Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Fishing
Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Isaiah 6:1-13/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 5:1-11/NRSVUE)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: all of those dates and names of people and places in the Bible (you know, “in the year that King Uzziah died” or “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius”) might not inspire our curiosity, but they actually matter. And they matter because they remind us that God is not a distant abstraction; they remind us that God chooses to show up in actual places at actual times to intervene in the course of worldly events, to act in the context of our history, and to ask things of us. Today’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah speaks of such a time.
It could have been as early as 742 BCE or as late as 736 (nobody can really say for sure because record-keeping wasn’t terribly good back then) but, whatever the year that King Uzziah died might have been, it wasn’t such a great one for the people of Judah. You see, Uzziah reigned for about a half century during a period of relative peace and prosperity for his people, but that period was definitely over now.
The Assyrians, the Judeans’ longtime adversaries, had been kinda quiet for a while but were gathering momentum and forging alliances with a bunch of Judah’s other enemies in the hope of expanding their empire, and so the people of Judah were now living under constant threat. Indeed, during the reigns of Jotham and Ahaz (Uzziah’s son and grandson), the Assyrians and their partners, under the leadership of King Tiglath-pileser the Third, would seek to take control of Judah by force (which they eventually did). And the prophet Isaiah-ben-Amoz, the author of the first thirty nine chapters of this book that bears his name, was a witness to all of that hardship.
So, one day, during this difficult year in which King Uzziah died, Isaiah is just sitting there minding his own business when he suddenly has a strange vision — and by vision I mean something along the lines of the dream I might have if I were to eat six burritos for dinner and call it a night.
Isaiah sees God sitting on a giant throne and the hem of God’s robe filled the temple (the point of this image is that the enormity of God enormity unfathomable for us mortals). There are six-winged seraphs, or angels, flying around up there and extolling God’s greatness. You definitely don’t see these kinds of things every day.
Isaiah’s reaction is to declare that he’s not worthy of being a part of this heavenly spectacle because he’s lost, because he’s “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips,” because he’s a sinner living among sinners. He figures that God and the angels must have the wrong guy; but apparently they don’t think so.
One of the angels then grabs a hot coal from the altar and touches it to Isaiah’s lips, declaring his guilt departed and his sin blotted out, setting him apart as special, consecrating him. God then asks a question that’s obviously rhetorical because God knows exactly what the answer is: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” God is calling another prophet (as God often does) to do God’s work in the world (because, for some reason, God always seems to need people as partners to do that work). And the previously reluctant Isaiah responds to God’s invitation enthusiastically, “Here am I; send me!”
It’s a pattern we see throughout the Bible. God needs a prophet and approaches someone, an ordinary person who believes and says that they’re not fit for the task (Isaiah wasn’t worthy, Jeremiah was too young, Moses wasn’t a good enough public speaker). But they eventually acquiesce and sign up.
Why is this the case? Perhaps a certain degree of humility is a prerequisite for this kind of employment — I mean, who would really trust a prophet who was arrogant enough to tell anyone who would listen that they were the only qualified person for the job? Or perhaps these reluctant prophets realize how tough the job actually is — indeed, the Bible shows us time and time again that prophets don’t an easy go of it.
You see, prophecy, in a biblical context, isn’t fortune telling or predicting the future, it’s pointing out to people things about themselves and their society that they might not see or want to see. It’s fair to say that being called to be a prophet is, at best, a mixed bag. It’s an honor just to be nominated, but your whole world also gets turned upside down, which isn’t necessarily all that much fun. At the end of the day, however, it’s kinda tough to say “no” to God.
Clearly something happened to Isaiah that day that made him say “yes,” that made him change his perspective on absolutely everything. Maybe it was all of the special effects (the giant throne and the angels and the burning coal) or maybe, just maybe, that glimpse at God’s magnificence helped Isaiah to finally understand that he was part of something way bigger than himself, something he was being called to be an active part of.
I think many of us have days like that in our lives – days we can point to and say “after that, nothing would ever be the same again,” days that reorient us, days that instill in us a new sense of purpose and connection and responsibility to the world around us. For many during my grandparents’ generation it was Pearl Harbor, for many during my parents’ generation it was the Kennedy and King assassinations, for many during my generation it was September 11th. I wonder what that day might be for people in our place and time?
Seriously, though — is there a day on which something happened that inspired you to overcome your fear, or your indifference, or your feelings of inadequacy, and finally say, “Here am I; send me!”, even if you didn’t know exactly what that could entail?
While we might not get the same kind of spectacular invitation that Isaiah did — the seraphs and the smoke and the quaking temple and the voice of God and all that — God is always looking for prophets, for people to speak truth to power, for people to step up and scream “enough is enough,” for people to call upon society to repent — to change its ways — even when these are unpopular things to do, even when these are difficult and frustrating things to do, even when these are risky things to do, because they are the right things to do.
The second part of today’s reading makes it pretty clear that Isaiah and his people are in for some tough times — all of God’s talk about cities lying in waste and desolation and emptiness isn’t easy to hear. And what God instructs Isaiah to tell the people to do sounds really strange and, frankly, kind of sinister: Keep listening, but don’t comprehend; keep looking but do not understand; don’t turn and be healed.
But are these instructions in a literal sense, or cautions in a rhetorical sense? In other words, does God really not want the people to turn and be healed, or is God, utterly frustrated by our words and deeds, saying something more along the lines of, “Go ahead, keep doing all of the stupid things you’re doing and see where it gets you”? I kind think it’s the latter.
Because amidst all of this devastation we bring upon ourselves (come on, let’s be honest, we don’t really need God to do that for us), there’s hope. Think about it for a second: Why would God go through all of the trouble of calling and sending prophets to encourage the people to repent if God didn’t actually believe that the people might repent this time?
And so at the end of this passage from Isaiah — after we hear about all of this horrible stuff — we’re presented with a sign of that hope: right there, beneath the stump of that oak that was felled amidst the burning landscape, a seed — a sign that life endures and persists; a reminder that things can be better than they are right now; a indication that faith, hope and love abide. Because, even though it might not seem like it in the midst of our darkest days, there are always people who not only believe these things to be true, but who are also willing to do the work — the work of the prophets — to make them real for all creation.
In a few thousand years, people will look back on what we wrote and said about what was going on in our place and time, they will read things similar to what we heard here today, and they will wonder what was going on during whatever year of the reign of whomever and why it might have mattered to us.
And as great as the challenges may have been back in biblical days (and as great as they may be in ours), history has a funny way of sorting things out. Let’s face it, there’s always been a whole lot more kids running around named Isaiah and Jesus than there are kids named Tiglath-pilesar and Tiberius; and for thousands of years now, people have gathered in places like this to talk about what the former two said and did, not what the latter two said and did. And maybe, just maybe, these are reminders that God’s priorities have proven to be far more enduring than the priorities of any worldly leader.
So, how willing are you to stand up for God’s priorities — things like love and compassion and fairness and justice and kindness — when they are under assault? And don’t think for a minute that this is a question that you don’t really need to consider since it was meant for someone else, someone more important, someone more worthy, someone who experiences visions and hears the actual voice of God.
Because the truth is, God is always asking all of us, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
What’s your answer?