproductive or of not being able to finish what needs to be done—or of getting farther behind. What new perspective do we need today? How can we refocus our lives? What other ways of seeing are there? How big is our world and what opportunities are still out there? What is God teaching us through the peripheral events of life, or even through the frustrations? What does obedience mean for us? How are we to reach out to people? How can hope and faith be rekindled in us? And what does it mean, for us, to follow Christ?

I’m ending today with many questions. The answers to these questions, though, are not for me to give. May the Lord help each one of us to see the ways he is working in our lives.