St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes
Fifth Sunday After the Epiphany/Year C
February 6, 2022
Gospel: Luke 5:1-11
I recently heard a television news anchor say, “Jobs increase, but there’s a shortage of workers. Where have all the workers gone?” The Business Insider reported 13 reasons that help to explain the labor shortage in the U.S.1 The article reveals, beyond the issue of wages, contributing factors. Among those reasons were the need for job flexibility, childcare demands, workplace health and safety concerns, retirees who wish to stay retired and employee burnout.
This labor phenomenon, in which millions have quit their jobs during the pandemic, has been called the “Great Resignation” or the “Great Reevaluation.” The workers who left a company for a completely new role, or an entirely different industry, during these pandemic times, have been called “epiphany quitters,” realizing that life is too short to commit to passionless work.3 These two descriptions offer a valuable perspective of the labor market’s transformation in the U.S. as we enter into the gospel passage in the fifth chapter of Luke today.
Jesus, whose teaching in the synagogues, casting out of demons and healing of the sick mobilized people, had found himself in a crowd pressing in on him at the shore of the lake of Gennesaret, a local name for the Sea of Galilee.
The location was also the workplace for the fishermen who were washing their nets after a night when not one fish was caught. Jesus eyed the two empty fishing boats, and chose to use Simon’s boat as a floating pulpit, positioned a little away from the shore. Now, Simon and Jesus are not strangers. Simon had witnessed Jesus heal his mother-in-law, as well as many other healings at his home (4:38-41), prior to this workplace encounter.
When Jesus concluded his teaching, he instructed Simon to put the boat out into deeper water and let the fishing nets down for a catch. After a whole night of efforts with nothing to show for it, one more attempt probably seemed like a waste of time and energy. Instead of Simon responding with a sense of workplace burnout, however, he obeyed Jesus and let down the nets with his fishing partners, brothers James and John. Overwhelmed with the miraculous catch of fish—so abundant that the nets were breaking and the boats were sinking, Simon proclaimed himself unworthy to be in the presence of the Lord and fell to his knees.
An epiphany is the manifestation of the divine—the revelation of God through Jesus Christ. The mortal fear and awe in the presence of Jesus’ divine holiness is evidence of the epiphanic experience for the fishermen and for all of the witnesses.
The Business Insider article identified, revealed two more reasons for the worker shortage that strike me as particularly relevant to our scripture study. One reason is the disconnect between the amount of open jobs and the workers available to fill them. The other reason is that people are paying close attention to whether or not they even liked their jobs. A related survey found that of 1,000 people who voluntarily resigned from at least two jobs since March 2020, 92% said that “the pandemic made them feel life is too short to stay in a job they weren’t passionate about.”4
What was not explicitly noted in the article is that there is an existential component operating. That which is concerned with human existence is inextricably tied to those things of the soul. This so-called worker shortage has a lot to do with the quality of human existence—the realities of birth, death and the stuff in between. The reality is that, in this world, there exists life-enhancing labor, which fuels the soul’s passion and directs one’s purpose and there is labor that does not; indeed such labor wearies, and suffocates the soul.
Jesus met the fishermen where they were—just as they were—at their place of labor. We are to notice that the existing skills used by the fishermen were not discarded, but repurposed for the increase, not of more fish, but more fishermen. “From now on you will be catching people,” said Jesus (v. 10).
While we do not know if the fishermen loved their jobs or even if they were passionate about their jobs. We do know that in the presence of the divine Jesus, and in the midst of the fishing miracle, Simon, John and James, shared an epiphany, and abandoned their source of livelihood, for themselves and their families, to follow him. These early followers of Jesus were the original “epiphany quitters.”
You and I are followers in the Jesus movement, and we are the Jesus movement. This movement is, at once, a labor of love, and many labors of love strung together across the lifetimes of the faithful. Just as the fishermen, and their personal lives, were transformed in the real presence of Jesus, discipleship requires that we, too, must risk submitting to the personal guidance, and holy leading of Jesus.
Submission requires a personal, trusting, relationship with Jesus paired with the courage to embrace the inescapable transformation of self. When we allow ourselves to be taken up into the divine net of lifelong transformation as God’s instruments of love, compassion, healing and enlightenment, Jesus takes our existing skills and abilities, and uses them to increase God’s kingdom here on earth now. Jesus calls us to go out, equipped with the life-saving gospel message, to join him in the miracle of catching people, so that all who witness lives transformed, may also be caught up in His divine net of abundant life.
Within the Jesus movement, we must be clear that there is neither a shortage of kingdom-building work, nor a shortage of human beings who can proclaim the good news of God in Christ. There is no such thing as a disconnect between the amount of vineyard jobs, and the amount of laborers to fill them—Jesus is the divine connection. We commit to laboring in God’s vineyard with hearts that cry, “Here am I; send me” (Isaiah 6:8)!, so that when Jesus returns to judge the world, he will ask not, “Where have all the workers gone?,” but find his faithful body, already at work, saying, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”
May it be so.
1 Madison Hoff and Juliana Kaplan, “13 Reasons That Help Explain the US’ Labor Shortage, Open Jobs, and Not Enough Workers.” Business Insider, Dec. 2021, 13 Reasons That Help Explain the US’ Labor Shortage, Open Jobs, and Not Enough Workers (businessinsider.com). Accessed 5 February 2022.
2 Ibid.
3 Madison Hoff and Juliana Kaplan, “Job Switchers Quit Because Pandemic Showed Life Is Too Short: Survey.” Business Insider, December 2021, Job Switchers Quit Because Pandemic Showed Life Is Too Short: Survey (businessinsider.com). Accessed 5 February 2022.
4 Madison Hoff and Juliana Kaplan, Business Insider, Job Switchers Quit Because Pandemic Showed Life Is Too Short: Survey (businessinsider.com), December 2, 2021. Retrieved February 5, 2022.
