Off on the world's shortest retreat on Lake Albano just outside of Rome. Leaving on Monday and will be back on Wednesday. It's not so much 'retreating' as it is 'nipping outside for a mo'.

A Sermon

Sunday February 7th 2010
Epiphany 5 Year C
Luke 5:1-11

I'm of the generation which learned its measurements in inches, feet and yards.

I know what an acre is. The Rectory here in Penicuik sits on about a third of an acre of land. If you added together the car park and the property the church is sitting on, you’d have about an acre without having to steal much of Nigel Johnston’s back garden to make up the difference.

I have seen a bushel basket. I know how big that is although, frankly, I’m a bit stymied when it comes to what a “peck” might be. I don't know how long a chain is, or a league. That's too ancient. On the other hand, I have no visual reckoning of what a hectare looks like – that's too modern - but I believe it to be some sort of metric acre.

Stewart and Hannah are probably more inclined to think in centimetres and metres.

I am descended from people who’d have known all the ancient measurements. They farmed sections and half-sections of land and could have told a new neighbour how many men they’d need to have around at harvest time to reap the fields and stook the grain on such a piece of Canadian prairie.

When I was a child in school we were told that there was a room somewhere on Parliament Hill in Ottawa where the government kept a lump of lead which weighed exactly a pound. They also had a steel bar measuring exactly a foot and vessels which could contain precisely one pint or one quart or one Imperial gallon.

We imagined an old commissionaire with a funny moustache guarding a small locked room. If you thought that Mr Lee down at the corner store had cheated you on a pound of green beans you could always fly to Ottawa and ask the commissionaire to get up and shuffle around for his keys and let you compare the bag of green beans with the standard pound kept in the room. Just the though of it kept everybody honest.

Our measurements have to be standard and regular and common property. I’m not going to buy cloth from you if your idea of a square yard isn’t the same as mine.

Time we measure in seconds and minutes and hours - days weeks months and years. If you've hit the age when you begin to become nostalgic you might ask yourself: “where was I five years ago? 2005, of course, wasn't it? Where was I in 2000? Or 1995?"

You go back in five-year increments through the eighties or seventies. A bit slimmer you were then, with more hair, married to that one and not this one. But when you change direction and go back up through the list you'll notice that it’s not a satisfactory way of measuring time at all. Measuring your life in regular increments is quite daft, really, and not terribly useful because the events of any life happen in lumps, not in regular steps.

You didn’t have a crisis or a change or a transformation every year or every five just because the clock or the calendar turned over. No, every year is not the same. There is no standard year or decade guarded by a commissionaire in a little room in Ottawa. No such thing exists. Some years, days months and moments are special times - they weigh more and contain more things. They are significant. Some times are lighter and click by with a dull regularity.

In the Greek language there is a word for time which passes in regular increments - the word is "Chronos" and it's a useful word for mapping out the regular time - time without content - time-always-the-same – standard days, weeks, months and years.

The other word is Kairos and it is better translated by the English word "season". A season has particular obligations attached to it and requires that the farmer, the student, the disciple or the traveller be aware not only of its proportions but its requirements. It contains the promise of abundance if taken seriously and approached at the right angle or the threat of tragedy if it is misunderstood or disobeyed.

An ancient tapestry outlines the seasons in terms of agricultural activity in medieval Britain: There’s the farmer in the first panel sowing seeds in the spring. There he is reaping in the fall. There he is slaughtering his hogs in November. We do different things at different times.

At the end of whatever sermon he was preaching to the crowds in the fifth chapter of Luke, Jesus, in the boat with his new disciples, tells Simon Peter to put out a little farther on the lake and to let down his nets.

“Lord”, says Simon, “we’ve done that regularly on the hour and half-hour all night. We've been letting them down. No one can say we haven’t kept to schedule. Each time we brought them up empty. Time and time again. But because you say so, I’ll do it again.”

You know the story. He did it again. And this time they enclosed such a shoal of fish that his partners in the fishing syndicate needed to bring their up boats close and take up the surplus.

It's a story we tend to universalize. Some of us, you see, have made perseverence into a religion and would take almost carnal delight in any story which showed the hero performing a difficult task "just one more time" and thereby reaping a reward. We would bear such a story aloft like a flag and would bore our children and grandchildren to tears with such a story. You might invoke me - or blame me. In fact, that's not what I'm saying at all. But this is not a story which merely praises perseverance.

Everyone has a list of things they've been hammering away at with little success to their enormous and never-ending frustration - things that they've been trying to do for a long time - things which don't happened just because they want them to happen. They've even written to their MP. No joy there either.

And in fact there's not an iota of proof that the one more time will be any more successful than the first ninety-nine. Maybe the frustrating thing you've been trying to achieve for twenty years is the wrong thing to do.

You've been banging your head against a brick wall. Now you've got a bruise on your forehead and bits of brick in your hair. Maybe the thing was ill-advised or wrong-headed. Maybe you should take your wife out to a movie, come home and have a stiff drink in front of the fire. And tomorrow - try doing something else.

There’s another related tendency which folks try out on this passage which is to say that the moment is different because Jesus is in the boat. This is both true and not true. Yes, Peter lets the nets down one more time because it’s Jesus telling him to do it. Don’t we sometimes, though, make Jesus an addendum to what we were doing anyway? We go back to the same old list but this time we imagine Jesus alongside us - Sancho Panza to our Don Quixote- and we carry on tilting at the same old windmills – the same things on our list - but this time saying that we’re doing it in Jesus' name. We invoke the power of Jesus to get ahead in life or make some other provision for our safety and security.

One wishes, again, that somebody had the chutspah to ask us why you think Jesus wants the same things we’ve always wanted. Curious coincidence, no, that Jesus might want exactly what suits us? How does that work?

No, the secret here is to ask what sort of season it is that these people in the boat with Jesus are occupying at this moment in Luke’s story. Forget what they are receiving – what exactly are they participating in?

At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has just disappointed an entire congregation in Nazareth – a congregation in which his family were seated looking decidedly uncomfortable as he preached an inflammatory sermon and then horrified as the congregation rose up in rebellion to drag Jesus from the body of the Kirk. He has moved to Capernaum as an exile from his family home and, frankly, Peter’s desire for a full boat and the desire of the other soon-to-be apostles to pay their debts and invest in new equipment is clearly not the point. By the end the day they will have left all these things – nets, boats and families – and will have become followers. Given that this is Luke's version of the same story which John places at the end of his Gospel, we can safely say that, as far as Luke is concerned, this is the last full boat of fish Peter will ever see.

The point is the Kingdom and its extension. Peter, James and John are being invited out of the boat and into the company of the apostles. It’s not one more fishing day with some added success because Jesus is present.

It’s the end of fishing and the end of regular time with its identical moments, its standard lengths and weights. It’s a new season – a new and irregular measurement of time and space. It’s the beginning of a new life.

A welcome bit of subtlety

One of the truly tedious things about living in Britain is the number of "shock ads" on television designed to dissuade the Brits from drinking and driving or neglecting to turn their electrical appliances off at night. They generally involve firemen holding distraught parents back from returning into a burning house to rescue their children, who will shortly die because somebody left the little red light on on the television set, or twisted bodies of adorable children on roads because somebody drank too much, etc etc.

As necessary as the messages may be it seems to be of a piece with the government's low view of the people who elected them that the citizens of this country need to be brutalized by terrible visual images before they'll decide to fly right. The ads are truly distasteful (I won't even give you an example here) and I turn the well-known ones off when they start.

The example above is different. Quite gripping without being revolting. Well done!

Thought for the Day

One definition of “compassion” has it described as being “more rigorous than empathy”. I don’t know if the word is ‘stronger’ or simply more likely to be turned into action. When Jesus sees the crowds – leaderless and without a shepherd – it is said in the text that he had compassion for them. The conversion of St Francis of Assisi took place not when he had a dream or a vision but when he saw a man stricken with leprosy standing on the side of the road. The sight marked the well-dressed young "Francesco". Something leapt into life within him and his life demonstrably changed thereafter.

My daughter began her first evening shift the other day at an overnight shelter for homeless women in Montreal. Up until this point she’d been paying her bills by working as a manager at a restaurant and she’d been well-paid and good at her job. She found, though, that the work was unrelated to her study at university which is all about people and intervening in the problems they face.

Her boyfriend, for his part, has just arrived in Haiti in a Canadian uniform where he’s in the midst of unpacking a field hospital and managing other supplies destined for the relief effort there. At different points on the globe they are dealing with the plight of others. They are now old enough and trained enough to make good on the feelings they have within them and to translate those into action on behalf of others.

Is empathy a warmer word? It describes what’s going on within us - what we feel. The impact – it’s right “there” and can take the form of distraction or tears or even physical pain .

Compassion usually refers to what we do alongside the object of our concern – what we do for them. We’d have to know whether we’re doing them any good and that’s harder to know. That’s where the risks come in.

We don’t always manage to do the good we intend, but unless we take the best stab at it we can, the feelings we have inside of us may remain merely feelings.



the audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:21.25 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar.