2025.02.09 | Fill My Days with Meaning

“Fill My Days with Meaning”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Second Sunday after Epiphany, 
February 9, 2025
Luke 5:1-11

In a superficial sort of way, this story of the calling of the disciples reminds me of my dad. Not because he was a committed disciple of Jesus—he wasn’t. But his vocation, the thing that gave his days meaning, was teaching. And the other thing that gave his days meaning was his favorite hobby—fishing. Teaching and fishing are the intertwined vocations at the center of this morning’s gospel reading from Luke.

My guess is that most of the sermons you might have heard on this text—and those from Mark and Matthew that are similar—have been about discipleship and how we should be willing to make sacrifices and give up everything to follow Jesus. If you come from a more conservative Christian tradition, you might have heard a sermon or two on the topic of fishing for people, urging hearers to go out and save souls for Christ.  These interpretations aren’t wrong, necessarily, but they do fail to take into account “the real world [context] of first-century Roman Palestine.” (1) I have come to see that this story is less about winning disciples for Christ and more about Jesus’s invitation to a more meaningful life through embracing the reciprocity and abundance of an economy rooted in care for God’s Creation, and resistance to an economy based on resource extraction that profits the rich and elite.

In his book, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, theologian and scholar Ched Myers explores in great detail the financial realities of fishermen during the time of Jesus. “Luke sets the episode at the ‘Lake of Gennesaret,’” Myers tells us, “an older name for Mark’s Sea of Galilee, which  eschews the imperially renamed ‘Sea of Tiberius’” (2):

The lowest freshwater lake in the world, it was ground zero for Rome’s efforts to exploit and extract resources in occupied Palestine. When Jesus was a young adult, Tiberius ascended to Emperor after the death of Caesar Augustus. Local ruler Herod Antipas commenced building a city on the southwest shore of the lake, naming it Tiberius in order to curry imperial favor. A key function of this new administrative center was to regulate the fishing industry around the lake, the most prosperous segment of ancient Galilee’s economy. Scholars have drawn a compelling portrait of the colonization of the regional political economy emerging during this historical moment.

All fishing became state regulated for the benefit of the urban elite—either Romans who settled in Palestine following military conquest or Jews connected with the Herodian family, now centered in Tiberius. They profited from the fishing industry in two ways. First, they controlled the sale of fishing leases, without which locals could not fish. Such leases were normally awarded not to individuals but to local kinship-based “cooperatives” such as the brothers Simon and Andrew or the Zebedee family depicted in this story. Second, local toll collectors taxed fish products and their processing and levied duties on product transport. Fish traditionally harvested in a sustainable fashion for local consumption by peasant cooperatives were now increasingly processed into salt preserve or fish sauce for export. Imperial interests, made possible by infrastructural improvements carried out by the Herodians (roads, harbors and processing factories), were structurally adjusting the traditional subsistence economy. These new regulations benefited the wealthy managerial class while disenfranchising peasant boatmen. The [managers] looked down on the [peasants] even as they depended on their labor; one ancient papyrus called fishing “the most miserable of professions.” So when Jesus of Nazareth showed up at the lake, as is narrated in all four of our Gospels he was walking right into a distressed economic landscape—boom for a few, bust for most. Top-down economic and infrastructure development inevitably enriches the few and impoverishes the many, as we still see everywhere in our world.

In 1986, a small boat dating to Jesus’s time was found well preserved at Kinnereth. Constructed originally of cedar, it had been repaired with no less than five other types of wood over a century. As a carpenter, Jesus may have gotten work as an itinerant laborer repairing boats, moving from harbor to harbor. The fishing village of Capernaum, founded several centuries earlier and with a population of around 1500 [...] was a reasonable place for Jesus to start building a movement of dissent and renewal, keying on restless workers, who would have been particularly responsive to Jesuss vision of a Sabbath Economics alternative. [...] Jesus’s strategy was not unlike Gandhi’s mobilization of the lowest harijan classes in India in his 1930 Salt March to the sea or Martin Luther King’s fateful decision to stand with the Memphis sanitation workers strike in 1968. True change can only come from below.

Luke depicts Jesus organizing a “teach-in” among these disgruntled workers. Borrowing a boat from a certain Simon, he pushes just offshore so he can use the water and beach as a natural amphitheater. He concludes his analysis of their plight with an object lesson, instructing Simon to shove off into deeper water and cast his nets one more time. The boatman’s response is poignant: “We worked through the night but caught nothing,” he laments bitterly. Local waters were becoming fished out, depleted by extractive colonization—like diamond mines in Africa today, rainforest logging in Latin America or tar sands removal in Canada. It is testimony to Simon’s desperation that he follows the prophet’s advice anyway.

Then comes the moment of revelatory reversal: suddenly there were “so many fish that their nets begin to break,” and when hauled in, [...] “they filled both boats so that they began to sink.” This mystical yet material moment symbolizes the abundance of creation restored, a glimpse of how their waters used to be before the artificial scarcity wrought by the empire. It also portends a double disaster: the potential loss of nets and boat. Yet if this overwhelming catch tears their nets, it also smashes the cycle of their poverty! As [the story of the overflowing wine jars that began our series and] in Luke’s later story of multitudes sharing bread (and fish!) In the wilderness, this prophetic sign is a reminder that creation, rightly shared, can sustain everyone—starting with the poorest. 

What do we make of Simon’s response, confessing to his sinfulness? Perhaps he is fearful that if his boat sinks, so will his economic prospects (in Luke the words “sin” and “debt” are often interchangeable). Perhaps his visceral reaction is one of shame about how entangled he is (like each one of us) in an imperial system that exploits and pillages Creation. Or perhaps his astonishment [...] signals a wary realism; he and his companions know that danger lurks in any form of “wildcat” community resource redistribution. Their copious catch would certainly be criminalized by the authorities as contraband, inspired by an itinerant preacher without a fishing license! So should these hard-pressed peasants joyfully gather the illegal windfall—or run for the hills?

Jesus understands their anxiety and compassionately invites Simon to let go of his fear. Then he offers them something even more powerful than a bumper harvest: a paradigm shift toward a radically alternative vocation. “From now on you will be catching people!” one of the most famous lines in gospel literature, it is beloved to evangelicals, who have traditionally interpreted it to mean that Jesus was calling them to save souls. but, if we only hear it as a sort of [revival-tent] summons, we miss the point of this recruiting slogan. In fact, Jesus is alluding to no less than four prophetic oracles about justice:

[...] The prophet Jeremiah envisions the Creator “sending for many fishermen” in order to catch leaders of Israel “who have polluted the land”;

[...] The prophet Amos warns elites of his society who oppress the poor that God will “take them away with fishhooks,” hauling them like sardines to judgement;

[...] The prophet Ezekial rants against Egypt’s Pharaoh: “God will put hooks in your jaws, and … pull you up from your rivers,” along with the fish to which they claimed exclusive rights; and

[...] The prophet Habakkuk laments how the emperor of Babylon “overfishes,” feeding on conquered peoples, cannibalizing the nations in the interests of empire.

For Jesus, who knew both the prophetic literature and sought to embody it anew in his context, this “fishers of people” idiom was a divine invitation to join him in overturning structures of power and privilege in the world to restore both [the abundance of] Creation and [the] equity [of abundance, to create an economy in which everyone has enough and no one has too much.]

In modern parlance, the rabbi was challenging these peasants to help him “catch some Big Fish.” And why wouldn’t they, having so little to lose? Luke’s good news to the poor results in the immediate mobilization of fishermen to join the movement. Breaking with business as usual they “release” everything. This same invitation is given later in Luke’s story to a rich man, whose refusal [to join the movement for change] is as immediate as the fishermen’s embrace [of it]. (3)

Friends, the Jesus of Luke’s gospel offers us a choice. We can either continue to spend our days in the soul-sucking drudgery of contributing to the scarcity-minded, extractive, and exploitative economy of the empire of the rich, or we can join his resistance movement, filling our days with meaning by building an economy of abundance. Will we leave our nets and follow him?

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(1)  Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2025), 71-72
(2)  Ibid., 72
(3)  Ibid., 72-75.