Love Can Forbear
Written by John Fontanella
Sunday, 13 June 2010 09:00
Welcome to senior Sunday, today we are graduating four of our youth from high school to college. This is a very special occasion for moms and dad, siblings, but also for the congregation as a whole because we live in community. That means that in some way you have impacted the spiritual journey of these youth here at Gateway. At the end of service there will be a time for recognition and a chance for you to say some words of encouragement to these youth. But first I’d like us to recognize that people have been making the transition to “university” or higher learning for almost a thousand years. And so today we will mark the continuation of that tradition. Donald Miller is an author that has wowed millions with his collection of essays about life called blue like jazz. I’d like to share with you a page that is written about his first days at college.
The first day of school (at Reed College) was exhilarating. It was better than high school. Reed had ashtrays, and everybody said cusswords.
There were four hundred freshmen in my humanities class. Dr. Peter Steinberger, the acting president, delivered a lecture of which I understood about 10 percent. But the 10 percent I understood was brilliant. I loved it. I made noises while he was teaching, humming noises, noises in agreement with his passionate decrees.
After class I would usually go to the Commons to get coffee and organize my notes. It was in Commons where I met Laura, who, although she was an atheist, would teach me a great deal about God. Her father, whom she loved and admired dearly, was a Methodist minister in Atlanta, and yet she was the only one in her family who could not embrace the idea of God. She explained that her family loved her all the same, that there was no tension because of her resistance to faith. Laura and I started meeting every day after lecture, rehashing the day’s themes. I don’t believe I had ever met anybody as brilliant as Laura. She seemed to drink in the complicated themes of Greek Literature as though they we cartoons.
“What did you think of the lecture?” I once asked her.
“I though it was okay.”
“Just okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I mean, this is supposed to be a pretty challenging school, and I wasn’t challenged. Not that good of an introduction if you ask me. I hope they don’t put the cookies on a lower shelf all year.”
“Cookies?” I asked. I thought she had cookies.
Laura would go on to explain the ideas I didn’t understand. In time she figured out that I was a Christian, but we didn’t talk much about it. We normally discussed literature or the day’s lecture, but one day Laura brought up and odd topic: racism in the history of the church. She had moved to Portland from Georgia where, though she is an atheist, she told me she witnessed, within a church the sort of racial discrimination most of us thought ended fifty years ago. She asked me very seriously what I thought about the problem of racism in America and whether the church had been a harbor for that sort of hatred. It had been a long time since I’d thought about it, to be honest. Just out of high school I got hooked on Martin Luther King and read most of his books, but since then the issue had faded in my mind. I am sure there are exceptions, but for the most part I think evangelical churches failed pretty badly during the civil rights movement, as did nearly every other social institution. Laura looked down into her coffee and didn’t say anything. I knew, from previous conversations, she had dated a black student back in Atlanta who was now at Morehouse College where Dr. King Himself earned a degree. Her question was not philosophical. It was personal.
My experience in college was much the same as Donald Miller’s. The chanting of “No Parents” rang throughout my freshman dorm. College is the first step towards us being “out on my own.” In hindsight I’m no sure how out on my own I was. I had a meal plan and a dorm room to meet some of my most basic physical needs but it was a first step nonetheless. The biggest challenge that I faced freshman year was that what my parents, youth pastor, coaches and teachers had taught me would be put into play. Like Donald, said things go from philosophical to personal in a hurry when ideas and reasons that you have followed, without question, for years are put to the challenge. Ideas that you have formed along the way things about how things work in the world, change, all of a sudden what’s up here doesn’t quite match what’s in here as it once used to. In other words, the world of the philosophical or spiritual is colliding with the physical. Physical topics such as human rights, economics, and personal property laws will be used to address the spiritual arenas and tough questions will be asked… Why do bad things happen to good people? And if God is good why does he allow evil in the world?
In Luke Chapter 5 verses 1-6 we get the chance to view Peter’s very real experience with the physical colliding with the spiritual.
Luke 5
The Calling of the First Disciples
(1) One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, with the people crowding around him and listening to the word of God, (2) he saw at the water's edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. (3) He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.
(4) When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch."
(5)Simon answered, "Master, we've worked hard all night and haven't caught anything. But (nevertheless) because you say so, I will let down the nets."
(6)When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break.
As I was watching the NBA finals between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, a player named Nate Robinson who is about 5’ 7” is driving the ball to his right and gets fouled hard by a much larger man Lamar Odom who is 6’10”. Nate gets knocked to the ground and responds by getting right back in Lamar Odom’s face in a fashion that he received a technical foul for. The announcer responded with a very wise phrase, “you know sometimes your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness.” Nate Robinson’s greatest strength and the reason that a 5’7” man can play in the NBA is his passion and drive to play the game of Basketball.
Simon Peter’s greatest strength is as a fisherman, his ability to provide for the needs of his family through the business of fishing. He is a professional fisherman, not a weekend warrior that grabs a cooler, tackle box, and some bait. This is a guy that will spend the majority of his time on the fresh waters of the sea of Galilee. The nets and his hands are his only tools. Imagine the kind of physical exhaustion one would face after a long night of dropping the nets in the water and dragging them a few hundred feet before coordinating the pulling of the fish on board. So imagine that Peter is physically exhausted at this point and add to that the discouragement if not catching any fish. They’ve lost time, money, they have failed to do their job and if they continue to fail their families will suffer.
And then in verse 2 into 3 we read that the fishing has come to an end and that the fisherman are cleaning the seaweed and muck out of their nets. And this guy with a crowd big enough to warrant such a request. Walks up to you and says, um hey can you row me out a ways so that I can do some teaching? You have got to be kidding me. If that was me I would have handed him the oar and said knock yourself out pal.
In verse 4, we are told that Jesus finishes teaching, and this must have some outstanding lesson because you have got a tired, depressed blue collar worker, that Jesus just gotten take back out on the lake… and Jesus says hey look Peter, lets go out there to the deeper part of the lake, you know, use some more energy, take the nets that you just finished washing and catch those fish that weren’t there last night.
Now I don’t sense any sarcasm… but Simon answers, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything… but nevertheless, because you say so, I will let down the nets.”
Wow. Can you imagine Luke getting this story from Peter, man what a facebook update for Luke that would have been.
But what is the real impact of this story? What is the real deal behind this miracle? The pillar of any miracle is that the miracle has got to fulfill a need.
Two things going on here that we should recognize.
Jesus sees the faith that Peter displays by taking him out on the boat and blesses him. It’s not recorded that Peter asks Jesus for provision, so we can only assume that Jesus wants to bless him. And as we examine the scriptures further you will find that.
1. God wants to bless you.
Peter doesn’t ask for it, God initiates it. God wants to bless you.
2. God wants to meet your needs.
Let me say it a different way, anytime a miracle occurs a need is being taken care of.
If there is no need there is no miracle.
It so happens that this miracle is not meeting a need of feeling or philosophy, but at its core it is meeting Peter’s physical need. In a very real way the spiritual world comes to provide for the physical world and we call it a miracle.
Jesus identified Peter’s physical need to catch fish and provide for his family and he met that need with a spiritual answer.
- Do you believe Jesus is still meeting physical needs with spiritual answers?
- Do you believe that Jesus is still meeting physical needs with spiritual provisions?
Skeptics, critics, college professors, scientists will tell you no… I haven’t seen it and if it is happening somewhere else in the world it isn’t happening in America and it certainly isn’t happening in Northern Virginia.
But let me proclaim this to you today. It is happening and we have seen it. We have seen it happen through prayer, just the way that the Bible says it would and yet there is doubt.
Indulge me for a second and analyze what Bible scholars call the “Westernized Christianity.”
I believe that we have created a bubble, a bubble that insulates us and our families from physical needs. Jesus tells us that it is easier for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to enter through the eye of a needle and you spend some time linking the two passages it becomes abundantly clear that the rich man has no real physical needs and therefor he lives in a set of circumstances insulate him.
How can we expect spiritual answers from Jesus to life problems when there are no physical needs that demand an answer?
Now I love Amazon.com I use it for everything. But its like they got together and said lets sell an item to solve every physical need that Americans have and lets sell that item in 5 different colors and lets offer free shipping.
So you say to me John, I am providing for my family I am protecting them, sure I might be insulating them from some physical needs, but I see that as a good thing.
Well, I will agree with you but change that it is a great thing, but there are some circumstances that we need to be aware of as a result. I believe that if we are going to systematically eliminate our physical needs that we have to serve people that have them. If we are going to provide for ourselves then we are going to have to provide for some people that can’t. I think that Jesus put serving the least and provide for the hungry for just such a church as ours so that we could still see the spiritual world clashing with the physical world.
So Jesus first demonstrates his power over the physical world… he gives Peter fish and then he tell Peter he look I am going to make you a fisher of men now. Jesus proclaims his Kingship of the Physical and then he claims his Kingship over the spiritual and Peter calls him.
Master. Not teacher, not rabbi, but Peter reaches for a title greater than those and he calls him Master.
See that’s where the girl in Blue Like Jazz got her world rocked. She couldn’t reconcile why what was happening in heard head didn’t match what was happening in her heart because to her there was no master. Nothing that could take physical need and meet that need with a spiritual answer.
Reed was recently selected by the Princeton Review as the college where students are, “most likely to ignore God.” Would it surprise you to hear that many of the students there have issues with authority? The New York Times calls Reed, “the most intellectual college in the country.”