Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity
“Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing;
nevertheless, at thy word I will let down the net”
Nada, nothing, nichts rien. A powerful word, it captures something of the dilemma of modernity – the sense of nothingness, of emptiness. Is “at thy word” the counter? Or does it reveal a deeper problem? Does “at thy word” mean that suddenly we will have everything? Yes and no. The danger lies in what we think “at thy word” means.
The danger is in our thinking. If “at thy word” means a logic by which we acquire things then reason has become something merely instrumental, a means to an end. But what kind of end? An end where everything is turned into things. We not only get things – a full net of things – but our thinking turns us into things. And this is a greater nothingness, our greater nothingness, the loss of our humanity. It is a betrayal of the deeper kind of thinking that this Gospel along with today’s Epistle presents to us. If we think “at thy word” means getting things then we have missed Peter’s command to “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts”.
In the Christian understanding, Christ is the Logos, the Word and Son of the Father. But as Word, he is not the means to our domination and manipulation of the world. That is exactly our contemporary problem. It is a problem about how we think about thinking. If we turn reason into a tool, then we become things at the expense of our humanity. We dismiss and ignore all the qualities of life signalled in the Epistle that are true blessings, blessings rooted in the compassion of Christ, the truth of God who is the author and meaning of all life. Life is more than things. It is our evil to turn reason into a machine-making thing.
The point of the Gospel is that Christ wants more for us than a net full of things. Ultimately, he has come that we “might have life and have it more abundantly.” That abundance of life does not mean an abundance of things. It has entirely to do with the quality of our life with one another that turns upon our life with God in Christ. It has entirely to do with the power of the Good alive and at work in us. It is altogether about a meaningful life, a life lived to and for God and with God.
