In the OT reading, one of three amazing passages of scripture today, we hear the story of the call of Isaiah.
It’s a special passage to me, one that was read at the service where I formally joined the Church of Scotland in which I grew up, the equivalent of confirmation.
It’s often used at ordinations and commissioning services.
To this day I can hear the voice of our minister, a tall and very imposing man in black clerical frock and with the white dog collar and ties, reading the opening words in a ringing voice that commanded immediate attention:
‘In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.’
Something of the drama and the awe of that moment has stayed deep within me ever since.
Today I want to think about two main strands: encounter − meeting the living God; and transformation − being utterly changed by that meeting.
In our first two readings today, in Isaiah and 1 Corinthians, we see two men, Isaiah and Paul, who ‘saw the Lord.’
They each had an encounter with the living God that rocked them to the depths of their being. They came face to face with holiness: pure love, pure moral right and pure power.
And they were suddenly very, very clear about who they were in comparison.
Isaiah, worshipping in the temple, standing in the doorway of the sanctuary where God was believed to reside in the Holy of Holies, cried out ‘woe is me, I am a man of unclean lips and I belong to a people of unclean lips.’
Paul, the Pharisee firebrand, the epitome of moral and spiritual rectitude fresh from zealously persecuting believers, was just taken out, and fell to his knees, blinded by the light of God on a dusty highway.
Peter was more gently moved, but in an equally significant encounter, a step further on his journey as a disciple of Jesus and to his ultimate role as preacher and teacher in the early church.
All three had a personal encounter.
All three confronted the liberating truth that we are not God, and we are not like God, and we need to be right with God. And all three admitted it.
Isaiah had his unclean lips symbolically cleansed and anointed with a hot coal, and began his prophetic ministry.
Paul experienced the searing wound of self-knowledge and radical self-acceptance, and in possibly the biggest about turn in biblical history became as zealous for the gospel as he had been against it. In good biblical tradition, he was given a new name.
Dramatic stuff. Stuff that reminds us that God is not to be tamed or domesticated or underestimated. That he is full of surprises.
But it is about Peter’s story in particular that I would like us to think today.
Let’s remind ourselves what happened.
The crowds were pressing in on Jesus.
Jesus asked Peter if he could use his boat to put out into the shallows, presumably so he could sit and teach, maybe giving him a better platform.
Perhaps it gave better acoustics and made it easier to engage with the audience.
Jesus does some teaching. We hear that people were hungry for his words.
After a while, Jesus tells Peter to cast out into the deep.
Presumably nothing could be further from Peter’s mind. He’s been up all night and he has caught nothing.
He’s already done Jesus a favour letting him use the boat.
The last thing he would want to do is to go back out there.
He was probably exhausted.
Fishermen in those days used linen trammel nets which were only cast at night when the fish couldn’t see them. He must have thought Jesus was crazy. Jesus was a carpenter, after all; what did he know about fishing?
Yet surprisingly, for this normally blunt, hotheaded man, we don’t have any record that he said anything much, and he did as Jesus asked. Perhaps he was too tired.
Jesus tells the men to cast their nets. And they are pulled out so full of fish that the nets nearly break and the boat nearly sinks. They have to ask others for help.
No doubt plenty of families were fed with the proceeds of the catch.
Now Peter has a close relationship with Jesus. He’s a friend and teacher, and we know that Jesus has been to Peter’s house and met his family.
Our homes are about who we really are, aren’t they.
They’re where we can really be ourselves.
It’s uncomfortable when people mess about with our home, or we have building work done or we move house or lose our home.
So in a real way Peter has already given Jesus access to where he really is himself, his personal space, his identity; he has allowed him ‘into his house’.
And that time the roof got taken off.
Jesus now steps into Peter's social and his economic space, his fishing boat.
Now I guess that Peter knew that something would happen, because it always did when Jesus was around. But how amazing must it have been when they saw, against all the odds, a catch so large that it nearly broke the net.
It must have smashed all their notions about what they knew about fish and fishing, and about themselves as fishermen. And about Jesus.
And that’s indeed what happened.
Peter, who has previously called Jesus teacher, now calls him Lord.
And the scripture says that Simon saw.
‘Suddenly’, as Kate Hey says, ‘he’s Simon Peter, and this new man is completely, utterly open to something far beyond his understanding, something that makes him painfully aware of his own limitations and his unworthiness, something that can, and will, transform his life. He is awestruck, as we hear in Eugene Peterson’s translation of his words: Lord, he says, “I’m a sinner and can’t handle this holiness. Leave me to myself.”’
Simon ‘saw the Lord’.
And perhaps Simon saw also something of the abundance, the overflowing goodness and provision of God in the wriggling catch bursting out of the boat.
The abundance of the Kingdom that’s foretold in so many parables.
And to Simon − here called Peter, though he has not yet been given this name by Jesus − to Simon and his mates, Jesus says ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of living human beings.’
What it seems to me Jesus is saying here is forget all that stuff you think you know.
It’s good but it’s so limited.
I really am so much more than you understand.
Let’s really go fishing … put out into the deep.
It’s probably no coincidence that in Greek the word used in that phrase is the word that is used when speaking to one person, and it is to each of us personally, as to Peter, that Jesus speaks. Put out into the deep.
Perhaps the challenge for Peter here, and for us, is to step into the deep, and in so doing, to find ourselves not adrift, but becoming more of who we really are.
To come to have our own stories of deep-sea fishing (or nursing or teaching or bringing up children or of being unemployed or wherever it is that we have gone deep with Jesus) that are real and that speak of encounter with the living God in our everyday lives here and now.
And we will be so authentically ourselves, knowing from that encounter that we are who we are, by God’s grace, that our lives cannot fail to attract those whom Jesus came to save.
The blind, the deaf, the lame, the poor, the prisoner, the broken-hearted.
To be fishers of living human beings.
And because we know who God is and so who we are, we will allow others to be who they are, and we will not patronise or judge, but love them as God does.
For each of us, putting out into the deep will mean something different.
I am deeply afraid of water. I am not a strong swimmer, and I hate the idea that I can’t put my feet on the bottom. I am afraid I will drown if I am out of my depth.
That’s also true of my spiritual life. I like to have a safety net, to retain a bit of control. And that why Jesus tells Peter not to fear.
It’s normal to dislike being out of our comfort zone.
But, as a card I got last week reminds me,real life begins where the comfort zone ends. And Jesus says he came to bring us life in all its abundance.
So we each might ask ourselves:
What is out of our comfort zone, the thing that’s really very scary?
It might be an actual change of direction, like Peter and his kinsmen who left their nets.
But more likely something about our personal identity:
a change of thinking about ourselves or others or God
a change of feeling about ourselves or others or God
a change of behaving to ourselves or others or God.
It might be about our economic or social identity:
a change of lifestyle
a change of those we spend our time with
a change in our state of health.
And what might it mean for us as a community to step into the deep with Jesus?
What are we afraid of?
Where might it take us?
What might we need to change or give up?
Out of the deep came a glittering harvest more abundant than Peter could have imagined, and totally against the odds − a slippery, gasping, living image of God’s love and provision.
Peter was convinced. The next thing he did was try to walk on water!
Kate Huey says this: ‘In God’s love − a love we’re called to share with everyone − there is more than enough for each and every one of us. There is more than enough forgiveness, more than enough healing, more than enough grace. What does it really mean for us to “leave everything and follow Jesus”? I think it means that we let go of the idea that there will ever be enough things to secure our future if we don’t make room in our boats, and in our hearts and our lives, for our sisters and brothers. I think it means that we let go of clenched fists that convince us that our money and our possessions [and our time] belong to us, not to God.’
Our journey into God’s abundance, our conversion, is always going on.
Martin Luther said this: ‘This life is not being but becoming. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way.’
So, fellow fishermen and fisherwomen, remembering we are works in progress, and giving thanks that by the grace of God we are who we are, let’s put out into the deep with Jesus and prepare to be surprised by God’s rich and unexpected harvest.
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Duration: 16 min 10 sec
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This page was last updated on Tuesday, 07 September 2010