Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Epiphany 5: February 8, 2007
The Sunday of St. Paul’s Annual Meeting
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

It was my final sermon in my senior Homiletics course in seminary, and I was anxious. Homiletics courses are courses that ask you to do everything at once—Biblical exegesis, prayer, soul-searching, truth-telling, creativity and presence. This sermon was my last shot at getting it right, my last shot at showing my classmates and myself that I could do all of those things.

The passage that I was assigned for this last sermon was this the gospel for this morning—the story from Luke about Jesus and Peter and fishing—the story that some call the “miraculous catch.”

And a miraculous catch was exactly what I was looking for as I prepared that homily, for I was tired of seminary and was panicked with performance anxiety. And so I fished around for weeks trying to haul in a prize homily, one that weighed a lot—one with fire and fight in it. I fished and fished, generating draft after draft, editing and re-editing each one, trying to get it right. I was fishing for a voice that was, well, mine, but, you know, a little smarter, a little more erudite, a little more creative and polished than I was. Draft after draft; edit after edit.

These were some of those drafts: Draft one began by talking about how much I loved fishing, but then I abandoned that approach because I couldn’t figure out where it go after that. Draft two started out with a lot of scholarly background on the gospel of Luke, but that one started boring me right from the get go. And if bored me, how could I ever expect it would engage anyone else? Draft three began by talking about the importance of vocation, especially the church’s vocation to become fishers of people, but that one quickly went way beyond my own Episcopal reserve at the time when it came to evangelism.

In other words, I had let down my net and had pulled up not the whopper of a fish I had had hoped for but a broken mirror, an old shoe and a tin can instead. Lots of useless drafts, lots of anxiety and activity but no real sermon: no real connection to the stuff that was under the story, to where God’s voice might be moving in the story, and, therefore, no real compelling way to share this with others.

And then a week before I had to give the sermon, I went to bed and I had a dream.

Now, of course, what I’m going to relate to you in a moment is the dream of one person, (me) a Christian and a seminarian feeling under pressure to be who she authentically was and, out of that, to create something real. But what I’d also like to suggest is that this dream might be your dream, also a Christian person longing to be who you authentically are and wanting to live a life that creates something real. And especially today, the day of our Annual Meeting, I want to suggest that this dream might speak to us as a community longing to be who we authentically are and out of that wanting to create something real. So listen; listen for yourself; listen for the community that is St. Paul’s.

In the dream I was at Lake Toxaway, North Carolina, a beautiful lake in the mountains I used to go to in my 20s, fishing off a small dock. I was fishing for bream the way I used to—using a bamboo pole with no float and using balled up bread for bait—the crude, simple tools that used to be available to me there.

Using these tools meant that to catch a fish you needed to be very clever in the way you dropped the bread-baited hook in the water in that the fish would only bite when the bread appeared to fall through the water at the speed it would have normally done without being on a hook.

In the dream I tried and tried and tried to outsmart the fish, just the way I used to when I fished like that, but in the dream, time after time, I caught nothing.

But then the dream departed from any fishing event I could remember. For coming from the edge of the woods that grew down at the side of the dock, there appeared a mysterious stranger, a man with dark hair and dark eyes. And while I don’t remember his face, I do remember that the sight of him was haunting and familiar, like seeing the face of a long-lost friend or family member, or a man I had loved once.

And I remember that I did not feel threatened by this man coming towards me in this deserted place. But his presence and approach was not neutral. On the one hand, it felt natural and right. On the other hand, it felt, stirring even slightly disturbing. Something was going to happen.

Which was right, because before I knew it, he was helping me off the dock, pole in hand, into a little boat tied up there at the dock, the kind of boat you might use for fishing. I was stepping down into the boat and could feel the unsteady water beneath me. And before I knew it, we were setting out away from the dock into deeper water.

I’m not the strongest of swimmers and so even in the dream there was a little tight knot of fear in me. Deep water frightens me; it makes me feel a bit like fish out of water, to use a kind of reverse image.

Yet, in my dream, that’s where I was going: out into deep, cool water. And here again the dream took a turn. For it was as if this small lake in the hills of North Carolina had become the ocean, had become all oceans, all the places of chaos and life that we fear and long for as we live out our ordered and earnest existences.

It was the deep, and I was there in a small fishing boat with my bamboo pole and with a dark, mysterious stranger.

And then we stopped out there in that deep water, stopped and looked around and floated and rocked. Floated and rocked and talked. I have no memory of what we talked about, but I do know this—that we talked in the way that intimate friends talk —with the kind of rhythm that intimate friends use—straight, clear sentences punctuated with silences, large and close and comfortable and real. I had put my hook in the water. And we kept talking as we floated.

And then as I relaxed into what we were doing—the floating and rocking on the surface of the deep, the intimate conversation, words and silences shared, I felt at home with myself, completely at home with myself, and an expansive peace surrounded me and surged within me, an inexplicable peace that came from someplace outside me or was it from someplace deep within me.

And while I was with myself and with him and in that peace, all at once, I felt the sharp tug of a fish on the end of my line. And as I snapped forward to hold onto the pole and to pull back, I woke up.

Some say that our gospel story for this morning, the story of Jesus who tells Peter to put out into the deep and to let down his empty nets, is a story about what it means to be the Church, to have the God-given mission of becoming fishers of other human beings, catching them and bringing them in for their own soul’s health.

I think what my dream was trying to tell me and what I’m trying to tell you is that this mission or any work we do, any accomplishment we have, any creation we are able to bring forth as Christians begins with a life lived, our lives lived, in relationship to and in conversation with the mysterious one, the holy and human one: the one who comes to us wearing flesh just like ours, the one who comes to us especially after all our efforts have failed; the one who helps us set sail upon the deep and who sends us forth, only after catching us up in his peace.