February 8, 2004 (Jimmie Johnson)

Old Testament Lesson                                                                  Isiah 6:1-8

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: "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!" Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair on tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out." Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"

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Gospel Lesson                                                                           Luke 5:1-11

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the world of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and  John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

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We may think we want God to answer all our prayers, but there is one prayer we had better hope God never gives us what we ask for. “Go away, Lord...” This is the prayer blurted by Isaiah suddenly in a moment of worship when he sees the beauty of God’s glory. The temple is filled with God’s holiness, God’s great beauty, and Isaiah immediately becomes aware of his own smallness and fears for his life.

But “Go away, Lord...”is not only the prayer of the young adult named Isaiah who had stopped by the temple and got a lot more than he bargained for. It is also the prayer of Simon Peter standing up to his waist in flopping fish and breaking nets. Why did so many fish cause Peter to become afraid? Why would nets straining to contain the catch freak Peter out? The lake was fished out. The catch was impossible. If the presence of Jesus, the Living Temple of God, could transform a fished-out lake, what might it mean for Peter’s depleted life and his acceptance of the way things were?

The leadership of the occupying Roman army and government had taken a liking to pickled carp and salty sardines. Not only did they gorge themselves on the fish, but they were making a small fortune exporting the fish. They didn’t care what the heavy fishing was doing to the environment. They simply wanted to make money, get rich quick before the fishing was depleted, get rich and get out. Who cares about the environment, and who cares about the working stiffs caught up in the economy? Greed had destroyed the lake’s productivity.

Peter and his friends were having to work two jobs, fishing by night and farming by day to make a meager living for their families. So when Jesus tells them to cast their nets back into the very water where they had experienced failure, they are astonished to pull in nets full of fish. They were in the presence of the impossible! From the waters of depletion came abundance—all at the word of Jesus. In the face of a corrupt, greed-driven culture which took and took and didn’t care about anyone, Jesus was able to bless with transformation and abundance. The full glory of God was present in Jesus, and Peter was overcome with God’s greatness in the flesh, and at the same time face to face with such Glory, Peter was overcome with a sense of his own shabby humanity.

Now we have to be careful here in letting Isaiah’s prayer and Peter’s prayer become our prayer. Their prayer, “Go away, Lord, I am a sinner,” is not based in a shaming self-hatred. The prayer of Isaiah and Peter is not the prayer of pathological self-loathing. Sick religion is not the answer to our problems. The prayer of Isaiah and Peter is not shame based but beauty based. They see the beautiful glory of God and the closeness of God to their lives, and they are blown away by it.

In Isaiah’s case, in the face of a corrupt religious establishment God still shows up at church, and in Peter’s case in the face of a corrupt business environment with no sense of ethics or care for the ordinary working man or woman, God’s glory stunningly produced hope. And hope can be very frightening if we are waist deep in despair.

“Go away, Lord...” Isaiah and Peter see the lie that their lives are. They see the lie that the larger culture is, and they see the way they participate in the lie’s perpetuation. They see the emptiness of all the pretension. But, and whatever you get out of this sermon, don’t miss this: the main point of the narrative of Isaiah in the temple and Peter in the boat with Jesus is not about the final word being that we are pretenders, that we are 9/10s fake on our best day, but the final word of the text is about God’s great desire to bless and touch us. Shoddy religion with its self-serving institutions and corrupt business institutions with their greedy leaders and dishonest practices don’t have the power to tell us who we are if we are open to God’s presence.

Look, the self awareness of which Isaiah and Peter profess their sinfulness is not about sin as misdeed or a slip up. Freud was telling us the truth when he noted that we project our parental experiences as God, that we think of God as simply a bigger version of mommy or daddy who walks in the room and catches us doing what we were told not to do. That’s what we think sin is. But this prayer on the part of Isaiah and Peter isn’t rooted in shame but in seeing the great chasm between who we are and who God is. Look, you can either be afraid of God because God is harsh and cruel and unforgiving, or you may fear God because you finally realize God is so wonderfully loving that you despair of all the ways you have betrayed that love.

I believe Isaiah and Peter are the models of a faith which from time to time finds itself seeing the reality of who we are and how fully known we are and yet how impossibly loved we are, and we just can’t believe it: “Go away, Lord, I am not worthy.” Deep down inside we think we are only loved if we are worthy of that love. In these rare moments of proper self-awareness, we see every secret thought, all the good little things we have done for shabby self- interested reasons, the way we always choose our own advantage, and in such moments we cringe and want God to go away.

Why can’t Jesus simply leave us alone? Why does he have to get in the boat with us, draw so near to where we feel helpless and out of control? Why couldn’t he simply let us be content with our little lies, our masks fixed firmly in place, our souls happy to play our little religious games? Some Sundays it happens to me, too. I’ll be getting ready to stand in the pulpit, when suddenly a sound in the music, a word in the anthem, hearing Pastor David read a text,
or an expression on a face in the congregation simply undoes me, and I’ll become so aware of how pretentious and self-centered I am thinking things like “This sermon sure will impress them. How lucky they are to have me here.” Or, I might be on my way to make a hospital visit and find myself thinking: “They will be so impressed that I am coming late at night to see them.” And then aware of God’s beautiful closeness to us and love for us, I find myself praying: “Go away, Lord...I am not a keeper. Throw me back.”

We may not articulate it in the fashion of Isaiah or Peter: “Go away, Lord, for I am such a sinner,” but the dynamic of phoniness is what we feel in those rare moments of seeing clearly and knowing we are still loved dearly. Across the gap between God and us, God always and only reaches to touch us with the impossible--with love and blessing. In these moments the issue for us to dwell on is not what we didn’t know yesterday about ourselves and the surrounding culture and the guilt that goes with it; rather the issue becomes how transforming God’s love in Jesus is and how God will never ever go away. Even if we want God to leave, God will not abandon us. God will not leave our silly churches, our self-serving institutions, our depleted environments, not even our empty personal lives, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. God will not walk away from any of it. That God will not walk away, of course, is frightening because it means if the context of our lives can’t change for whatever reason, if it is fished out and empty of hope, still we can change because God can do the impossible even in lives like ours.

 

 


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