An Abundance of Aluminum Pie Tins - Luke 5: 1-11
It occurs to me that in three and a half years at Christ Church, I have neglected to tell you all about my grandmother, Ruth. She was something else. She was raised with her four sisters by an immigrant mother and a largely absent father in rural Arkansas. She married and had three children, including my mother, and used the shed in the backyard as a beauty shop to help make ends meet. When she became a widow at age 55, she stepped up and went to work at her husband's position at Arkansas Power and Light for the next decade.
Mammaw Ruth had no shortage of hobbies. She quilted, and all the grandchildren have at least two. She made ceramics, everything from porcelain dolls to those kitchen scissor holders that hung on the wall next to your rotary phone. She could knit, she gardened, and no one on the planet made better peanut butter cookies.
Her wide variety of skills came from her Depression-era upbringing, which deeply impacted her for the rest of her life. I caught glimpses of this all the time. For instance, her refrigerator always looked empty to me. She was notorious for giving her grandchildren one dollar bills and warning us not to buy dope, whatever she thought that was. And when we packed up her house to move her in with my family in 2008, I counted 76 aluminum pie tins, because, "You never know when you might need one!" When I asked her if she’d ever thrown one away she said, “Of course I have! No wait, that was your aunt Karen.”
Ruth was not one to talk about herself and she always tried not to take up much space in a room. When she passed away in January of 2013, I realized that I had probably only scratched the surface of who she was. She was complicated, innovative, and passionate. There is so much about her life I wish I had asked her. As a good friend said at her funeral, still waters run deep.
Perhaps that’s why, when I read today’s Gospel passage, what stood out to me was not the miracle of the fish or the oft-repeated phrase “fishers of men,” or even the calling of the first disciples. Instead, I was struck most by Jesus inviting Simon to put his net in the deep water.
Simon, James, and John are living in a Depression-era of their own. Resources are limited for non-Roman citizens. Their government is obviously no help. And on top of all that, all their labor seems to be for nothing. They worked all night long and have nothing to show for it. They’re in survival mode, and I think my grandmother knew how they felt, never knowing where your next meal, or aluminum pie tin, might come from.
Of course, by the end of the story, they will have caught enough fish for themselves, their families, and everyone in town. Plus, they will have renewed purpose and they will willingly, excitedly, drop their nets and their entire livelihoods to follow their Lord. But in between the scarcity at the beginning of their day and the great abundance at the end, is the deep water. The deep water is where God acts. It is where the resources are discovered. It’s where the strength to answer God’s call lives. It’s where abundance comes from.
Thinking about abundance, one thing I loved about my grandmother was her sense of responsibility to her community. Regardless of her own financial instability, she’d give you the shirt off her back if you needed it. Occasionally, I would spend the night with her on a Friday night, and she never adjusted her schedule for me. If someone was sick and needed a visit or if she’d finished hemming someone’s pants, or if it was her day to wash the kitchen towels from church, she’d just bring me along with her. Even though her refrigerator never seemed to have anything but buttermilk and wonder bread in it, she somehow always had everything she needed to make those peanut butter cookies or even a whole casserole for her neighbor.
Although I don’t think she ever quite got over the fear of scarcity her childhood instilled in her, when someone she loved was in trouble, she could always dig deep and find what was needed to lend a hand. For my grandmother, abundance, whether of food or energy or kind words, was inextricably tied to her call to serve. And I think that’s because God’s call and God’s abundance can come from the same hidden and sometimes daunting place where God acts in our lives, if we’re willing to go there.
We are about two years into this pandemic and I can safely speak for us all and say that we are tired. Sometimes it feels as if we haven’t progressed at all since March 2020. We can relate to Simon and James and John who worked all night long and caught nothing, only to have Jesus invite himself onto their boat and have them row back out to drop their nets again. When the Omicron variant hit last December, I heard the collective groan, “What more do you want from us?!”
Sadly, I know that many of us have felt that way before. One of the most difficult parts of the human condition is that we get stretched thin. We get thrown more than we think we can handle. We are confronted with pain, grief, and loss when we least expect it. Even the most faithful among us must ask, from time to time, why God? How can I get through this?
In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus responds to our cries with "I know it’s tough, but you’ve got to explore the deep water." This might mean looking where we’ve been afraid to look, either within ourselves or in the world around us. It might mean trusting in something you can’t quite see. It might mean diving back into the hard work when we think we’ve had enough, in our case, putting that mask on another day. It might mean responding to a call from God that we’ve been ignoring. Because in the deep water, that place we land when all else fails, that place we’d been hoping to avoid, that place we’re not sure if we can handle, that’s where God’s miracle of abundance will appear. That’s where we will find the strength to say yes to God, to drop our nets, those things that aren’t serving us, and start serving others instead.
As I look back on my grandmother’s life, much of which was not easy, I know that she understood about the deep water of faith. She knew where her abundance came from, even when the only thing in the cabinet was peanut butter and pie tins. She answered God’s call to serve others even when it seemed impossible, and never found herself without precisely what she needed.
Most of us do not struggle with scarcity the way Simon or my grandmother did, but as followers of Christ, we have the same call towards that deep water. Eventually, we all have to dive in with prayer and discernment and with faith that it will not be a place of vast emptiness, but a source of abundance, of strength, and of calling. There is good news in the deep water. God is present and active there, waiting for us to discover all the strength and love and aluminum pie tins we need. Amen.