Pessimism and Abundance

MCC Rehoboth
February 9, 2025

^{Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Boss, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.}

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.

This gospel passage from Luke is strange and miraculous. What we read here probably sounds very familiar, very expected and unsurprising. But it is in fact magnificent: a chimera, an amalgam, a hermaphrodite. This passage stiches together bits of gospel staples that appear other places and stand alone. They are nowhere else gathered together like this into one. This reading is a mixture, a beautiful, beautiful monster. (Please remind me later to quote Angels in America.)

In the John gospel, the miraculous catch described here is a post-Easter resurrection story tacked later onto the finished gospel, and it’s part of my favorite eucharist: there is fish and bread on a campfire, at daybreak, at the edge of the lake. Jesus was dead and they cast their nets relentlessly and fruitlessly, casting and drawing, but then Jesus appeared super alive, alive as heck, and told them where all the fish were. In that John story, like here, Peter is dramatic and overzealous.

In the Matthew and Mark gospels, this fishers of people story is a simplified version, five verses only, of the call and the cost of discipleship: two sets of brothers are engaged in the ordinary business of the day, a family business, and are called by Jesus with no pomp nor promise, called specifically – listen please to this – they are called only to this one thing: to abnegate everything, everything, to walk away from nets and boats and father. They are invited to leave behind social and economic safety, and they accept. Both pairs of brothers renounce first their means of physical subsistence and then their means of physical and social subsistence.

There are other episodes in Matthew and Mark where Jesus is trying to give a TEDTalk on the beach, and everyone presses up on him and crowds him so he has to step into a boat and teach them from the water. In both of those stories where he preaches from a boat he tells the same parable, of the sower: there’s crusty soil and vultures, there’s rocks and thorns and scorching sun, there’s good dark rich dirt, and there’s a sower that offers seed to all the ground they met; they throw seed wantonly, recklessly, at all the dirt, all the rocks, all the thorns. You get seeds, crust! You get seeds, weeds! Everyone gets seeds! Both times told from a boat, from the limen, from a threshhold, from the water, the place of creation and procreation and chaos, change.

And don’t fear is repeated dozens of times throughout the bible canon. Again and again, don’t be afraid of sea and storms, don’t fear your worth or unworthiness, fear not those who can kill the body, don’t be afraid of disease and illness – or of being healed! Again and again the divine voice, divine breath repeats that encouragement through prophets and angels and Jesus: fear not. Fear not. Don’t be afraid.

This Frankenstein’s monster of a gospel reading couldn’t be more perfect for me right now and also ever. Right now and always. I feel and have felt so much of my life like I’m casting and casting and casting useless, ineffective nets catching nothing, catching waterweeds and plastic beach garbage. And I find myself grasping and grabbing, whether it was for marriage, or home ownership, or now as social security is threatened, as the departments of health and education, gender markers, so much of the material and social means of subsistence are being wrested away. And I’m so afraid right now.

It’s hard to talk about what I’m afraid of without sounding like I’m talking about partisan politics, but I want to be clear that I am not afraid of a political party or party affiliation. I’m afraid for folks seeking asylum and refuge from sexual and ethnic terror in their home states who are turned away with no resources. I’m afraid for the folks in U.S. states who have immigration police knocking door to door demanding ID and asking them to report their neighbors. I’m afraid for thousands and thousands of employees doing the work of government programs and administration unsure of their position or their salaries to buy gas and eggs and rent. I’m afraid for survivors of sexual and physical violence as funding to crisis centers is threatened again. I’m afraid that trans folks, me and my people, are being defined out of existence, again, and of what that means for trans elders, trans inmates, trans teens who’ve already started hormone blockers. I’m afraid for ministers who are attacked for asking for mercy.

I’m afraid for the humans who share my state and my country who aren’t afraid for these folks being targeted, or who are celebrating the actions and policies targeting them. I’m afraid of these neighbors and fellow citizens, afraid of those who ignorantly or willfully fail to understand the difference between free speech, a marketplace of ideas, and critical thinking. I spend most of most days feeling like there’s a rock on my chest. I spend most of most days trying to regulate my emotions. And I’m not an optimist. I’m not an Eeyore or anything, but I’m usually surprised to find any amount of beverage in any glass. I’m very very resistant out loud to silver linings or making lemonade.

A few years ago, the big craze in anti-violence non-profit ice breakers was to ask people what gave them joy, and I remember struggling to understand what they meant. Joy feels like one of those words, like forgiveness, that makes me feel lost and alone in the room whenever people talk about it. (I don’t want to get too sidetracked talking about joy right now but it’s different than happiness, right? Isn’t it different than laughter?) Lately, I’m finding that the hot new ice breaker question is what gives us hope, which also doesn’t resonate with me. What’s hope in the face of existential fear? What is hope that isn’t desire or expectation? I don’t hope that these policies will be rebutted and scuttled, I want them to be. We need them to be. I feel like the closest thing I have to something called hope is this sense that I can’t not do what I do.

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.

The ongoing fruitless activity of the fishers today speaks to me. The pessimism, hopelessness, failure, futility. The pointlessness. I get it. I feel this way a thousand times a day, maybe every time I open my phone, again and again I feel helpless and ridiculous like these useless fishing nets. And that is an awful and a dangerous thing to feel. That is an awful and a dangerous thing to feel. It’s hard to imagine abundance in these places; it’s hard to experience the promised fullness of life. But it’s there, it is. Maybe that’s joy. Maybe it’s hope, knowing and continuing to practice and practice and practice remembering and reconnecting to the abundance that is possible.

It’s mindfulness, I think. It’s a head game, or a heart game: A thousand times a day I panic and freeze and then come back to a center, back to a balanced place, back to a site of connection and community and worthwhileness of myself and things. Because, for one thing, the fishing nets are only fruitless and pathetic if their only purpose is the harvest of fish. The act of casting a net and drawing it in, over and over again, is only useless and ridiculous if the only reward for it is the jackpot.

Every time we do the things we do, there’s this question hanging over it. Will this be the day someone becomes free? Will we win the right to file joint tax returns today? Will we be free to pee today? Will today be the end of racial profiling? Is the war over? Is today the day? No? Today then. No. Perhaps today. We never know if there will be a payoff. But we may be too invested in seeing the payoff. No shade, that’s basic human psychology, ask Corrine. Something about intermittent reward. The psychological tendency is to give up, or stop trying, or learn helplessness when the outcome is repeatedly not the desired outcome. But doing what we do, doing whatever work we do day in and day out for the future we imagine and not seeing the payoff, and not knowing whether there will be a payoff isn’t failure. It’s not hopeless and it isn’t pathetic. I want to argue that this Jesus, and this passage especially, especially this stitched-together gorgeous monstrous chimera version of this passage, says this is not failure but abundance.

The Luke gospel combines the fishing-all-night casting of nets over and over again story with its calling the first disciples. And so it tangibly and obviously and absolutely ties together how it defines discipleship to a parable that defines abundance. In every gospel, in the prophets and the laments, across the canon, discipleship costs everything. They left their nets and boats, their means of making subsistence, and they left their father, their social and religious safety and respectability. John lost his head, the prophets were hunted, Jesus and every disciple were executed. They relinquished all: this is the bottom line for Jesus. The bottom line is not love, not inclusion of the marginalized, not feeding the hungry, the bottom line is relinquishing and losing everything you are and have because of your love and inclusion of the marginalized and feeding the poor.

This bottom line is reinforced again and again in parables and sayings to give to everyone who asks, to lose everything and find life, to lay up our treasure above, to sell everything and give it all away to people who can’t pay us back, to not be afraid of who can kill our body. The John gospel’s miraculous catch of fish is a story of shared meal and community, it’s a eucharist story and a resurrection story, and so it is a story of dying, literally, for discipleship.

But that’s not a failure story. That is abundance. It’s a call to be freed from fear, freed from grasping for things that are being wrenched away. Discipleship is fearless and its path has been utterly cleared of obstacles.

Here’s a story: For now and at the pleasure of the universe I work at a university with sexual and physical abuse survivors, with women and others for student access and success, and with queer and trans students. Last fall, one trans student in my orbit had just started using feminine pronouns and, late in October, a friend made up her face for the first time. Throughout the summer, advertisements were mocking and threatening trans women and rally speeches were promising to eliminate non-binary gender options, but on the day after the election, this student came to school full femme, head to toe, a bright red dress, full nails, full face. And she walked in long strides, head high, grinning. Fearless. She seemed fearless. Absolutely strong. And I’d spent the night afraid and frozen, so when I saw her I thought to myself, So this is what we’re bringing? Well, alright then. Only there were swears in there, too, in my thought to myself, because I like to swear.

That’s abundance with no promise of jackpot.

A dozen or a hundred times a day, I freeze with fear and helplessness. Then I breathe. I remember that whatever I have isn’t really mine. Corrine and I keep writing checks, at least 10% of our income, to MCC, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Lambda Legal, The Bard Prison Project, The African American Policy Forum, The Abortion Conversation Project. I’m not proselytizing you to my justice concerns, you may not agree with my priorities, no judgment. And I’m not bragging about tithing, I just want to say that we’ve always done it, and it feels harder now than ever. We don’t know what’s happening with Social Security or the economy for working folks like us. It’s not easy now to give anything away, but it’s possible. It’s part of what we can’t not do. It may be all I have that resembles hope. And it’s a price of discipleship that moves me toward abundance. When I write those checks, even in fear, even with a tightness in my ribs and heaviness in my chest, I also feel abundance, bigness, enoughness. I feel free to love and include the marginalized and feed the hungry, even at cost to me.

It’s abundance with no promise of jackpot.

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets.

Doing the thing, whatever it is for each of us – the thing we think of as living our faith, as servanthood, as “doing good” – doing that thing as a practice, again and again, without reward is self-abnegating, ego-abnegating, it’s discipleship, and it is beautiful. It is a miracle. Thich Nhat Hahn noted that sometimes the miracle isn’t to walk on water but to walk mindfully on the earth. It is relentless and repetitive, like the breaking of waves on the shore, never ending. We cast the nets and risk everything again and again. But not alone. No calling of the disciples story is only one disciple, but two sets of two, and they are sent out in twos, and they are gathered in twelves, and in the tacked-on John lakeside story they are reunited with a resurrected Jesus, and they build a fire and eat together, fishes and bread at the side of the lake. It’s become my newest dedicated ministry, checking in with my people. It feeds me as much as anyone else. Telling my friends I love them. Asking the people I pass how they’re holding up? How is their heart? Listening to the answer. Gathering in rooms and group texts and on socials. Sharing my adventures and my fears and finding out what they’re doing. I don’t think I have the capacity to try to change anyone’s mind who aiming at us, so I’m focused on supporting folks who are in the crosshairs.

There are many beautiful things in nature and in art, and perhaps none are more beautiful than a sea of waves, never ending, breaking again and again upon the shore. Casting a net, or casting a fly fishing line again and again. This is our lives, our loving, interconnected, grounded, justice-seeking lives working and risking everything to put food on the table, food enough for everyone, and surplus for everyone.

I wanted to quote Angels in America, if you’ll stay with me for another minute. There’s a quote where Roy Cohn, who knew Ethel Rosenburg to be innocent but framed and executed her, and blocked protections for gay employees for years in Congress, and who was himself gay, asks Belize to describe what comes after death. Belize responds:

Belize: Like San Francisco.
…
Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens.
…
Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths.
…
Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain’t there.
[When he finishes, Roy Cohn asks,]
Roy Cohn: And Heaven?
[Belize answers,]
Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.”

Teacher, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet, if you say so, I will let down the nets… When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

I love you. Peace.