Epiphany 5 C; Luke 5:1-11

Dramatic Reading: Simon Is the Miraculous Catch!
I'm Simon, a fisherman, well that is what I'm trained to do, that is what my father did and his father before him. It is how we've feed the family for, well forever, for as long as anyone can remember. Yep, fish, all the time. Fish, fish, salted fish and more fish. Not just us really, our whole community is supported by fishermen. In the morning we all head down to the lakeshore, help each other with our boats and nets, spend a workday fishing, more or less together, in the same area anyway, that way we can help each other if anything goes wrong and let each other know if we find fish in a certain area. Lately fishing hasn't been great so that last part is really important, if no one catches fish no one eats. At least they don't eat much. And we are all pretty close, we even have members of our family in other boats, two of Zebedee's sons work for me, I used to help out an uncle. That kind of thing. So it matters to us that everyone have enough and like I say times have been lean.

Really lean, we're starting to feel it, I'm hungry all of the time. It is hard for everyone but there are a lot of people who live under my roof and I'm responsible for taking care of all of them. I have to go without so they can have something and what if even then it gets to the point that that isn't enough? Like a week or two ago my mother in law was been very sick we reserved food for her and everything and she still wasn't even getting any better there was nothing we could do. I hate feeling out of control like that, it is my job to take care of things. In fact, it was really lucky that some traveling rabbi, that is what we call people who teach about God, was staying with us (again with the lack of food, we wanted to take him in and it is really important to us show hospitality but I think he could tell that we weren't exactly flush). Anyway she should have been the one waiting on him and she wasn't so we had to explain that she was ill. Then he insisted that we take him to her, he took her hand and told her to feel better and just *poof* like that the fever was gone! Thank the Lord!

Needless to say, we scraped together a lot of food and let him stay as long as he wanted. Besides he is great to listen to, he has new things to say about God, things I've never heard before. I'm just a fisherman but I like to believe that I think deeply. I'm not an intellectual exactly but the things that he says make sense. He says that God doesn't want to just punish us all the time, that God is about life and living, about love and healing about something bigger and better than each of us and today. I like to think that. It makes me feel a little better about the lack of food.

Ah right, lack of food brings me back to my point, I'm sorry, so anyway, things have been sparse. More days than not lately it seems like we set out, we do everything right and instead of fish all we catch all day are old sandals and branches that tear little holes in our nets, cause the knots to come untied so they don't do any good and fish can swim right out. So each day we go down, we fish, some days we catch something, a lot lately we catch nothing. We even try longer than normal and still don't catch anything, then we pull all the boats out and have a nice time hollering back and forth and watching what goes on at the lakeshore while we mend and clean our nets.

That is actually what I was doing the other day when that rabbi that I was telling you about showed up at the shore, really he was kind of pushed to the shore by this huge crowd, turns out that I'm not the only one who hears something in what he has to say, everyday more and more people are listening to him. This time it was so many that he needed to get out away from them a ways so that they could all hear and see him. Needed, kind of a stage, so we put him up in my boat and took it off shore a few feet so he had a little space and they could all relax on the shore and listen.

After he was done he looked over to where we were preparing our catch, or where we would be preparing our catch if there had been much of anything between us and asked us to get in the boat with him and go out to the deep water and put our nets back down. By this time it was about midday and fishing is usually done by early in the morning, plus we were pretty sure there just weren't any fish nearby to catch and finally, this rabbi didn't seem to understand fishing because you don't fish in the deeps, that just isn't how it is done but he had done great things for us and we could tell that he was exhausted from all the teaching, crowds had been following him for days and he had been healing people left and right.

Honestly I didn't feel much like going home to my family to tell them one more time that there would be no fresh food on the table, no fish to take to the market, no celebrating with friends because once again we were all unable to provide for our families, so a little midday boat trip out to the middle of the lake was okay if he said so.

There was something else too, something about the way he asked us to do it. He used this word catch, I'm not sure how to describe it to you, that word in my language means something like sustain life or restore life. It makes sense, if you think about it, you have to have food to live and if the only food that you get comes from what you catch then your life is sustained by a catch. I thought maybe he just used this kind of awkward term because he was from out of town. They talk different where he is from. So he said take the boat out tot he deep water and put out the nets to restore and sustain life. OK

So out we went, down went the nets and all of a sudden there was a great pull on the nets, like nothing that I had ever seen or felt. They were full of fish and it happened fast, we couldn't even get the net ups ourselves so James and John came out to help and another boat or two. There were so may fish we felt like the boat was sinking. But I didn't feel like I was sinking, for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my whole life I felt like I was going to be okay and not just me but the people I loved the most, my family, my friends, the people who worked for me, all the responsibility that I had held on my shoulders for so long from the time my own father had died and left me in charge of everything was lighter, I had help with it, there was hope in it, I felt alive even as seawater rushed around my feet and my little boat swayed from side to side, deeper under the waves, it was the best sinking feeling in the world!

And then all of a sudden I realized what it meant, this man wasn't just a rabbi, he was sent by God. I was completely unworthy of this feeling, it must have come from him, I took his power, I didn't deserve it. So I knelt down at his feet, I must have been crying I told him I was sorry that it was all a mistake that anyone sent by God would come to me. I needed to get him to the shore to get away from him because I was afraid but I was paralyzed because I didn't want to let go of the new life I had just found, and I wanted to be that person who brought new life to all those people. I had felt a catch, as he said, felt my life restored and sustained.

I wanted to keep feeling like there was more in the world than just me. And then I heard his voice, he called me by name. He told me not to be afraid and I felt like I was forgiven for being so unworthy. He told me that from NOW ON, not just today, not just this one time but from NOW ON I would be catching people. Finding them when they are in deep water and restoring their lives to them. Not just their lives but something more, it seemed like he was actually giving part of his life to them and he wanted me to help. When I got to the shore I left my boat and net for someone else who needed to learn how to fish and I followed Jesus the Rabbi!

And my life was sustained, thanks be to God. Amen