Fifth Sunday After Epiphany Year C 2010

February Drafts
05 Epiphany C 10
February 7, 2010

Isaiah 6:1-13
1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." 4 The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. 5 And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" 6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7 The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out." 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!" 9 And he said, "Go and say to this people:
'Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.'
10 Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed."
11 Then I said, "How long, O Lord?" And he said:
"Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant, and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
12 until the LORD sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
13 Even if a tenth part remain in it,
it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled." The holy seed is its stump.

Psalm 138
1 I give you thanks, O LORD, with my whole heart;
before the gods I sing your praise;
2 I bow down toward your holy temple
and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness;
for you have exalted your name and your word
above everything.
3 On the day I called, you answered me,
you increased my strength of soul.
4 All the kings of the earth shall praise you, O LORD,
for they have heard the words of your mouth.
5 They shall sing of the ways of the LORD,
for great is the glory of the LORD.
6 For though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly;
but the haughty he perceives from far away.
7 Though I walk in the midst of trouble,
you preserve me against the wrath of my enemies;
you stretch out your hand,
and your right hand delivers me.
8 The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
your steadfast love, O LORD, endures forever.
Do not forsake the work of your hands.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11
1 Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, 2 through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain. 3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. 11 Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.

Luke 5:1-11
1 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, 2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 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. 4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." 5 Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." 6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. 7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" 9 For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; 10 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." 11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

Saints Hidden in Sinners

If you want to be a pastor in Deltaville sooner or later you will have to get in a boat with a waterman.

When Duck Ruark invited me to go pull pots with him one morning a few years ago, I took him up on his offer. I arrived in the wee hours of the morning and we boarded his little open boat and trundled on out of Jackson Creek into the mouth of Fishing Bay.

Duck gave me a running commentary on the life of a waterman and I could tell he loved the work, that it was, as he said, in his blood. I remember him telling me that the fun of it was in the pot-pulling. You never knew what would come up out of the dark and murky bay water.

He showed me how he caught the buoys with his boathook and wrapped the line around his little power winch and pulled up the pots. He made it look easy of course.

It so happened that day that the weather was warm and the bay was, as the locals might call it, flat ca’m. Not a wave in sight. It also happened that just about every pot was chock full of fat beautiful crabs. We joked about taking preachers along to pull your pots.

We joked about it, but I think we both felt something special that day. As I reflect on it this morning, I think old Duck and I got a little taste of paradise that day.

When I was a child and came to Deltaville in the summertime, I would sometimes get to go out with Jesse and Mabel Hurd in Jesse’s old deadrise. Usually we’d pile a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles into the boat, everybody with their own fishing line, and Jesse would always be able to find where the fish were schooled up. It seemed like we’d just drop our lines and pull them right back out again and there would be a fish on them. All kinds of fish. Spot, sugar toads, croakers. It was, well, paradise.

Paradise is the wonderfully good creation of God, suffused with his living Spirit, in which all things flow together in a kind of symphony of life. Paradise is full of astounding abundance, everything needed for everything to live, growing with abandon, a lush garden.

This coming week, we’re going to start our reading group around a book called Saving Paradise. One of the points the Disciples’ scholar Rita Nakashima Brock makes is that paradise is not some lovely dream, it is in fact an ethical measure. Paradise is not some future reality that will probably never come, nor is it a past utopia lost in the mists of time. Paradise is here right now. We’re living in it. It’s only a matter of opening our eyes and unstopping our ears.

Of course, once we open our eyes and unstop our ears and we see the paradise we live in, we also see all those forces that conspire against it. And those forces, well, they see us too.

Life unbound, life unending, life in abundance, that’s paradise. But at the same time, there is things loose in paradise that have twisted it, raped it, harrowed it. The scriptures call these forces sin and death, the powers and the principalities.

Paul tells us this morning that the matter of first importance in every apostle’s preaching, what was “first handed on” to every one of them, was a rather simple story. Christ died. Christ rose from the dead. And the living Christ appeared to his disciples. Resurrection.

Many Christians believe that resurrection is when you die and your soul goes to heaven. But this is not what the story tells us. The story tells us that Jesus came out of the tomb and appeared to his disciples. The story tells us that he ate and drank with them, and that they touched his glorified body. Certainly, Jesus was different than he had been before the crucifixion, but this was not a ghost, not a disembodied spirit floating around. This was a living person, right here in the world.

Now, before anyone gets nervous, I will say that the scriptures also speak of a kind of holding place for the dead, a place of rest and joy. And we know that many people have seen this place in their near-death experiences. The only point I’m making is that this is not resurrection, nor is it eternal life.

Just as paradise is all around us, suffused with the Spirit of God, if only we have eyes and ears to see and hear it, so resurrection life, eternal life, is also offered to us here and now. It is part and parcel of paradise, the goodness and fullness and eternity of the life of God.

So when Peter puts out his boat into the deep water, and pulls up net-full after net-full of fish, until his boat is nearly sinking under the weight, he finds himself suddenly in paradise.

His reaction is interesting.

I invite you all to reflect on your own experience of God’s calling. What was that moment when you sensed the living presence of God, felt the membrane separating heaven from earth split open, and heard your name on God’s lips? Have you had that experience?

Of course I’m not asking if you had a hallucination. My own experience of God’s call was not a hallucination. Even so, I couldn’t really tell the story of it without speaking as I just did.

When did you have that experience? Have you had that experience? I know there are some here who have, and I suspect there are some here who haven’t yet.

If you have then you probably know something about both Isaiah’s and Peter’s reaction. When you feel the presence of the Holy One, when you find yourself in the throne room of heaven, or for that matter in the sudden shocking abundance of paradise, when your eyes are opened and your ears are unstopped, not only do you see the glory of God, you also see how far short you fall from it.

How skeptical I have been all these years. How slow to believe. How little I have expected from the God who made all things that live. How faithless I am. And here I am in God’s presence. Now I see what I did not know, now I hear what I never heard before. Surely he will strike me down forever.

Instead, he invites me to serve him. And of course, I’m terrified.

One of the Methodists’ greatest preachers is William Willimon. In a sermon on this text, Bishop Willimon said that it’s not death that scares us the most. It’s resurrection.

God says, “Come away from the dead-end life you’re living, drop it all, everything you value, everything you think you’re good at, everything you think you know. Just walk away from it. And I will lead you into a new life, a new, unimaginable, abundant and eternal life. Leave the world of scarcity and fear and death, and come with me into Paradise.”

Just as Peter pulls abundance up out of the empty waters, so Christ pulls saints up out of sinners.

In the twelve step fellowships, the one step out of the twelve that the founders regarded as the most daunting was the sixth step: Humbly asked God to remove all our shortcomings. Who really wants to be transformed that much? Who can even imagine it?

And so I tend to believe Willimon. It’s not death that scares us most. It’s resurrection.

Amen.