Fifth Epiphany
Luke 5:1-11, Is. 6:1-8
Back in the days when I used to work more than nine tenths of a mile away from my office people would often commiserate with me on my commute, either 27 miles from one end of the city of Chicago to the other or 13 miles of dark and treacherous country roads. I appreciated their concern and sometimes it was just miserable but I grew to tolerate that commute because it gave me time to adjust from the work part of my life to the home and family part of my life. Compartmentalization--we all do it. --This is the religious part of our lives and that is the family part, this is the work part and that is the fun part, this is the money part, and on and on and on. Sometimes this is good and necessary but sometimes it actually stands in the way of our ability to know ourselves.
If I were to ask you this morning, "What is the Bible about?" I would be interested in your responses. There are actually a whole raft of responses that would be correct but one answer to that question that you might not give is this one: the Bible is the story about the collision of two compartments the secular and sacred. Another way to say the same thing would be to say that the Bible is the story of the intersection between the holy and the unholy, or it is the place where the divine meets the human. Now we tend, sometimes mistakenly, to believe that the Bible is about how to worship and how to pray and things like that. There is a little bit of that in there but the vast majority of the Bible is about the overlap between the sacred and the secular, between the righteous and the profane, between the holy and the ordinary. The Bible is primarily the story of the way in which God intervenes in that which is not normally considered to be holy or sacred or righteous. Our scripture lessons illustrate this in an interesting way.
Here's Isaiah caught in the flow of political history, in the year of the death of King Uzziah, walking in to the temple like it's any other day. Quietly going about his religious tasks when all of a sudden he has a vision that knocks his socks off.
And there's Peter after a disappointing day at work calmly fixing his nets. Oh yes others are over listening to that rabbi Jesus but Peter has work to do just now. We can imagine Jesus saying, Can you give me a little help here fella, these people keep trying to get closer and closer and pretty soon I'll be treading water. Can you lend me your boat? Simon's a good guy and he hasn't any fish to take to market anyway so why not. It's a little different when Jesus directs him to let down the nets. That Jesus is a carpenter, what does he know? Nevertheless it's easier to do it than to argue...And then all those fish--boatloads.
Now the point of these stories is not the visions or the miracles. That part is really irrelevant--the point is that in the midst of the day to dayness of life these faith figures have been accosted by the holy. Somehow the compartment that was work and the compartment that was God have intersected. They've been brought up short by realizing that life is not just brushing their teeth, and grocery shopping and business meetings and homework assignments and soccer games and manicures and sleeping and eating and keeping up with the Joneses and shoveling the sidewalk and going to church and fishing. Life is not "just" anything.
. There's nothing especially religious about Simon's fishing but it becomes the vehicle for something greater. Suddenly God's power bursts forth. The same context, the letting down of fishing nets, now becomes transparent to the divine presence. As in the breaking of the bread at Emmaus, the curtain is pulled aside from ordinary reality. The veil of the mundane world that had hidden God is abruptly torn asunder, and the divine power shines through. Reality becomes luminous, shot through with mystery and miracle.
My favorite Poem--Gerard Manley Hopkins
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out , like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
(Copies of the whole poem are available in the narthex.)
It's not the miracle. It's that in the midst of life the ordinary can be infused with the holy, with the divine.
When I was a chaplain at Salem Village there was a nurse's aid. She was, I am convinced trying to convert me. As she overheard me leading worship and doing Bible study she began to think that I was not spiritual enough. She would leave every article she could find about a miraculous appearance or apparition. There was a gourd in the perfect shape of a crucifix that was being put on display. There was a notch in the tree of a cemetery in Indiana that was a perfect replication of the face of the Virgin Mary. And of course the more well known weeping Madonna and bleeding crucifix. Now don't get me wrong I am not being flippant about these things--indeed they can be a very real part of some people's spirituality. But what I always said to her was simply, "What difference does it make." Hundreds of people flock to these apparitions but how are they changed. How do they leave differently than when they have come? It is not the miracle that is meaningful it is the effect it has on ones life.
Three things happen with Isaiah and Paul.
First they become very aware of themselves
Isaiah says, "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!"
Peter falls at Jesus knees saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"
When our lives intersect the divine it is as if a light were shining on the very recesses of our being. And what we see is not sparkling perfection but the reality of our own imperfections and weaknesses.
Way back in the 16 th century, Teresa of Avila rather matter of factly offers this prayer
"O my Lord, since it seems you are determined to save me, I ask that you may do so quickly. And since you have decided to dwell within me, I ask that you clean your house, wiping away all the grime of sin."
The second thing that happens is that the divine commissions for service.
"Simon, from now on you will be catching people." Isaiah feels the touch of that hot coal and hears the voice "Whom shall I send and who will go for us?"
And finally Isaiah and Peter answer the call. "Here I am: send me." And they brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him."
Life is put into perspective. Somehow in the encounter with the divine all the compartments break down. Somehow only one thing matters. Jesus tells that parable about the man who finds a treasure in a field and goes and sells all he has to buy the field.
." The explosion of the divine presence relativizes ordinary concerns. The daily cares and woes of human beings are set in a new context that destroys their claim to ultimate significance. One's own life seems of much less consequence when viewed from the perspective of the vastness of God's mystery and power. Simon's habitual, comfortable sense of self cannot continue when confronted with the transcendent.
But in the same way, the fact that God has deigned to touch the ordinary, the everyday compartments of our lives makes them special and precious in our sight. We see with the eyes of God.
We see in the Grand Canyon or an atom the imprint of the creator. We marvel at the intricacies of this construction the human body and the connectedness of the ecosystem.
But more than that:
We not only see that there are hungry people in the world; we interpret the hungry to be our brothers and sisters who we watch starve. We see the violence of our streets, but we recognize the inner and outer sinfulness of us all manifest in their violent acts and lack of control. Once the compartments of our lives have been invaded we are given more than a nightly newscast of the woes of the world; we are called to participate in that world, God's world as healers, as reconcilers, as people who care to do something against the constant tide of the waywardness of humanity.
Amen.