February 9, 2025 – Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Fr. John Edmunds, ST (@14:50 in the video)

FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME — C
Isaiah 6:1-8
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

Jesus needed people. As St. Luke tells the story, immediately after Jesus started his preaching ministry in Nazareth he realized that he couldn’t do it alone. He went on a recruiting mission so he would have others to walk with him, to work with him, to be with him. This is not the image of the hero painted by popular culture. John Wayne faces the bad guys all by himself. Rambo goes out into the jungle as a one-man army. Shane rides into the sunset alone. Nor is this exaltation of the loner unique to US culture. Odysseus must find his way back home without companions. Horatio is solo at the bridge. The hermits of Christian tradition go out into the desert to flee the world. Even the Prophet Isaiah in the first reading is stepping up to volunteer by himself. Our culture, like others, glorifies the strong, silent type who faces impossible odds as a lonely hero. But that was not Jesus. Jesus needed people. He needed people to support him. He needed people to comfort him. He needed people to accompany him. He was no Lone Ranger. He formed a community.

This seems important to notice because we live in an isolating environment. People tend to keep to themselves. A sociology book written twenty-five years ago entitled Bowling Alone reported that people no longer belong to leagues or clubs or associations or organizations as they had in previous eras. The advent of social media has made the privatization of our time even more pronounced. And we only need to look around to see how this has impacted Church attendance. Only 35% of the millennial generation attend church more than a few times a year. According to all the surveys and all the research the latest generation have the same spiritual hungers as human beings have always have. Yet, the contemporary tendency is seeking to find the answers to their spiritual questing on one’s own instead of joining with other people to journey toward truth together. We are not only bowling alone, we’re also praying alone.

This is, of course, preaching to the choir since you are here with the community but I think it would be useful for us to reflect on why it is important to be with other people as we seek to connect with God. The Bible gives us some pointers on why being Church is the best way to have an authentic experience to slake our spiritual hungers. In the epistle, for example, we find how important it was for St. Paul to be part of a larger tradition. He had his own spiritual encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. Yet to find out what that meant, to see the true significance of that experience he needed to connect with others. Cephas, the twelve, James, the apostles, the five hundred brothers all contributed to his faith. When we think about God or have an experience in prayer we all to easily get lost in our own heads. We are not quite sure what to make of what God might be asking of us. By gathering with others, by seeing how the Bible illuminates my own experience, by joining with seekers who are on a similar path I get to sift out what is genuinely from God and what is a product of my own mental musings. St. Paul says,”By the grace of God I am what I am.” But it was only with others that who he was — a child of God named and claimed by Jesus — became apparent.

While we think of St. Paul as the great missionary he never goes out alone. In his missionary journeys he always had companions: Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Titus, Luke – his epistles are full of names of those who shared the missionary life with him. This is, of course, an echo of the strategy of Jesus. During his earthly ministry when he sent the disciples out, they always went two-by-two. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theological executed by the Nazis, suggested that the reason Jesus sent them out two-by-two was so that they would have someone to forgive. Anytime you have people rubbing up against each other there will be the giving and the taking of wounds. The only way to be effective as missionaries was in knowing oneself as forgiving and forgiven. St. Peter in the gospel for today imagines that he is unfit to be part of the community because he is a sinful man. Jesus brushes that aside. We are all sinners. We are all in need of forgiveness and healing. We are a community together so that we can show the power of forgiveness. In a world full of division and strive, by gathering as a community committed to reconciliation we demonstrate to the world what life in God is really like.

The gospel for today has one of those provocative phrases that show the power of life together. “Put out into deep water,” Jesus said. As St. Luke tells the story, the disciples were already involved, they had already went what the gospel calls “a short distance.” Now they were being challenged to take the next step, to go deeper. In our lives we take the first steps in faith when we bring our plans – a good education, a happy family, 2.3 children, a successful career, financial security, healthy life and comforting death – and ask Jesus to be part of our story. That is a good beginning but then comes the invitation to take the next step in discipleship and put out into deep water. Instead of asking Jesus to be part of our plans, Jesus asks us to be part of his plans for us. We are asked to trust that what Jesus wants of us, even if it goes contrary to our desires, is in fact what is best for us. It is by being part of a community of faith, by seeing how others have trusted in God, that we are given the confidence to say “yes” to Jesus, to make our one desire and choice always and only do to what God wills. Let us join hands together and leap into the deep which is God’s love!