Scripture: Luke 5:4-11 and Matthew 11:25-30
When I was about nine years old, we moved from a house in the city to a house in the country. And when I say country, I mean country. It took almost twenty minutes to drive from our house to the nearest village. And that little village had all of four businesses in it: a hardware store, a drug store, a bait shop, and a bar that my mother called “the bad part of town.”
You had to take a dirt road to get to the dirt road that our house was on. Right across the dirt road in front of the house was a large parcel of densely wooded land, my own miniature forest. I spent countless hours there—chasing toads, riding my minibike, and building impregnable forts out of scrap wood with my buddies.
But the best part about our house in the country was that it sat on a lovely and largely undeveloped lake that was full of panfish. Indeed that is precisely why my father had moved us there. More than anything in the world, he longed to be able to walk down to the bottom of his yard every summer night and fish for bass and bluegills. And so he did.
My father wanted to instill in me a love for fishing and that lake was the place to do it. In fact, it was almost impossible not to catch a fish there. I quickly discovered that if I took about three steps onto the dock, lowered my worm into the water, and watched carefully I could see the fish sweep in and take the bait. Then it was literally just a matter of lifting the fish out of the water. At my young age I found it immensely gratifying but my father—a fishing purist—disapproved.
He had a point. Life doesn’t spend a lot of time being easier than we expect it to be, but sometimes it does that, and when it does that it can be its own kind of problem. Sure, I was catching a lot of fish, but I wasn’t learning anything about fishing, and it was about as sporting as tossing dynamite into an aquarium. No more of that, my father decreed. If I was going to be a true fisherman then I needed to learn to cast to the deep water.
He led me out to the end of the dock and he pointed to a spot that at that tender age seemed very far away. He said that this was where I needed to cast my line—out to where the bottom dropped off. He checked my worm, reviewed with me how my mighty Zebco push-button reel worked, leaned over to offer some last-minute coaching, and told me to let it fly.
I heaved the rod with all my might but was puzzled to see something land with a clumsy splash in the water right in front of us. It was my father’s hat. In my Herculean effort to get the line all the way out to that drop off, I had snagged the back of his hat and launched it into the lake. I reeled the hat in, held it up like a trophy fish, and my father unhooked it and tossed it aside to dry. My father, not by nature a patient man, took a deep breath and told me to try again.
Once more, he reminded me of how the Zebco worked. He offered a few words of wisdom. And he told me to let it rip.
I gave the rod another mighty heave, but this time the result was not a flying hat but a blood-curdling scream. You see, in the absence of a hat I had hooked the back of my father’s head. The only good news in this very-bad-news scenario is that my father always pressed the barbs down on his fish hooks so he suffered five minutes of agony getting the hook out of his scalp rather than the standard seven minutes.
You can now perhaps understand why, when Jesus tells the fishermen to cast their nets into the deep water, I wince and wonder whether that’s really such a good idea. And our friend Simon Peter and his brother Andrew had the same reaction, although for different reasons. In all candor, it’s hard to blame them.
Put yourself in their place. They’d been out fishing all night. They’d had zero success. They were exhausted and a bit hopeless. We can hardly fault them for rolling their eyes and shaking their heads over advice like: “Hey, why don’t you try one more time, but in the deep water?”
Now, in this sermon, I want to try to connect two gospel passages that, at first blush, may not seem to have anything to do with each other. This is the first of them. And I want to begin by asking you to notice that in this passage Jesus doesn’t just tell the fishermen to keep throwing out their net. Rather, he specifically tells them to go to deep water. And I want to invite you to think with me about what that instruction might mean.
Going to deep water means going to mystery. It means going to the place where the bottom drops out. It means going to that darkened territory where we can’t see all the structures and tangles that lie beneath the surface.
It means trusting. It means believing. It means having faith.
Deep water is different than shallow water. My father succeeded at making a fisherman out of me, and many years later I found myself in the Florida Keys trolling in very deep water indeed. Something big hit one of the lines, the rod bent hard and twitched, and the Captain took the rig out of the rod holder and stuck it in my hands as I braced myself against the transom.
I fought the fish for quite a while and, just when I thought I had him, the line went limp and the rod popped up. “I lost him,” I said despairingly. The Captain shook his head. “Shark took him,” he replied. “Big shark. I saw him flash underwater.” I hadn’t run into that problem when I went after bluegills with my Zebco. As I say, deep water is different.
Going to deep water may not sit well with us at first. There’s a lot of comfort in the shallows. In the shallows, we can see everything and watch it all unfold and never, ever worry about spearing our father in the back of the head. The shallows are easy and they are free of any true risks. The problem, as Jesus understood, is that they are also free of any true rewards.
A while back, I stumbled on a beautiful song called “Deep Waters” that was recorded in 2023 by a group called the Laudate Mennonite Ensemble. It was written by a composer named Pepper Choplin. Here are some of the lyrics:
Their fishing nets were empty when they first saw the Lord.
All night they had been fishing in the waters by the shore.
The Lord said: “Go to deep waters, cast your nets once more.”
And, because they obeyed, they would never be the same.
Go to deep waters, deep waters, where only faith will let you go.
Go out to deep waters, deep waters. Harvests of faith will overflow.
Go.
You can find the song on Spotify or YouTube if you’re interested. The music is as lovely as the lyrics and I commend the piece to your attention.
Now, we may prefer to frolic in the shallows, but life has a way of tossing us into the deep water doesn’t it? Indeed, it seems to me like we live mostly right on the edge of the drop off, whether we acknowledge it or not. We’re all just one step away from finding ourselves trying to keep our head above the waves.
Lots of things can move us into the depths. The passing of a loved one. The cancer diagnosis of a friend. The loss of a job, a career, a long-planned future. The dissolution of a marriage. A struggle with an addiction or dependency. The list goes on and on.
Shallow water one day, deep water the next. We live with that potential each and every minute of our time on planet earth. It is the very essence of the human condition.
But I want you to notice something about this gospel passage. In this story, Jesus tells Simon Peter and his fishermen friends to go out into the deep water. He tells them to leave the shelter of the shore. He tells them that it is in the deep water that they will find what they seek.
And, you see, this is exactly what our faith demands of us. It calls us to be a people of depth. It calls us to be a people who voluntarily leave the shallows behind and who choose the deep water—where, as the song says, “only faith will let you go.”
Our faith commands us to comfort the family of the one who has died. To bring books to the friend who has received the cancer diagnosis. To help set up the Go Fund Me page for the person in economic distress. To take our pal in the broken marriage out to lunch and lend them a sympathetic ear.
Jesus has no interest in robbing us of the delights of the shallow water. He is, after all, the one who kept the party going at the wedding feast at Cana. It is for me impossible to imagine a Jesus who does not smile and laugh and know deep and genuine joy.
But He wants us to understand that it is in the deep water that our work lies. “I will show you things hidden since the beginning of the world,” Jesus tells his followers. And we discover those things in the deep waters—in their darkness, and their impenetrability, and their mystery. Go to deep waters, He said. Go.
Now, I want to connect this gospel passage with another because I think it helps tease out a meaning that we might otherwise miss. The other passage appears in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me all of you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
I count this among my favorite passages in the Bible and I return to it frequently. I perhaps most often come to it when life has tossed me into the deep water and I needed consoling. Now, that’s a perfectly good understanding of these verses and a perfectly good use of them. And I would never discourage anyone from embracing these verses for exactly that purpose.
But, this morning, what I’d like you to notice is that Jesus isn’t really talking in this passage about when life tosses us out of the comfortable shallows. He’s talking about the way we may feel when we voluntarily head into the deep water to do his work. That is not the yoke of life—that is the yoke of following Jesus. That is not the burden of existence—that is the burden of making the choices that Jesus asks us to make.
Let’s be honest: Those choices can take us into very deep waters, indeed. Just think about all the tough work they entail, the sometimes chafing yoke, the often wearisome burden. It’s quite a daunting list of job responsibilities.
Seek first the kingdom of God. Love one another as we love ourselves. Love our neighbor. And, since everyone is our neighbor, that means love everyone. Even the unlovable. Even our enemies. Forgive others. Forgive ourselves. Turn the other cheek. Then turn the other one. If someone asks us to walk with them a mile, walk two. If someone wants the shirt off our back, give them our coat as well. Don’t judge. Worry about the log in our own eye, not the speck in someone else’s. Feed the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Visit the sick and the imprisoned. Welcome the stranger. Believe—even when the incontrovertible facts say: doubt. And I particularly like this part of the job description from a poem by Wendell Berry: “Practice resurrection.”
Holy smokes—literally. It’s all so much to do, isn’t it? More than we can imagine. More than we can lift. More than we can carry. More than we can bear.
And if we were to try to do all these things on our own power we would absolutely and magnificently and spectacularly fail. But that’s exactly what Jesus tells us in this passage. That we don’t do them on our own power.
We do these things on the power of the one who stills the water. We do them on the power of the one who commands the water. We do them on the power of the one who walks on the water. There is no water so deep that Jesus cannot rise above it and, in the rising, lift us up in God’s service.
After I discovered the song “Deep Waters” I went looking for other pieces by that same group, the Laudate Mennonite Ensemble. I found another song that I also love, this one quite different. It’s a South African hymn called “Woza Nomthwalo Wakho.” In English translation, that means: “Come, bring your burdens to God.”
The lyrics are exquisitely simple: “Come, bring, your burdens to God. Come, bring your burdens to God. Come, bring your burdens to God. For Jesus will never say no.”
When I first heard the hymn, the theologian in me, and perhaps also the lawyer in me, wanted to argue with it. But wait, I thought, sometimes we ask God for something, and God answers, but the answer is no. Is the hymn promising something it can’t deliver?
But the more I thought about it the more convinced I became that the hymn has things exactly right. You see, this is a song specifically about burdens. And when we come to Jesus with a burden Jesus will never say: no—I don’t care, or no—you’re on your own, or no—it’s too much trouble, or no—I’m busy with other things. Jesus says yes to all of our burdens. And it is in his saying yes that our yokes become easy and our burdens grow light.
The yes of Jesus may not be the yes we imagined. It may not be the yes we hoped for. It may not at first even look very much like yes. But let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God and the Very Embodiment of Love Itself, does not invite us into deep water just to watch us drown.
Let me close with a story. It’s a true story. And it’s the kind of true story that makes those of us who speak from pulpits on Sunday mornings say: “Wow. That will preach.” Let’s see if it does. The story goes like this.
In May of this year, in Pensacola, Florida, a teenage girl got caught in a riptide that started to drag her out to sea. A woman who saw her in distress frantically ran down the beach looking for help. She encountered a fisherman whose name was—wait for it—Andrew.
She alerted Andrew to the emergency but, unfortunately, neither Andrew nor the woman could swim. And, even if they could, swimming out to try to help the young woman might get them caught in the riptide, too. Things looked mighty bad. But then Andrew had an idea.
He had a drone with him that he used to set bait for shark fishing. He draped a life vest over the drone and flew it out to the struggling girl. On his second attempt, he managed to drop the life vest right into her waiting arms. It was as if it fell from heaven. The grateful girl’s father called Andrew a “guardian angel.”
And so he was.
And so are you.
And so are we all, when we do the work of God, out there in the deep waters.
“Go to deep waters, deep waters. Where only faith will let you go. Go to deep waters, deep waters. Harvests of faith will overflow. Harvests of faith will overflow. Go.”
And the people said: Amen.
