Going Deeper

Scripture:        Isaiah 6:1-13,   Psalm 138,   I Corinthians 15:1-11  Luke 5:1-11

Have you ever had something happen to you or done something that, once it happened, you knew that your life was never going to be the same again, that the direction of your life had been changed by what happened?  Maybe when you were growing up, some community leader – a teacher, a pastor, a police officer, a fire fighter, a military recruiter – impressed you so much that you said to yourself, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”  Or maybe your family experienced some hardship or tragedy –  going hungry, being evicted and on the street, watching yourself or a family member fall into addiction - and you dedicated your life to saving others from a similar fate.  Or you read a story in the newspaper or saw a documentary on TV.  Or you went on a field trip.   Or maybe your life-changing moment was meeting your spouse, and thinking, ‘This is the person with whom I will spend the rest of my life.”   Looking back on your life, were there turning points that helped to set the course for all that followed?  For me, growing up in a chaotic family, around alcohol and violence, and finding the church as a refuge, as safe space, made me, as I was growing up, want others in difficult circumstances to be able to experience that same refuge and safe space that was there for me.   And here I am.

Today’s Scripture readings give us two “call” stories – stories of how two people had such a powerful experience of God’s presence that they knew they could do nothing else but dedicate themselves to God’s work.  In the Old Testament, we have Isaiah’s vision in which the Temple becomes God’s throne room.  We’re told that in his vision, God is sitting on God’s throne, surrounded by heavenly beings.  The hem of God’s robe fills the Temple, and the voices of the heavenly beings shake the Temple to its foundation.  Isaiah instantly becomes aware of his own sin, his own unworthiness to be in the midst of such heavenly grandeur. A seraph declares him cleansed from his sin, and in response to God’s question “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us for us?”, Isaiah cries out, “Here I am! Send me!”

And in our Gospel, we have the very different call story of Simon, to whom Jesus later gave the name Peter, meaning Rock.  Jesus asks Simon to take him out on the lake to teach, and after he was done teaching, he told Simon to go out into deeper waters and let down his nets for a catch.  Now, Simon and his friends had been fishing all night and had caught nothing, and Simon must have wondered how Jesus, the carpenter and traveling preacher, would have known anything about fishing.  But, with a sigh, Simon did as Jesus asked, and caught so many fish that the boat was nearly swamped.  Like Isaiah in the Temple, Simon realized he was in a boat not only with a sometime carpenter and traveling teacher named Jesus, but with the very presence of God, and told Jesus, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  And Jesus told Simon and his companions, “From now on you will be catching people.” And they left their boats and nets to follow him.

Two very different call stories, one a vision of God’s grandeur in the Temple, surrounded by heavenly beings and incense, one an experience of God’s provision, surrounded by water, slimy nets, and smelly fish.  And yet neither Isaiah or Simon would ever be the same again. 

In reading Isaiah’s call story, I was struck that, just after God had declared Isaiah cleansed from sin, and just after Isaiah responded to God’s call, Isaiah was told,  "Go and say to this 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 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."  In other words, right after God had recruited Isaiah and gotten him to sign on the dotted line, Isaiah was told that, in human terms, his mission would be a failure; indeed, Isaiah himself would be an utter failure.  Isaiah was told, in effect, “I’m sending you to preach your heart out, but hardly anyone will notice you let alone listen to you, and the few who do listen won’t understand a word you’ve said.”  

What’s worse, while Isaiah was preaching and being ignored, despite all Isaiah’s many warnings, his country would be made desolate and the people sent into exile – his country would, in our words, go to hell in a handbasket - as the scripture says, “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the LORD sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. 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." Isaiah would be powerless to prevent any of this from happening, and so he was being sent only to watch and bear witness.  Isaiah is given just the barest hint that all was not lost:  “The holy seed is its stump.”   

Isaiah must have experienced incredible discouragement and feelings of futility, must have said to himself many times, “Why am I even doing this?  What’s the use?”   It’s a feeling many pastors and faithful church members have experienced over the centuries, certainly a feeling with which I am intimately familiar – pouring heart and soul into a church, hoping to make a difference not only in the congregation but the wider community, hoping to see lives saved or at least changed for the better, but struggling for years on end just to keep the doors open with little evidence of making a positive impact, or any difference at all, in the lives and communities we serve.  The first part of our Isaiah reading – the part ending with “Here I am! Send me!” is often read at ordination services for new pastors – but sometimes I think at those ordination services we should read the rest of the passage, to give the newly-ordained pastors a reality check and bring their lofty expectations of changing the world back down to earth.

In our Gospel reading, Simon and his fishing partners were experiencing frustration and disappointment on a much smaller scale: they’d been out all night and hadn’t caught a thing.  They were working their hearts out trying to provide for their families, and coming up empty.  Remember what Jesus told Simon: "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch."  When we are experiencing discouragement, sometimes it’s a signal from God that we need to go deeper, that our current understanding of God, our current faith in God, is distracted by surface appearances and doesn’t have the needed depth – in a very different context, we may remember that in Jesus’ parable of the sower, the seeds that landed on rocky soil quickly sprouted, but because they lacked depth of soil, they just as quickly withered.  And so we may need to steer our faith into deeper water, or plant it in deeper soil.  That’s not to condemn or find fault with where our faith has been in the past, but only to recognize that the faith and understanding that served us well earlier in life may not be sufficient for the present moment,  that we may have outgrown the past – and growth is good, a sign of life – and so we need a faith that fits us now.  We may need to go deeper into Scripture, laying aside what we’d been taught by our parents and long-ago Sunday school teachers and confirmation class pastors, laying aside our own assumptions and presumptions, to really listen for what God had to say to those who first heard it, and what God may have to say to us now.  We may need to go deeper into prayer, laying aside the shopping lists and “honey-do” lists we usually present to God – after all, God is far more than a heavenly bellhop or waiter or concierge - and waiting in silence for what God may have to say to us.   We may need to go deeper in our relationships both within our congregation and in our communities, suspending our snap judgments, letting down our defenses, and taking the time to really listen to what others are trying to tell us.   We probably won’t be rewarded with a boatload of fish, but we may get more insight into the way forward , more light for our journey.

But ultimately, God is calling us to be faithful, not necessarily to be successful in terms the world can see.   Like other denominations, the United Church of Christ around this time of year asks its congregations to report a bunch of statistics – how many members on the rolls, average attendance, number of new members, number of deaths and other transfers out.  And the numbers I reported this year were small, as they were last year and the year before that.   Our total membership is around 45 members, roughly double the 23 who were left on the rolls ten years ago when I started.  Each year we usually add a new member or two, very occasionally there’s a death or a transfer out, and average attendance fluctuates somewhere between 15 and 20 a week, though we averaged more than 20 a week in 2015 – this year I reported that our average weekly attendance was 19 people, up slightly from last year’s average of 18.  Outsiders looking at Emanuel Church’s numbers would conclude that not a lot is happening here.  They may not be wrong.  And yet I think – maybe wishfully, maybe not – that our church blesses God, our members, and our neighborhood in ways that don’t show up in the numbers, that Bridesburg and Port Richmond are at least a little better for Emanuel’s still keeping the doors open, that God still has a plan for Emanuel Church.  The earliest Christian churches were tiny house churches, not megachurches, and it was tiny house churches that changed the world for Christ.  But their members went deep in their faith, spending time in the word and in prayer and worship.  They went deep in their community, eating together as a community, selling their personal assets and pooling the proceeds.  And from that depth of faith and community, they shared the good news of Jesus, and changed the world.  None of those earliest churches are still in existence – but the seeds they planted bloomed, and carried good news to the world.

We’re called to be faithful, even when we apparently have little to show for our faithfulness.    Isaiah’s words were greatly inspiring to the early Christians, who found in them connections to Jesus, and continue to inspire us to this day – many of our Old Testament readings come from Isaiah, as today’s does - but apparently Isaiah’s words left his neighbors cold, and did not move them to change.  In terms of motivating his neighbors to change, Isaiah was a failure, as God had predicted up front.  But he was faithful, and we can continue to be faithful as well. 

Jesus told Peter to go into deeper water, and calls on us to go deeper in our faith.  God called Isaiah to be a faithful witness, even though few of his neighbors apparently cared.   May we, too, continue to be faithful, and ask God to deepen our faith, deepen our community, and broaden our witness.  Amen.

On The Edge

Scripture:  Jeremiah 1:4-10,  Psalm 71:1-6,   I Corinthians 13:1-13,  Luke 4:21-30

You may remember that last Sunday, we began to read the story of Jesus’ visit to his hometown congregation, and his first sermon there.  This morning, we hear what longtime radio commentator Paul Harvey used to call, “the rest of the story.”

Last week, we read that Jesus had chosen the first few verses of Isaiah chapter 61 as his text.  Let’s hear those words again:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   because he has anointed me
   to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
   and recovery of sight to the blind,
     to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’

He told his listeners, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  The crowd was on the edge of their seats.  Jesus had preached in some of the surrounding villages, and had healed in Capernaum, and had gotten rave reviews.  The hometown congregation looked forward with anticipation of what he might say to them – and who knows, perhaps he could heal some of their sick as well.

The anticipation didn’t last long.  We might say that Jesus took his sermon in an unexpected direction.  First he told them that he knew they wanted him to heal, as he had at Capernaum.  But, in a roundabout way, he told the hometown crowd that he would do no such thing.  Worse than that, he reminded them of two times when God had bypassed Israelites in need to show his favor on Gentiles – in Elijah’s time, the widow at Zaraphath, and in his successor Elisha’s time time, Naaman the Syrian. 

These stories would have been familiar to the hometown congregation, but may not be as familiar to us, so I’d like to describe them briefly.  The story of the widow at Zaraphath is as follows: Elijah was on the run from King Ahab, and in his travels happened upon the home of widow, where Elijah basically invited himself to dinner.  There was a famine, and the widow was down to her last bit of flour and oil, and she was making what she intended as a last meal for her and her son before they were resigned to starve to death.  Elijah asked the widow to make him a little cake of flour – and with some reluctance, the widow did so.  Because of her act of faith, we’re told that the jar of meal was not emptied, nor did the jug of oil fail, but the widow and her son were sustained by God’s grace for many days.  Later the widow’s son became gravely ill and died – and Elijah brought her son back to life.   Naaman was a Syrian commander – an enemy of Israel, who had just raided the Israelites’ camp – who had heard from one of his captives of Elisha’s healing power.  He came to Elisha’s home seeking healing.  Elisha did not step outside, but sent Naaman to dip in the Jordan river seven times.  At first Naaman was angry because he expected more respect and more attention, but finally he did as Elisha said, and was cured.

The point, for Jesus’ hometown congregation, was that both the widow at Zaraphath and Naaman were Gentiles, non-Jews, foreigners to the nation of Israel.  Worse, Naaman was an enemy of Israel who had just conducted a raid on Israel, and was rewarded with information on how to seek healing.  Even so, despite being foreigners, they responded in faith to Israel’s God, and were rewarded.  The thought of God’s love and grace extending to these people was more than the people at Jesus’ hometown congregation could take.  We’re told that they became enraged, so much so that they tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.  But, we’re told, Jesus walked through the midst of the crowd and went his way.

To our ears, their reaction likely seems a little extreme – walk out of worship, sure, but try to throw Jesus, their homeboy, off a cliff?  Jesus had really struck a nerve with his hometown congregation.  Their theology made it very clear that their God was essentially Israel’s tribal God.  They believed that God promised protection and care for them, and vengeance on their enemies – indeed, the Isaiah passage Jesus read includes words about the day of God’s vengeance – but Jesus had left that part off when he read the scripture.  There are plenty of places in the Old Testament that uphold a special relationship between God and Israel.  For God to bless someone outside that special relationship, let alone an enemy of Israel, must have felt almost like God was going behind their back and cheating on them.   And the hometown crowd responded to Jesus almost as a jealous spouse would respond.

The problem of the people at Jesus’ home congregation was that their God was too small and too predictable, that their God’s love was too small and too limited.  Jesus was inviting them to move beyond their tribal claims on God to a more generous view that certainly had Israel at the center, but extended beyond Israel to include persons of faith outside the community.  But this view of God was too big for Jesus’ hometown congregation to take in, too big for them to wrap their minds around it, too threatening for them to tolerate.  And so they hated what they did not understand, and instead of pondering the message literally tried to kill the messenger.

It goes without saying that, had God’s love not extended beyond the Jewish people, none of us would be here this morning.  None of us would be here, and many of us might not know one another.  We have all been blessed because God’s love was bigger than Jesus’ hometown congregation could imagine.  But might God’s love be bigger than we can imagine? 

We are going through a national conversation – not always a civil conversation – about borders and boundaries.  But in this passage, as elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus seems to be interested in building bridges, not walls. 

It is natural to want, as the folks in Jesus’ hometown congregation wanted, that God will bless us and curse our enemies.  But according to Jesus, that’s not how God works.  In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” 

Beyond that, there are numerous passages in the Old Testament calling on people to care for foreigners who live among them:

Leviticus 19:34:  The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.

Exodus 22:21  You must not exploit or oppress a foreign resident, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

Also, in Jesus’ description of the judgment of the nations in Matthew 25, one of the points on which the people were judged is whether they welcomed strangers….. “I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, a stranger, and you welcomed me, naked, and you clothed me, sick, and you cared for me, in prison, and you visited me.”  We may well wonder how Jesus himself – of suspicious Middle Eastern descent, brown skinned, not speaking English, with no fixed address – would be welcomed in our day.   

To draw lines between ourselves and those we fear is human.  To erase those lines is divine. 

Earlier, we heard from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, the 13^th chapter, the famous “love chapter” of the Bible.    We heard those words from Paul:  “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude…..love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.”   The love of which Paul wrote was not about emotion, but about action.  And Paul put no limits on the reach of that love.  Indeed, while this chapter is often read at weddings, it was written to a divided church, with walls of misunderstanding between Jews and Gentiles, walls of  misunderstanding between members with differing gifts, who thought their own gifts were the coolest.   The love Paul described is a love that erases lines and breaks down dividing walls.

As Jesus preached and demonstrated through his own life, death, and resurrection that God’s love has no boundaries, may we follow in the way of Jesus, showing love without limits, in Bridesburg, Port Richmond, and to the ends of the earth. Amen.