The Mysterium Tremendum by the Lake

February 9, 2025 - The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Good morning, Epiphany. Today, I want to start us off a little differently, with a poem by Wendell Berry called, “The Peace of Wild Things.” It goes like this:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It’s good to be with you again this morning, Epiphany, on this ninth day of February, this sixth Sunday of 2025, this fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, this Super Bowl Sunday. Many of you know of my background as a sportswriter, and there is no larger day in the American sports calendar than today. It’s so large, in fact, that Abbey and I scheduled our wedding around it. I think I’ve mentioned this to some of you before, but when we were picking a day for our wedding, I laid out all the major sporting events that I’d want to avoid coinciding with our anniversary for the rest of our lives, and mid-February was free every year. At least it was... the NFL added a week to their season in 2021, and now our anniversary is dangerously close to the biggest sports day of the year. Last year, they fell on the very same day. Best laid plans of mice and men, or something.

My background may be in sportswriting and fandom, and yes, I’m rooting for Kansas City to win again today, but I’ve found that for most men around here in South Haven, there’s another pastime that takes prominence over watching 20-40 year old men compete on TV while being paid millions of dollars. That pastime, of course, is fishing. I’ve asked George Sipes if he would take me out ice fishing sometime, and several of our fishermen escape South Haven this time of year to go fishing in warmer climates, but I have not been fishing since the spring of 2007 when I lived in Mozambique. There, a missionary I lived with took me out at 5 am on Cahora Bassa, a massive lagoon near the border with Zambia and Zimbabwe. I had never properly been fishing before, and so I took my cues from my friend and did as I was told, catching three, sharp-toothed tigerfish over the course of six hours on the water. It was an experience in patience, in stillness, in peace of the wild things, in hope. Mary Moore pointed out in our liturgy meeting on Tuesday that there’s nothing more hopeful than fishing: lots of time spent with no guarantee of reward.

Our connection with today’s Gospel passage is probably clear by now, this is probably the most famous text about fishermen in the entirety of literature, let alone in the Bible. (“The Old Man and the Sea” might come close, as might “Moby Dick,” but whaling is a different thing.) Jesus says, “I will make you fishers of men,” in the King James Version, but here we have “You will be catching people,” which doesn’t have the same poetic ring to it. This Gospel story is one of the most familiar because of its startling and profound imagery. Jesus is standing on the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, preaching to the crowds on the lakeshore, and the attention to his teaching is so great, what he is preaching is so revolutionary and life-changing, that he needs more space. We’re lakeshore people here in South Haven; I’m imagining Jesus standing on our pier with people trying to hear him on both North and South Beach... and then the Friends Goodwill passes on its way out for a sunset cruise, or maybe the Reinecks or the Fritzes in their boats, and Jesus asks them, “Can I come aboard? Do you mind? I need some space to preach good news to all these people.”

In this Gospel narrative, Simon Peter takes the lead role and is the one who says "yes" to Jesus. Simon, an expert fisherman himself, had just come in from a long night of failure, working all night long and catching nothing, but he still made space for and took time to let Jesus preach to the people. When Jesus was done teaching, then, he did not play the role of novice fishermen or gracious and thankful guest but instead gave Simon and his friends directions to “put out into the deep water and let down their nets.” I can imagine Simon being incredulous at this point; he had given the man a ride, a platform to do his thing and preach on his boat, and now the man was giving the fishermen some fishing tips! We hear nothing of being incredulous here, of course. Instead, Simon and his friends simply do what Jesus asks, and their boats fill with so many fish that they begin to sink.

Simon is overwhelmed by this, falling to his knees. He has encountered something divine, something holy and wholly other, and he recognizes Jesus as Lord and considers himself unclean, sinful, and unworthy to be in his presence. Isaiah has a similar story in our Old Testament reading, “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips.” Moses does too when encountering God, as does Gideon, as does Job, and even as does Paul, the author of our second reading today, who met God on the road to Damascus and fell down trembling and astonished. Encountering the holy is an awesome experience, it is earth-shattering, mind-blowing, and life-changing. In his powerful book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto described this as meeting the mysterium tremendum, the numinous, that which is beyond explanation but that which is completely good and wholly other. Simon encounters the holy, the mysterium tremendum in Jesus, and in awe, he pleads with Jesus to go.

Jesus, of course, does not go, instead calling him to come with him, to be a fisher of men, a catcher of people. And they do, Simon and his brother Andrew and James and John, they all leave everything they had to follow Jesus, which is just a stunning turn of events.

In this week’s enotes, I talked about one of the key messages in this passage, that even the holy Son of God needed community, he needed friends, he lived a life just as we do in committed, loving relationships. Simon, Andrew, James, and John, these fishermen became disciples who would be with him through everything: life, death, resurrection, and beyond. This morning, I’d like to point out that none of that would have happened –  the miraculous catch of fish, the call to follow Jesus, everything after – none of it would have happened without their willingness to take the time to do something absurd, like letting a lakeshore preacher hop on your boat at the end of a long night of fishing failures.  

Simon and his friends encountered the holy because they did something like what Wendell Berry talked about in the opening poem, “going and lying down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.” Letting Jesus onto their boat was not a productive moment for the fishermen, one that would solve some of their problems or make them some money. It did not accomplish a task or check off a box on a list. It would not have made sense to their bosses, if they had them, nor assuage their anxieties about putting food on the table at night or solving injustices in the world. It would have confused a lot of their friends and family. Simon and the future disciples made space for something good for their souls in a world of failure and disappointment, and there, they met God.

There is beautiful imagery in Jesus’s phrase, “Put out into the deep water.” Friends, this morning, I would encourage us to not simply stay on the surface with the anxieties of our lives, the pressures of our everydays, with the news stories and the social media posts and the to-do lists and the calendars and the plans. Instead, I encourage us this morning to look for that deeper water, to take time to make space for the holy, the mysterium tremendum, the mystery that is wholly other and fully good. There, here, we find God, and when God asks us to follow, I pray we may all have the strength to do so.

Amen.