God's Not Afraid of the Dark: A Sermon

5th Sunday after the Epiphany 2025

I was asked again to guest preach, this time for a preacher who lost their voice. Since I was crafting this sermon, I did not write a separate post last week. If you don’t want to read a sermon, try this post from two years ago which influenced this sermon:

For today’s sermon, I focused on the lectionary Gospel, Luke 5:1-11, but I would have changed the other readings as follows: Old Testament - 1 Kings 19; Psalter - Psalm 69; Epistle - Ephesians 3:16-21.

What a week it has been. What a year the past three weeks have been. The weather has been on a roller coaster, with shorts one day and back to winter the next day. Our emotions and nation seem to be all over the place. Today is the Super Bowl, which some are excited about while other football fans are disgruntled. There has been so much going on, and the news alerts in my email have been popping up like crazy. What a time to be alive.

And so, many of us may identify with Simon Peter at the beginning of our Gospel reading this morning. He has just worked the night shift, he was out fishing all night and it was futile. He caught nothing. He is tired and worn out, he’s ready to just finish cleaning up and go home to bed. Can anyone identify with that feeling? I’m tired, I gave it my all, nothing worked, it’s been a long day, long night, just let me get home safely and get some rest. Please don’t ask anything of me right now. Except, Jesus does. While Simon is cleaning up, Jesus hops into his boat, asks Simon to push out a little from shore, and then Jesus keeps teaching the people, with now a little distance between him and them. Then, when Jesus is done teaching, he asks Simon to go out into deep water and let down his nets again.

Simon is at the end of a long night. He had just finished cleaning those nets. What was it about Jesus that made Simon say yes? Maybe it was in the teaching Jesus had just finished doing. Maybe it was desperation for a catch, for money to buy the day’s food. In Luke’s Gospel, Simon has already met Jesus before, at the end of chapter 4. Simon’s mother-in-law had a high fever and Jesus healed her, along with many others. So, this isn’t the first time Simon and Jesus meet. There must have been something already in their relationship that when Jesus asked Simon to go back out on the lake one more time, and not just the shallow area but deep water, that made Simon say yes. Simon’s response is: “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.” Because you say so. Simon is willing to take Jesus at his word.

It reminds me of the song by Lauren Daigle that came out in 2018 called “You Say.” Anyone familiar with it? It’s about what Jesus says, versus what we think and feel and do. The chorus goes:

“You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
And you say I am held when I am falling short
And when I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours”

It’s a reminder that the most important thing said about you, the truest thing about you, is that you are loved. When you are tired and worn out, when you’re falling short, when you feel helpless, when you don’t know what to do, God says, “I love you. I got you. You are mine. Always. No matter what.” So, Simon says, “Because you say so, I will try again.”

God often asks us to try again. Another infamous story in the Bible that I know at least one pastor is preaching on this morning is 1 Kings 19 where Elijah is so worn out that he eats and sleeps and eats and sleeps and when he’s done, God approaches him again in the still, small voice, the gentle whisper, and after listening to Elijah vent and grieve, God sends him back. We can feel tired and worn out. I remember seeing something about a week ago saying, I’m done with my 30-day trial of 2025 and I’d like to return it. Yet God is more likely to send us back, and ask us to try again. However, the good news is that God doesn’t send us back exactly the same. For Elijah, God provided an assistant, Elisha. For Simon, Jesus asks him to go fish in a different part of the lake, in deep water.

Deep sea fishing is different than regular fishing. Deep sea is out where you’re farther from shore. It’s riskier and you’d better pay closer attention to the weather and currents to make sure you stay safe. After all, this is the concern of the psalmist in Psalm 69, which begins, “Save me, O God, for the waters have risen up to my neck... I have come into deep waters, and the waves are washing over me.” We can imagine waves washing over us, right? Maybe at the ocean, or a water park. The advantage there is that we know which way is up, we can find the ground under our feet; we can make our way out, usually, eventually.

One time when I went whitewater rafting, I crossed a rapid and fell out of my kayak. I knew which way was up, but I was caught in churning water. I had to fight to get my head back above the water, and once I did, I remember this conversation with the guide, who yelled at me to swim over to him. I yelled back, “I can’t!” And he yelled back, “You can! You remember how to swim!” Now, what I meant by “I can’t,” wasn’t that I didn’t know how to swim, but that the white water was so strong where I fell in that it was physically very hard to move against the water and swim. But the thought I had during that was God. I was weeks away from leaving to serve with a mission agency long term in Nicaragua. God had clearly called me and prepared me for it. So, my reasoning was that since God had plans for me, then God wasn’t going to let me drown in this rushing torrent of water. So, somehow, I managed to get my way from the eddy of water to reach out to the guide’s paddle, who then pulled me in. I don’t remember how I managed to gain any momentum to swim, other than God.

So, like the psalmist, we pray, “...rescue me from deep water! Do not let the waves wash over me, do not let the deep swallow me, or the Pit close its mouth over me.” Because this is the connection: between deep water and the primordial sea, which is a powerful Jewish symbol of chaos. In Jewish tradition, deep water hearkens back to the waters at creation, when the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters, and God brings forth order from the chaos. God creates out of the chaos. You see, when God calls us into deep water, we don’t know what’s out there. Literally, we don’t know. We know more about our solar system than we do about the depths of our oceans. Deep water is full of the unknown, yes, surprises, probably, and also unexplored resources and potential. We don’t know, and that can be scary. Yet when God is the one leading us there, we can trust in God. God creates out of the unknown, and so can we.

Don’t forget, God’s not scared of the dark. In fact, God does a lot of work in the dark, as I was reminded when I was rereading the book “God’s Holy Darkness,” whose author we hosted here a couple years ago. Elijah in the cave is in the dark. Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus, which includes that verse John 3:16, is at night, in the dark. Creation begins in the dark. The Spirit hovering over the waters, was doing so in the dark. When the temple was complete, King Solomon said, “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.”² Deep water is dark. That’s why we don’t know as much about the bottom of the ocean: because there’s no light. There’s light in outer space thanks to all the stars. Instead, in the deep you get fish like the Anglerfish, who have to provide their own light. Deep water is unknown and it’s dark and that’s where Jesus calls Simon. And Simon says “because you say so, I will go.”

When Nemo and Dory meet the anglerfish in Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” movie

Shock and awe and chaos invite us to disengage. They are designed to overwhelm us and assault our resilience. It’s on purpose. Yet, God brings order out of chaos. Creativity comes out of chaos. We can find agency and maintain our equilibrium even in chaos. At a clergy group this past week, one colleague observed that in order to do so, we have to make sure we draw from the right well, the well of living water. Don’t draw on finite things that won’t sustain you. Instead, think creatively. Immerse yourself in the Word; my personal favorite are the psalms. Remember that creativity comes out of chaos. Remember that in the deep water are resources that you haven’t tapped into yet. There’s more there. We don’t keep trying to do the same thing over and over and expect different results; that’s the joking definition of insanity. We try things differently. Elijah got Elisha to work with him so he wasn’t alone. Simon went out to deep water instead of the usual fishing area. And they caught so many fish that everyone who saw it was astounded by how big their catch was. It was more than they could imagine, an unknown potential. In Ephesians, Paul talks about how God can do more than we can possibly ask or imagine. That’s God working in the dark, beyond what is known. And that is good news. The full blessing in Ephesians is: “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”