Texts: Genesis 1:1-10, Luke 5:1-11
I’m really happy to be with you all today, and to share with you one of my passions—creation-honoring Christian worship. So let me unpack that a little before getting into the meat of the sermon. Today, in many churches around the world, the Season of Creation is beginning.
Some of you may have heard of it; many likely have not. 
I first learned about the Season of Creation in 2006, which was about the first year that it had spread beyond the Uniting Church in Australia, where it began. There were many ideas behind the Season of Creation—but I’m not going to go into all of that history.
The most interesting reason for the Season of Creation is that the Bible makes the claim in many places that not only is Jesus the revelation of God, and the Bible a source of revelation, but that creation itself reveals God to us. In other words, nature itself can tell us about God with the same validity that the Bible does. That makes sense when we think about it—that something created could teach us something about the one who created it. My mother was a potter. Throughout my active ministry, I used the communion set that she made for me when I was ordained, and that pitcher, chalice, and plate bore the marks of her fingers. The Bible makes the claim in a number of places (Job 38, Psalm 19, and Romans 1 among others) creation itself reveals God to us.
So today we begin, as all life does, in the ocean. The Hebrew word for ocean was Yam, which was the same as the name of the Canaanite god of chaos. This was not a coincidence. The Hebrew people viewed the Sea as chaotic, unpredictable and mysterious. While they understood the sea as a source of life – fishing was, after all, part of the culture and economy – they also viewed the sea as a potential source of death.
I think most of us understand that – I think that at some level, fear of the sea is very common, even among people who depend on the sea for their lives and livelihood. I remember as a little girl, when my family was living near the ocean, my father and I would often take walks to the shore, and sometimes walk along the jetties together.
It is among my earliest memories – I turned 4 that year. At the same time, I also remember the vivid nightmare I had that year, in which I was swept into the water by a great wind, and found myself drowning in a sea filled with chains. The ambivalence I felt as a four-year-old is not unusual.
What can we learn from our understanding of the ocean that can help us in understanding God, and our relationship to God and Creation?
The ocean covers about 2/3 of the earth’s surface. But there’s ocean and then there’s ocean. I learned a few years ago that the shallow seas comprise only about 8% of the oceans, and yet these are the richest part of the ocean – the shallow waters are the parts of the ocean that lie above the continental shelves – that is, the parts of the continents that extend into the ocean.
These are the places that are home to the coral reefs, the seagrass beds, the kelp forests and 90% of the world’s commercial fisheries. While we may think of the ocean as a vast resource – it is only 8% of that resource that yields what we use.
However, the richness of the shallow seas shouldn’t mislead us into thinking the deep, open ocean is unimportant. While the shallow seas might contain most of what humans like to extract, the deep, open ocean is critically important to the health of the earth – quoting the book Planet Earth, published in conjunction with a Discovery Channel series of the same name: “… [the deep ocean] regulates our climate, conditions our atmosphere and contains some of the least known and most extraordinary animals on Earth.”
The animals that live in the deep, open ocean may never touch the ocean floor, as it can be two miles below. Despite the fact that most of us will never explore the deep ocean, it makes life on earth possible.
So what can we learn theologically from the ocean? First and most obviously, just as much of the ocean depths are unknown to us, God is the Great Mystery. Despite what we may experience as deep faith or years of theological studies, what we know most about God is that we know very little of God. What we do know—God’s deep love and ever-present energetic flow—gives us a hunger to know more.
Going back to the Bible passages we read this morning, there we see some of the same ambivalence that I described around the ocean. As Genesis begins, the waters already exist—this first creation account (as we should be aware, there are many creation stories in the Bible—Old Testament scholar Bill Brown describes 7 different creation accounts in Scripture), anyway, this first creation account does not describe creation ex nihilo—creation from nothing—but God’s spirit-breath-wind begins by hovering over the waters…which are already there.
The ocean is the beginning of creation—it is essential to the world—and it is God’s spirit acting upon the waters that brings new life forth. Life begins with breath.
The passage from Luke is set at the Sea of Galilee, which actually is a large freshwater lake, like Lake Michigan. It is not nearly as big as Lake Michigan, though – Lake Michigan is more than 100 times the size of the Sea of Galilee.
When the Bible described seas, it didn’t differentiate between fresh and saltwater. Other names for the Sea of Galilee include: Lake Tiberias or Lake of Gennesaret, as in the passage I read this morning. But because of the earthquake activity in the area, and especially because it is very low-lying and surrounded by hills, the Sea of Galilee is subject to sudden, violent storms, and so is a dangerous body of water, more so, perhaps, than its size would predict.
It was also important to the local economy, as the center of the regional fishing industry – so for the people of that region, the relationship with the Sea of Galilee included both gratitude and fear.
And that can be true of our relationship with the mystery of God as well – on the one hand, we feel grateful for God’s love, for all that God has provided in our lives, for who God is as the source of all life and love.
At the same time, we may fear God. While some people fear God’s judgment and anger, my own reading of the Bible is that God is a loving God, who yearns to be in relationship with humans. But even for those of us who don’t fear God’s anger, the idea of intimacy with the Divine mystery can be frightening. For many people, intimacy is frightening anyway – to be fully known by anyone leaves us vulnerable. To allow ourselves to care deeply about another is risky.
And in the passage from Luke, we find more reason to be afraid of discipleship – that deep relationship with God. It will change us. The experience of the fishermen with Jesus around fishing is a prequel of what will come in discipleship – when they go deep, they receive abundant gifts, far more than they anticipated, but they will not be the same as they were before—they are changed by the relationship with God. That’s what deep intimacy does – it leaves us so open to another that we are no longer the same as we were before the relationship.
In the Gospel passage, they were just doing what they were used to doing—fishing where they usually fished, and it’s not producing what they want—and Jesus tells them to go deep.
Our discipleship can be compared to human experience with the ocean as well – most of our interaction takes place in waters we can map, where sea life is different but comparable to life on land…indeed it is where the land has just slipped into the water.
And so too with our discipleship – most of it takes place in or near the rest of our lives: we gather with others, we share our ideas, we learn from one another, and reflect on our own experiences. And the way our faith extends into our lives away from church is also integrated with those lives in a way that is rich and productive – we care for others, we reach out to people we don’t know yet, we care for the earth, we feed the hungry, we help those who need help. And indeed, through these dimensions of our discipleship, we find meaning, we learn about ourselves and others, we are changed.
But it is all within reach of what we know – and yet, there is another dimension to discipleship that is more mysterious, more frightening, and like the deep, open ocean and the life of the earth, has the ability to shape our lives powerfully.
And lest my description of the richness of the shallow seas give a false impression: scientists are beginning to explore the deep-ocean floor, and, in one such exploration, quoting again, “…they could hardly believe that such density of life – which rivals anything found on even the richest coral reefs – could exist in the total darkness of the deep-sea floor.” There is abundance in the deep ocean, and in deep discipleship, too.
It is the depth that I want to invite you to consider today. Draw near to the deep questions that scare you. Build deep friendships with people you don’t yet know well. Allow yourself to explore some of your more challenging feelings—of fear, anxiety, anger, or grief.
Experiment with practices of depth—daily contemplative prayer experiencing the depths of the living God, reading whole books of the Bible, joining a committee or mission project in church or in the community. Go deep.
And going deep can come in ways that seem less obvious—working through a conflict with someone, challenging ourselves to do something that scares us, or for me recently—staying present to my dad as his dementia deepens.
The depths usually take us to places that are unknown, unmapped, and may seem dark at first sight. Even when we can’t touch bottom, get to some kind of understanding, familiarity, or peace in the depths, they can be rich and nourishing in important ways.
Psalm 42 tells us that “deep calls to deep.” The depths of God are calling us to go deep. How many times in life do we resist going deep? God has gone deep with us—invested in humanity during creation, and most particularly by coming among us as one of us in the person of Jesus Christ.
Too many of us stick to the known territory of the shallows, steering clear of the depths of intimacy with God, God’s world, and God’s work. Go deep, love deeply, and live deeply, as God has with us.
Creation teaches us that life is both resilient and fragile, and that our choices, our actions, our commitments matter. Live deeply. Amen.