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.