Luke 5:1-11
Isaiah 6:1-13
February 9, 2025
Brent and I have a running joke, and
I tell this story with his permission. Whenever I’m working on something,
usually making dinner, Brent will come into the kitchen and ask what he can do
to help. I’ll tell him something like “set the table,” or “grab drinks,” and so
on. But regardless of what I ask him to do, he always says, “I don’t wanna do
that.” Then, without exception, he goes above and beyond to help me. It’s a
small thing, I realize, but it makes us both laugh, and that’s important.
I must admit, when I read our
passage from Isaiah for this morning, our running joke immediately came into my
head. This passage describes Isaiah’s call from God to be a prophet to God’s
people. The first eight verses are better known to many of us because we hear
them quite often in the church year. I mainly associate them with Advent, but
certainly Isaiah is read at different times and in different seasons.
These first verses begin by setting
Isaiah’s call in the specific chronological time of King Uzziah’s death. Isaiah
has a vision. He sees the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty. The hem,
just the hem, of the Lord’s robe filled the temple. I confess that I don’t know
what the dimensions of the ancient temple were but imagine if we had this
vision today and imagine what it would be like to see the hem – just the hem –
of the Lord’s robe filling every inch of space in our sanctuary, top to bottom,
back to front, and side to side. And that’s just the hem! Can you imagine how
big the full robe would be?!
That would be overwhelming on its
own, but along with the hem that filled the temple, there were seraphs
attending the Lord. I used to lump seraphs together with cherubim, which meant
that I had the idealized belief that somehow they were cute, cuddly creatures
like the cherubs we see depicted on Valentines Day cards. But actually, seraphs
are more like snakes with wings, which means they would be snakes that could
fly. Snakes that can fly. I still get scared at the flying monkeys in The
Wizard of Oz. Flying snakes are the stuff of my nightmares. I cannot
imagine how terrifying it would have been to watch seraphs flying around. And
not only were they flying, but they were also “calling to one another.” I think
our English translation softens this somewhat. I suspect that their call would
have been more like thundering screeches because the text tells us that the
pivots on the thresholds of the temple shook at their calling voices and the
whole temple filled up with smoke. So, not the cherubs on Valentines.
All of this is terrifying, but
Isaiah is especially terrified because the overwhelming glory of God brings
into sharp relief his own failures, faults, and shortcomings. He recognizes
immediately that he is “a man of unclean lips,” and that he lives among people
who are the same. In response to his lament, one of the seraphs picks up a live
coal with tongs and touches Isaiah’s lips with it. It must have been
unbelievably painful, but it is the cleansing he needs. His guilt is departed,
and his sin is blotted out. Then Isaiah hears the voice of the Lord calling,
“Whom shall I send, and who will go
for us?”
Isaiah, now forgiven and freed,
responds with great eagerness, “Here am I; send me!”
This is where we usually end the
story. One of my favorite hymns, “Here I Am, Lord,” is based on this ending of
the story. Whenever I read these first eight verses, I always want to reclaim
Isaiah’s eagerness at answering God’s call for myself. But … the story does not
end here. It goes on. Because now that Isaiah has said “yes” to God’s call, he
has to hear what God is calling him to do.
God tells him to say to God’s
people, “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not
understand. Make the mind of this people dull and stop their ears and shut they
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.”
Isaiah responds by saying, “How
long, O Lord?” One commentator I read wrote that while this sounds like Isaiah
wants to know his specific time frame for doing this, it’s really a lament. It
is Isaiah’s wail at what he is being asked to say. It is a more emotional
version of, “I don’t wanna do that.” But this isn’t a joke. Isaiah has
volunteered to answer God’s call to do something hard and unlikely and unlovely
and scary and … hard. Again, the commentator wrote that God is telling Isaiah
to go and fail. We think of a prophet’s call as one where the prophet convinces
the people to return to God, to turn back and turn around. But God is saying
the exact opposite. To claim that this is an easy call is an understatement.
The call that Jesus makes to Simon,
James, and John seems light and carefree in comparison. Luke puts his own spin
on this call to these fishermen. In Matthew and Mark there is a sense that
while the fishermen might have heard about Jesus through the stories that were
beginning to circulate about him. But in the verses just before ours this
morning, we read about Jesus healing Simon’s mother-in-law. It’s clear that
Simon has encountered Jesus before.
In our story, the crowds are
pressing in on Jesus to hear the Word of God from him. In order to keep
teaching them without being knocked down, Jesus gets into Simon’s boat and asks
Simon to row away from the shore a little. Then Jesus sits in the boat and
continues to teach the people. When he was finished, Jesus asked Simon to go
out to the deep water and “let down your nets for a catch.” Simon, a
professional fisherman, tells Jesus that they have been out all night. They have
let down their nets again and again and again, but they caught nothing. Then
Simon utters these words, “Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
Yet if you say so, I will let down
the nets. Essayist Debie Thomas writes that Simon is at the point of complete
exhaustion. He is frustrated. He has tried everything he knows to do, and he
was a professional fisherman, so he knew a lot. He knows that there are no
options left. And it is in this moment of resignation, despair, exhaustion,
frustration, that he is open to any other suggestions. Yet if you say so, I
will let down the nets.
And does Jesus make good or what?!
They caught so many fish their nets were beginning to break. Their partners in
the other boat had to come and help them so the one boat wouldn’t capsize. Both
boats were filled to the brim with fish!
When Simon Peter sees this, when he
realizes just what Jesus has done, when he gets a glimpse of the power that
Jesus has, he also sees his own sinfulness, his deeply flawed sinful self. And
just as Isaiah recognized this about himself and cried, “Woe is me,” Simon
Peter falls down on his knees before Jesus and says,
“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a
sinful man!”
But Jesus says, “Do not be afraid;
from now on you will be catching people.”
Do not be afraid. I know that Jesus
was referring to Simon Peter’s fear and amazement in that moment, but I also
wonder if Jesus was speaking to the future as well. Following Jesus would not
be easy. In fact, it would be spectacularly difficult. There would be times
when Simon Peter might think, if not speak aloud, “I don’t wanna do that.”
Answering a call to follow, to
serve, to walk the narrow path of discipleship and servanthood is not easy. I
don’t think it’s meant to be. God told Isaiah to go and fail at bringing the
people back to God. Jesus will tell anyone who listens that the first must be
last and the last first, that if they want to follow him, they must also pick up
their own crosses, that following him means leaving behind home and safety and
security and even those they may love the most. None of it will be easy. It is
one thing to worship Jesus; it’s another thing to follow. And Jesus is calling
them to follow.
But as Thomas points out, when Jesus
called these first disciples, he called them not to become different people but
to follow him as they people they are. He spoke to this professional fisherman,
a man who knew what he was doing when it came to casting nets and respecting
the sea and its power. Simon Peter was a fisherman. So, Jesus did not say,
“Follow me and you will be healing people as a doctor heals or herding people
as a shepherd herds his flock.” Jesus said,
“Do not be afraid; from now on you
will be catching people.”
Do not be afraid. I call you as you
are. I call you to use the gifts and talents and skills you already possess.
Will I challenge you to do more? Yes. Will I call on you to do what you think
and believe that you cannot do? Yes. But do not be afraid because who you are
is enough.
Isn’t that what most of us want to
hear, long to hear? That we are enough. Jesus does not call us to transform
into someone completely unlike ourselves. Jesus does not call us to become
someone else. Jesus calls us to be us.
There is a beautiful scene in the
television show, Young Sheldon, when Sheldon, a boy from East Texas and
raised in a Southern Baptist family, has convinced himself that the best
scientists are Jewish. He wants to be like Einstein, so he thinks that if he
converts to Judaism he will be like Einstein. He goes so far as to call a
synagogue and speak with the rabbi about converting. The rabbi tells him to not
worry about converting to Judaism but to be the best Sheldon he can be. Because
someday when he goes to Heaven and meets God, God will not ask him, “Why weren’t
you Einstein?” God will ask him, “Why weren’t you Sheldon?”
We are called to follow Jesus, and I
think it is safe to say that following Jesus is not easy. It’s not supposed to
be. It is going to be hard, and it is going to challenge us. It is going to
call us to do difficult and even scary things. There may be times when we
wonder if we’ve done the right thing, if we say to ourselves and to God, “I
don’t wanna do that.” But do not be afraid because we are called to be
ourselves – to be Amy and Charlie and Charlotte and Anne and Emmy and Sam and
Brianna and Garrison and Andrew and Barbara and Brent and Cacey and Linda and
Sarah Ella and Betty and John and Sherry and Matthew. We are called to be
ourselves, so do not be afraid. Thanks be to God.
Let all of God’s children say,
“Alleluia.”
Amen.
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