Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity

admin | 20 July 2014

“Nevertheless, at thy word, I will let down the net”

Just another fishing story, it might seem. Jesus, standing by the lake of Gennesaret first teaches “the people who pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” using a ship as his pulpit, it seems, and then bids Simon Peter to “launch out into the deep and let down your net.” Peter’s response captures an essential aspect of human experience. “Master,” he says, “we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.”

More than just another fishing story, the miracle here is not just in the amazing catch of fishes that broke their net and almost sank their ships. Neither is it just about the call of Simon Peter and James and John to catch men for God. No. This gospel story also speaks to the fears of our contemporary culture in profound and wonderful ways. It addresses the very modern concept of the empty meaninglessness of life.

Sometimes our fears define us and our world and culture. As the philosopher and Christian Peter Kreeft notes, the fear of the ancient world was the fear of death, the fear of the Medieval world, the fear of Hell, but the fear of the modern world is the fear of meaninglessness. “We have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.” There is nothing and we are nothing, it seems and this has been a feature of modern literature as, for instance, in Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, which is about facing the empty nothingness of life.

It is all nada. “Nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” – Nothing and nothing then nothing and nothing and then nothing – as the older waiter observes, thinking about an old man in the café, perhaps a survivor of World War I and its atrocities in the face of which there is no answer, no meaning just the utter meaninglessness of war and destruction, of death and despair, and in the old man’s case, an attempted suicide. Has anything really changed? we might ask, as a passenger plane is shot down in the Ukraine, as girls from a boarding school are abducted and remain in captivity in Nigeria, as humanitarian disaster after humanitarian disaster unfolds for countless millions of people displaced by wars and conflicts beyond their control. Hemingway’s short story marks the first time the Spanish word nada which means nothing was used in English.

“What did he fear?” the waiter asks himself. “It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.” And yet it takes a clean, well-lighted place to be able to face the empty meaninglessness of life, “a certain cleanness and order.”

“It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.” And yet, there is a consciousness, an awareness of the self which suggests otherwise and perhaps in ways unknown or at least rejected by Hemingway. The waiter recognizes that “some lived in it” – in the experience of a meaningless existence – but “never felt it.” But the waiter claims that “he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada” and extends this in a kind of full frontal attack on religion as providing an answer, taking the Lord’s Prayer and substituting nada for all of the nouns of meaning. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada at it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.” That’s a lot of nada! And if that is not enough, he does the same thing to the Hail Mary. “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” This is brilliant and provocative.

Yet, despite the rejection of the idea of meaning there are, I think, two things that counter the claim of meaninglessness. “Deliver us from nada” is, perhaps, the prayer that reveals a deeper truth at the heart of human experience, namely, the desire to make sense of the senselessness of life. And, then, there is the idea that a certain kind of light – a certain kind of awareness – is needed to face and name the nada of existence. Despite the claim that “a man was nothing,” there is a sense of the self, a someone and, indeed, a community of people.

Well, what is this all about, you are probably asking, for those who live in the relative comfort of middle class lives? Is it all nada? Well, “Some lived in it and never felt it.” For what do I hear all the time but the whinge and whine about aches and pains and growing old? The complaints and barely concealed anger and fearfulness about death and the disarray and collapse of our institutions? Empty churches and empty souls, and the fear that somehow all the hopes and dreams of a comfortable life are really nothing, nada. Such is the emptiness of a merely cultural Christianity. Is it any wonder that assisted suicide has become the default position for the culture of nihilism, the culture of secular atheism? Coming soon, perhaps, to a nursing home near you.

We live in the ruins of the revolutions, the revolts against spiritual and intellectual life which paradoxically can only be understood through what we have rejected. Alfred Döblin, returning to Berlin after an uncomfortable exile in America during World War II, found an Europe that was unwilling to hear what he had to say. What he had to say speaks to our world and day. “You have to sit in the ruins for a long time and let them affect you, and feel the pain and the judgement.” We are the children of experience who have to confront the meaninglessness, the nihilism or wilful nothingness that we have chosen. Only so might we learn. But, just as Döblin discovered, so it is with us. We don’t want to hear and see. As he puts it, “you haven’t heard it. And if you heard it with your ears you didn’t comprehend it, and you’ll never comprehend it because you don’t want to.” It is a feature of contemporary culture, Alberto Manguel, observes, namely, “the readers unwillingness to hear.”

This is where today’s lessons come into play. For those who “love life” and want to “see good days” must find it not in material comforts but in a moral and spiritual attitude of the soul that is open to the only real blessing that there is: “be[ing] followers of that which is good” even in the face of terror and hardship. “Neither be troubled; but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts,” as Peter says in the Epistle reading, the same Peter who in the Gospel shows us the truer response to the experience of nada. To be sure, “we have toiled all the night and have taken nothing,” he says, “nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net.”

“All the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,” Luke tells us in the beginning of this Gospel reading. What is that about except the strong desire to know and to want to understand, the very principle upon which education depends, the life-long education of learning the will of God and finding our truth and our happiness in God’s word? There is something more than the empty nothingness of life if we choose to learn and act upon what we hear. This is the critical point. It is all about what we choose. We can assert the nothingness, the nada, the meaninglessness of existence for that is altogether what we will. Or we can embrace the word of God and persevere in gladness and joy, finding our good in God’s will.

Our awareness of ourselves as selves means that we are more than nothing. In ourselves we are nothing. We find the truth of ourselves in God. To sit in the ruins need not mean empty despair and sorrow. It can be about attending to the word proclaimed in the midst of human experience, “sanctifying Christ as Lord in [our] hearts” and letting down the net “at thy word,” persevering in the tasks of our lives. It is our call: to be defined by the self-willed nada of contemporary culture or to be defined by the word of God.