Jesus saw two boats there alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. After he had finished speaking he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” Simon said in reply, “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets.” When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing.” (Luke 5.2-6)
Somebody who knows what it’s like to put out into deep water has to be Ruth Coker Burks, whose new book, All the Young Men tells of her efforts to help in any way she could the young men dying of AIDS in 1986 Hot Springs, Arkansas, a place–much like every other place in the country at the time–that shunned and persecuted these dying men. A single mom and only 26-years-old, she becomes known as somebody who will help these men whom she calls “my guys.”
Doing the paperwork for them to get assistance, visiting them in hospital rooms that nurses won’t enter, drawing blood to have tested, she does it all, refusing to back away or back down, even when coming face-to-face with people in her own church who don’t want her among them because of her work with these young men.
At one point in her book–a book described as “a gripping and triumphant tale of human compassion”–Ruth is desperate to find food for these sick men, knowing that keeping weight on them will give them more time. Losing her job in a time-share office, she has a difficult time making ends meet for herself and for her daughter, much less for these dying young men.
She tells of the time when, at wit’s end and options exhausted, she decides to lower her nets into deep water, writing, “There were only so many times I could go to the elders of the town for grocery tabs. I knew keeping weight on my guys was helping, but even with Bonnie’s half of the food stamps and all my foraging, I was coming up short. And then the answer was right there at the Piggly Wiggly.”
“It was early morning, and we needed bread on the way to school, so I swung by the Piggly Wiggly on Park, and we popped in real quick. On my way out, I saw the dumpster was so full they’d left the top open. It wasn’t a huge bin, but about chest high, and right on top was a clear bag full of plastic-wrapped loaves. The bread I’d just spent money on.”
“As Allison got in the car, I walked over to get a better look at the bag. Through the plastic, I could see that all the bread had a sell-by date of just a few days from then. I thought of all the sandwiches I could make my guys and the dressings or the ways I could stretch meatloaf. I grabbed it. The whole bag. And once’ your’re taking food from a dumpster, you’re in. So, what was I going to do but look to see what else they had?”
And that’s how she, like Simon Peter in today’s reading, discovered that she was able to “catch a great number of fish, the nets tearing.” Soon, she was also pulling up to the “big Kroger out on Airport Road” in the early hours of the morning–the best time to dig deep in the dumpster before the food spoiled–finding fruits and vegetables and anything salvageable, in this way keeping these dying men fed. The man driving the milk truck saw her digging in the dumpster a few times and let her have the milk and yogurt he had to remove from the shelves because of the expiration date.
The evangelist Luke places this story of the miraculous catch at the center of the call of the disciples in his text, unlike the other gospel writers who say nothing of it in their recounting of the call, although John offers a similar story much later in his sequence of events. That Luke purposely puts this narrative at the heart of the call of Simon Peter and the others should alert us to its importance, not only for the first followers of the Galilean Teacher, but for us who might want to follow the Rabbi in our own time and in our own place.
To follow Rabbi Jesus, Luke implies, requires having the courage to put into deep water, even when good sense tells us the opposite, as Simon shows when he says to the Rabbi, “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets.” Reluctant and bone-tired, he has little hope of catching anything, except maybe a few hours of sleep, if he’s lucky. But, against all odds, he acquiesces and, dropping into the deep, finds his nets as full of good stuff as the dumpsters that Ruth Coker Burks digs deep into.
Luke’s point is clear. Unless we are willing to forego common sense and take a risk, we’re never going to have what it takes to be a follower of the Galilean Teacher, who knew a thing or two about putting into deep water, his life a series of high-stake risks as he fed the hungry, touched the leper, and embraced the sinner. Human nature consistent in its disdain for the damaged, the diminished, and the damned, he met resistance in his outreach to the last, the least, and the lost, just as that spirited single mom did in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but he plowed ahead, as she did, and the world became, at least for a while, a better place.
How deep, then, are we willing to drop our nets? That is the question we face today as we hear the call of the first who would follow the Rabbi on the byways, requiring that they go deep at every turn of the road. If we are risk-averse, then discipleship is not for us, and we need to stay at home, safe behind our closed doors and closed minds and closed hearts.
About a decade ago, officials in California had to shut down an eldercare facility because it had failed several inspections. The Department of Social Services planned to relocate to other facilities the 20 residents who were still living there. What was not expected was that the owners didn’t wait for Social Services to complete its work. They ceased operations immediately and terminated their employees.
Almost all of the workers walked out, leaving behind the elderly, vulnerable, weak residents to fend for themselves, an impossibility given their circumstances. But two men did not leave, the cook and the janitor, each of whom worked around the clock for two days, feeding the patients, cleaning them and their rooms, seeing that they had their medications. Each man went home for only one hour every 24 hours to take a shower, and then returned to the facility.
When asked why they stayed, one of the men answered, “If we left, they wouldn’t have anybody.” The other said, “I just couldn’t see myself going home. Even though they weren’t our family, they were kind of like our family for this short period of time.” Only these two were willing to drop their nets into the deep. The others walked away, not to be bothered by other people’s problems.
Sadly, we live in a world where Hot Springs is not one town in Arkansas, but is a town all over the place, places where the needs of others are always second to the needs of oneself, where the have nots are despised and the haves glorified, where other people’s problems aren’t our problem. If our world looks ever more selfish, it is because fewer people are willing to follow the path of the Galilean Teacher who commanded his first followers that they needed to drop their nets into the deep, not stay on the surface.
According to folklore, the deep is considered dangerous, a place of demons or creatures that will do us harm. Complex, chaotic, confusing, the deep conveys uncomfortable, unsafe, unknown, convincing us to stay on shore or at least in shallow water. “Better safe than sorry,” we tell ourselves, turning it into our way of life rather than the Rabbi’s command, “Put out into deep water and lower your nets.”
As a consequence, our world descends further into the darkness because we are too terrified to push our boats too far offshore. And yet, as the Rabbi makes clear, it is only in the deep that we will find the catch, because it is in the deep where the suffering, the starving, and the despised flounder and flop around, trying to find help, hope, and health.
When Mother Teresa visited Phoenix some decades ago–her purpose there was to open a home for the destitute–she was interviewed by the largest radio station in town. At one point, the interviewer asked Mother Teresa if there was anything he could do for her. Expecting to get a request for a contribution or media attention to raise money for her new home, he got an unexpected answer. Looking him squarely in the eye, the diminutive nun said, “Yes, there is. Find somebody nobody else loves and love them.”
As always, Mother Teresa showed clear insight into the soul of the gospel and into the soul of humankind, recognizing, as Rabbi Jesus did, that finding somebody nobody else loves is going to mean we drop our nets into the deep, because that is where we have buried the unlovable, the unwanted, and the unpopular, out of sight and out of mind.
Today, Rabbi Jesus tells Simon Peter that his destiny will be catching men, no longer just fish. Hearing his words, Simon Peter “left everything and followed him,” showing for a second time in this brief episode the courage that is the hallmark of every true follower of the Galilean. If we are to keep step with Rabbi Jesus, then we will have to leave everything and put out into the deep. Anything less will end up with empty nets.
The name Thomas McKean means nothing to most Americans, although he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The reason is simple. McKean did not sign the document until 1781, which was five years after it was initially drawn up. He waited until he knew that it had succeeded, when he saw there was no personal danger in signing it. The opposite is true of John Hancock, who was one of the first to sign the initial document and who did it with a bold flourish, so much so that his name became a synonym for a signature. He is reported to have explained the way he signed it by saying, “I signed it that way so King George III could read it without his spectacles.”
Courageous in the face of the deep threat that the king posed, Hancock and those that signed the document changed the course of the history of the young country. Had they done as McKean did, then we would be living in a very different world. To follow the Galilean Teacher requires that we also find the courage to dip our pen deep into the inkwell, signing bravely on the dotted line, ready to lose everything. Our decision, like that of John Hancock, will determine the future of our world.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 