From "The Fisherman"

By Rev. Ronald Knox, June 24, 1939.

A sermon on Luke 5:5.

How she has waited, the Church of Christ, all down the centuries, and with how little regard to the maxims of human prudence and human skill! Not seizing her opportunity here and there, where circumstances seemed favourable; not trimming her sails to every passing breeze, but patiently issuing her invitation, and leaving grace to do its work. How many hopes she has seen fail, over how many apostasies has she wept; how she has seen the fashions of the world change about her, old creeds die down and new creeds replace them, the folly of yesterday turned into the wisdom of today! Should she not by now have become hardened and cynical, her pity for mankind turned into a weary scorn, her ambitious hopes into the dogged persistency of despair? We might have expected it, but we were wrong. What if, here and there, she has toiled long and caught little for her Master? Still at his word she will let down the net; until his grace, bound by no law of proportion to human effort, brings her good fishing again. Despise her as you will, criticize her as you will, but do her the justice to admit that the patience of the fisherman is hers.

Will you forgive me if I leave you with this indomitable patience of St Peter as the lesson of St Peter's feast? A trite lesson, perhaps, but a difficult lesson to learn, and in these times especially. After all, we do live — it is time we admitted it to ourselves — in days of great discouragement. Those who are just growing to manhood or womanhood, in a world that seems so shut to honest effort, they will feel it most. We have toiled all night and taken nothing; do we not, inevitably, repeat that complaint as we look around us? Our civilization, so laboriously built up, the fruit of so much noble endeavour — and now it is threatened with collapse by forces not under our direction, perhaps not under our control. The British Empire, so great in its conception, say what you will of it, so wonderfully preserved and organized — and now it is beginning to show signs of breaking up. The Great War, fought and won, so we told ourselves, to save Europe and bring her peace and prosperity — and now we are clinging to peace despairingly, while prosperity has vanished. Have we not toiled through the night, and taken nothing? That sense of public discouragement reflects itself in our individual lives, weighs upon our spirits more than we know, and is making of us disappointed men and women. The indomitable patience I speak of is, believe me, a gift which we all need, or shall need before long.

Don't let us imagine that patience means a tame acceptance of the inevitable, sitting down with folded hands and hoping that somehow better times will turn up. It means action, bestirring ourselves and making the best of things; doing God's will, not merely submitting to it. At thy word I will let down the net; we are to attempt what seems hopeless, what seems hopeless, when we know it is God's will, whether he has made it known to us through conscience, or through revelation, or through the outward circumstances of our lives. As long as we are sure that we are obeying him; that no pride of ours, no neglect, no timidity, no human respect, is preventing us from finding out what his will is.

We are disheartened, perhaps, over material things; times are less prosperous, and we have to make the best of an income smaller than the income we were accustomed to; some of us can find no work to do, and feel the pinch of poverty nearer to the bone. Some of us are disheartened over spiritual difficulties, temptations against which we have long fought, it seems unsuccessfully, or dryness in prayer, or perpetually falling short of the standard we had set before ourselves. Some of us are disappointed over favours denied to us in prayer; all the harder to endure because those prayers were not selfishly offered, but for the needs of others; there is a son who is turning out badly, there is a friend's conversion we have long hoped for, there is an invalid for whose sufferings we asked relief. The temptation (in any case) is to throw up our hands in despair; to tell ourselves that we have done enough, and that we shall be running our heads up against a brick wall if we try to persevere; we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; very well, we will toil no more. That is where we want to remember the great "but" of St Peter's utterance, "but" at thy word I will let down the net. Casting all your care upon him, for he hath care of you; [1 Peter 5:7] so St Peter wrote when he was an old man, and in prison, and the Church for which he had laboured so hard was being assailed by bitter persecution; he had learned his lesson, that day by the Lake of Galilee, long ago.

[Pastoral Sermons and Occasional Sermons, pp. 502f.]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 01/31/03 07:15:15 AM
Categorized as Religious & Speeches and Suchlike.