The whole Bible – soup to nuts, Genesis to Revelation – is really just one long story about God calling out to us people to do two things: to come out of whatever it is that’s holding us back, and then to come closer to God. And those are two sides of the same coin.
It’s that simple. One long story with the same theme, just told in hundreds of different ways. And every one is different. Time after time, God calls out to someone – a person, or a community – to be part of God’s work, and it always ends up giving them the gift of climbing out of themselves and then, instead of finding that it’s scary on the other side, finding joy and surprise. Time after time, God gives all kinds of different people that gift. In every life story, people break out of what’s holding them back and find delight and connection with other people and with God that they didn’t expect.
But the “receiving” of that gift is never easy. So I don’t want to leave it at that kind of abstract churchy language. What’s so interesting about these three readings today, about the prophet Isaiah and his call, about the apostle Paul and his, and the calling of the first disciples of Jesus, is that they’re about God calling out, but not in an abstract churchy way. They’re about the real, bumpy emotional process that God’s calling to us involves. They’re about what happens when God flips open the cell phone and hits Redial, so to speak.
The first story is the call of the prophet Isaiah. It’s the Old Testament reading that’s usually used at ordinations to the priesthood – it was used right here at mine. It’s the basis for the Sanctus we sing in the Eucharist – Holy holy holy Lord. God of power and might.
And it’s the “power and might” part that starts it all off. God gets the ball rolling – though the ball’s really always rolling anyway. But God gets it started by revealing God’s own character, the stunning, beautiful, splendid kind of power that God has. But see, right off the bat, what that means is that God is showing God’s self, and so right off the bat, it’s about relationship. Isaiah’s not getting a memo.
And the next step in Isaiah’s emotional story is that seeing God a little more clearly means seeing himself more clearly – a key idea in Christian thinking. The protestant theologian John Calvin made that real clear. To see God more is somehow to see ourselves better. It’s a paradox, but the more we get out of our own heads, the more we can see back into ourselves with two very godly things: compassion and insight.
So here’s another important step in the whole thing about God calling out to us. God’s call to do something different always gets us to see ourselves in new ways, it gives us a chance to cogitate on ourselves.
And in seeing himself more clearly, Isaiah freaks a little – which is a good thing, and the natural next step in the process. God is the most amazing source of love ever – but God’s not a yes-man. Which is a hard combination for us humans to get. God says, “yep, you’re right. You got problems. Just the plain old human ability to get something totally wrong,” So God wipes Isaiah clean, saying, in effect, that “no matter how imperfect your messy life feels, what I see when I look at you is pure you, pure loveliness, and pure potential. You don’t have to be perfect to be called. You’re good to go.”
Then the next wonderful step is simply Isaiah’s response. It’s not duty, it’s not obligation, he’s not being forced to do anything. What happens here? Nothing less than joy and exuberance. “Here am I, Lord. Send me!” And the thing is that, if Isaiah hadn’t let himself truly receive the gift of feeling God’s glory and his own imperfection, and then realizing that that imperfection doesn’t bother God one bit, then Isaiah would never have truly been able to arrive at the joy, and the response.
It may be something like what we hear in the Gospel in the calling of the first disciples. And even more than with the visionary experience of Isaiah, we get real-life details here.
And to understand how real-life it was, I need to set the stage a little bit. Simon Peter was a fisherman, and we tend to make fishing sound cute, like the opening of the Andy Griffith show, and not that it can’t be light-hearted fun. But that’s not what this is about. For those who fish professionally, it’s very hard messy work. And what we have to remember, at our historical distance from this story, is that in that culture and at that time, fishermen were considered sort of on the edges of cleanliness, cleanliness or purity being an important thing in that culture. Fishermen were on the edges of religious and social purity, because, by definition, they had to deal directly with carcasses – dead fish bodies. And because they had to work to earn a living most days a week, they didn’t have the required amount of time that would have been spelled out in Leviticus – 2 days, 3 days, whatever – that the cleansing and purity rites of the day would have required.
So that means that Jesus, as he was calling his first disciples, didn’t go to the core of the social and religious purity. He started on the edges, with the very definition of uncleanness.
Which Simon Peter probably vaguely got, on some level – like Isaiah, though with different language. Jesus stood there and told him to fish in deeper waters, and Simon Peter wrestled with that. I mean, he was a professional fisherman, he came from a family of fishermen, and he knew what he was doing and why he was doing it that way – he knew how to fish. He had spent his life looking at the tides and the sky and everything else. And Jesus tells him to do something out of the usual order, something that went against procedure as usual – and Simon Peter had every logical reason to object. But still, when he went ahead and did it on trust, something wonderful and surprising happened. He caught more fish than he could handle.
You see, like Isaiah, Simon Peter saw something of the real nature of God. It wasn’t smoke and seraphim, it was a creaky boat, old nets, and smelly fish – but this too was showing something glorious about God. And when Simon Peter saw a little more of God’s presence and power, however he understood it in his mind – the result is that he saw himself a little more clearly. “Get lost, Jesus, because I’m sinful and I get stuff wrong all the time, like I just did get something wrong.”
Like Isaiah, Simon felt on the edges of cleanliness. And like with Isaiah, that uncleanness, that imperfection, was immaterial to Jesus. Jesus goes right to the edge, of cleanliness, of acceptability, of the water, and turns it all around to show that the greatest results lie beyond our boundaries that we’re most comfortable with. The things we’re so sure we know how to do? – Jesus says, don’t let that hold you back.
And his closing line is great – “you’ll be catching people,” he says. It’s too easy to make that cute, like we cast out that fishing line and reel in them Christians. All we need to do is make sure the ushers have a good casting arm, right?
Of course not. Of course, fishing for people as Jesus meant it is exactly like fishing for fish. It means getting down in our own humanity, being uncomfortable or impure. It means dealing with the carcasses, so to speak, in people’s lives and in our own. And like for the disciples, it means we get to see God in new ways, which means seeing ourselves in new ways, too.
And that can seem scary. But if, like Isaiah and Paul and Simon, we roll with it – it isn’t about fear, ever, but about more bounty than we can imagine. God emboldens people – Isaiah, Simon Peter, you, me – to go into the future of God’s new work. The bottom line here isn’t fear, it’s response. It’s “here am I, Lord, send me.” It’s “ok, I’ll drop my nets down where I didn’t think it was going to work."
You see, “Do not fear” is the greatest punchline in the Bible for a reason. It’s because God’s call does pull us away from our certainties, which often end up being the very things that are holding us back. That’s the tender paradox of the “one hope in God’s call to us,” to use the phrase from the opening of our baptism service. God’s call is never about just some weird sadism about losing the things that are dear to us. It’s about finding things that are maybe even more dear to us than we knew that are already buried deep inside.
Those are the two things I started out by saying were the story of the whole Bible. That God calls us out of what holds us back, and whispers to us to come closer to the divine. Not somewhere out there on a mountaintop or whatever. Closer to the divine that’s living and breathing and heart-beating with every heartbeat in this room.
And see, that’s the joy part of this whole thing. That’s where Isaiah and Peter and Paul and so many others of the saints, known and unknown, end up. Not with more tasks, though God’s work involves that. Not with fear, though we can feel that along the way. God’s call ends up with bounty and joy and surprise.
And what is God’s call to us? Well, I'm not positive, but like for Isaiah, I think it’s to be sent out into God’s future. Like Simon Peter, I think it’s to find bounty in places we were absolutely certain it didn’t exist because we felt we knew all the rules.
And then I think God’s call to us is to let our selves be surprised. Surprised by the way things unfold when we didn’t expect it, surprised by changing our minds, surprised by what’s around us – and maybe even in us.
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In closing, something that Tim has been saying in the search for the new Director of Music, a director who understands both our musical traditions and the musical newness that’s inside all of us – and remember, the “us” changes every single week here, it’s not a closed set.
Tim says, and I think I’m getting this generally right, we’re here in what many see as the Mother Church of the Episcopal Church, the place where the Episcopal Church was crafted, and freed from the things that held it back in order to find out what it meant to be the Episcopal Church. That happened here. And we have hundreds of thousands of tourists a year to see this religious landmark, and we have worship traditions that span the ages – though let me emphasize, there’s not a single piece of music, hymn or otherwise, that was done the same way in the 1770s, the 1870s, the 1970s. Ten minutes of musicological research can tell you that. Tradition itself can be a seductive illusion.
But if we here at Christ Church can embody both our amazing history and the future church, which, if it is to flourish, is going to look different – if we can do that here in this wonderful and complex place, then the whole rest of the Episcopal Church has to stop whining about how hard it all is and go on the future too. If Christ Church Philadelphia can embody its tradition of finding out what it means to be the Episcopal Church, then there’s no excuse for anyone else not to do it, either.
As we look across the country at our wonderful denomination, our wonderful Anglican tradition, and its struggle and sometimes decline, and yet also the places where there are nothing less than brilliant shining bursts of hope and new life – as we look at that, as the parish where the whole Episcopal church find its voice in the first place – are we willing take the lead again?
It makes me think of something a friend of mine used to say. He was ordained at priest in his 50s, but all his life he’d felt the tug to go in that direction, and it was just that life had its complications and he kept putting it off. He joked about this famous call of Isaiah, used at priesthood ordinations. He joked that, for years, his version of it was “Here am I, Lord. Send…. someone else.”
I think God is calling Christ Church in a stunning way right now to be Christ Church again, and God’s doing it because of what this congregation has already lived and done and risked and tried and failed and succeeded and tried again. I think God is hoping and loving us into our next steps, as bold and uncertain as they may seem, because that is the “one hope in God’s call to us.”
So I want to think that our story isn’t, like my friend’s joke, “Here is Christ Church, Lord – send someone else.”
I want to think our story is: “Here is Christ Church in Philadelphia, Lord – send us…”