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2/9/2025 0 Comments Feb. 9, 2025: So Many Fish! Old Testament Reading Isaiah 6: 1-8
The Gospel Luke 5: 1-11 It’s not often that we can open our minds and hearts wide enough to see God working in our midst, let alone appearing before us. How would we react if God appeared right here on our altar in a cloud of smoke with heavenly seraphs encircling him as the earth shook? Might we fall prostrate on the ground thinking it was our time of judgment as Isaiah did? Or what if we suddenly had a prophet before us who spoke of God and then presented us with some incredibly abundant gift of fish like Simon Peter or like a farmer being presented with a full harvest after the crops failed, like someone being restored to health after a terrible illness or someone whose life savings were lost in a stock market crash who suddenly, somehow, has all of them restored? Would we cry out about our unworthiness but also believe? There are three parts to this reaction that we see both from Isaiah and Simon Peter. The first is the recognition that this gift whether a vision or some act of abundance is a confirmation of God with them that brings a sense of overwhelming awe. The second is a humble statement in reaction both to the gift and awe that they, just like us, are flawed humans and are not worthy of God’s abundant love and favor. And, finally, the third part comes after God asserts God’s call to them, thus noting that they are indeed worthy of it, this time it is a gracious submission. Isaiah says, “ Here am I, send me” not even knowing what the mission is but empowered by God’s belief in him. Simon Peter responds similarly but in action more than words. When they got to the shore, he and the other fisherman, James and John, left everything - walking away from their boats and their lives to follow Jesus. I want to look more closely at the Luke passage to see all that was involved in the miracles and in Simon Peter, James and John’s response to them. Let’s do so by weaving in some beautiful poems written by Pastor Poet Steve Garnaas-Holmes who prophet-like shares not only the miracles for the fisherman but the miracle of God in our own lives if we can just open our eyes to see. “ Little Boat” is inspired by this scripture: Luke 5.3 Jesus 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. —Luke 5.3 A little boat, not grand, grimy with fish scales, the patina of sweat and gunk. Simon didn't see it coming, the sudden request to commandeer his ordinary little boat, from which the rabbi spoke words that healed hearts, that ignited miracles, Simon noodling the oars to keep the boat steady, staring at Jesus' back. Was he already feeling out of place, his boat a divine oracle, like he shouldn't be in it? What was it like, to be inspired, or convicted, or merely outclassed in front of all those people? It would take him longer than that afternoon's miracle to truly get on board. You never know how the Beloved may climb into your plain, messed-up life to birth blessing for strangers, or how long it might take you to come to accept that it ought to be so. How might God be climbing into our imperfect lives, asking us to move over on the couch, to listen? God does not always show up as a physical presence, but is present nonetheless. Jesus’ first action in the boat was not for Simon Peter. He first asked Simon Peter for a ride so he could talk to the crowd without being jostled by them. He asked Simon Peter to row out so he could talk to the people crowded on the shore. Note that Simon Peter was not in that crowd - he had just gotten back from an unsuccessful fishing trip and was cleaning his nets. But Jesus, commandeering the boat in this manner, got Simon Peter’s attention and he responded both by rowing and by listening. I mean, how could he help but hear him in his little boat? We don’t know what Jesus was teaching that day, but Simon Peter was touched by it even before the miracle of the fish. Consider when you feel the quiet nudge to help others. Maybe it comes from watching the news or hearing of a person in need. That nudge to do something, even something small, may just be God climbing into your life and asking you to be a blessing to others. Our second poem by Pastor Garnaas-Holmes is “Willingness” inspired by Luke 5:5 Simon said, “Boss, we worked all night long and caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” —Luke 5.5 A beckoning deeper than words comes to you, an incoming tide, a hunger not your own, a hankering greater than all of us. Love asks something of you, innocent, outlandish, like an expectant child. You don't need to know or understand, you needn't calculate outcomes or judge whether you are able, you only need to be willing. A great shoal of possibilities swims just beneath your knowing. You cast your control of things into the mysterious waters. The net of holiness is not belief or understanding but willingness. This was actually the second thing that Simon Peter agreed to. First, he rowed out as Jesus asked him but now, his experience as a fisherman is being questioned. He was the expert, not Jesus. Yet, Simon Peter did not respond to Jesus with hubris stating - who are you to question my ability? Instead, he emphasizes that they had already tried- had fished all night without success, but he humbles himself to follow what Jesus said anyway rather than to assert any authority he has. What might we need to let go of to follow the direction that Jesus is nudging us towards? It is easy to be logical, to rely on our own expertise, what we are sure is fact. We want to lead, but sometimes we actually have to let go of power and control in order to gain it. It’s scary to let go of control, to follow the nudge without fully understanding it and yet by doing so, there could be a whole shoal of possibilities, a whole lot of fish out there just waiting for us to catch them. Suspending our disbelief is a way to let God in, which opens up a bigger net of opportunity. Pastor Garnaas-Holmes’s final poem in this series “Catching People” reflects on Simon Peter’s new mission from Luke 5.10 “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” —Luke 5.10 The way you look at water and see what's beneath. The way you know the need and habits of unseen fish, live your life by their rhythms, think about them all the time, and think they're beautiful. The way you gather them, the joy not just of a fish but a shoal, a netful. And how, if it's people you're gathering, you're one of them, not different or above, brought near to each other in something greater, a web cast in vast steadiness-- all of us caught up together. Brought close not just to a boat but a bosom. Not recruited, but joined, woven into the net that catches us all, returning us to each other. “Catching up alive,” the Greek means, not snagged, not used, but drawn, as we are, in love. Like caught up in a dance. Something is breathed into us. We catch by being caught. The thing about miracles from God is that they are not an end in themselves. Jesus was not just paying for the boat ride with so many fish, Jesus was calling Simon Peter and James and John to a different kind of vocation, a different kind of fishing: fishing for people in Jesus’ name. He was also calling them into community with him and all the other believers. In a community of faith we are stronger as individuals and as a group. In a community of faith we support one another in good times and in challenging times. In a community of faith we cast our net of love out wide like Jesus did in an abundant welcome to all in God’s creation. In a community of faith, we show our love by helping our neighbors and our enemies. In a community of faith we accept that God is still speaking and we try our best to listen. In a community of faith, we know that God will sustain us even when the seas are rocky. And while Simon Peter caught so many fish, miracles do not always have to be big. Each Sunday that you join me here feels like a miracle in my call that nourishes and blesses me. God calling me here was a miracle in my life that made me walk away from the uncomplicated safety of the high school teaching boat that I was in. God gave me a bigger boat - one that allowed me to do two vocations. Like Peter, I had to learn a new way of fishing - from teaching students to read and write, to teaching people about God. Like Peter and Isaiah, I initially felt unworthy yet, like them, I quickly realized that all things are possible with God and humbly climbed into the new boat. God finds ways in our lives to get our attention through the gift of so many fish. What might Jesus be calling you to do? How will you move over to make room for him in the boat? Just remember that when you do, you cast wide the net of possibility. Amen. Pastor Michelle Fountain
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2/2/2025 0 Comments Feb. 2, 2025: God’s Wider View Old Testament Reading: Jeremiah 1: 4-10
The Gospel: Luke 4: 21-30 Isn’t it interesting when you run into your children’s friends or kids you once knew who are now adults? I look at adult Jeff and still see 9-year old Jeff managing to drop the majority of his clothes on the way to the showers at Cub Scout Camp, despite the fact that adult Jeff is a college graduate, has been a Nordic coach at Harvard and Colby College, and currently runs an outdoor recreation area in Maine. I see Graham, a very successful college-educated stone mason, and picture the teenager who was always building campfires in the woods and didn’t try very hard on the AP English exam for my course. Sometimes it is hard for me to adjust my lens to see these kids as the fully formed and fully functioning adults that they now are. My view of them in the past sometimes clouds my ability to see their present. This is probably what the people of Nazareth felt like when Jesus preached to them in the synagogue. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they ask themselves remembering him running around town with the other kids, and even learning a trade from his father. Who was he to be saying, “Today this scripture (about being anointed by God to bring good news to the poor, release those who were captive or oppressed and give sight to the blind) has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And yet they try to see him as an adult version of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, they had heard the stories of the miracles that he had performed in Capernaum and they had heard how well he spoke in the synagogue just then. But Jesus knew they would want to tie him down: celebrate the hometown hero and reap the benefits. Nazareth had plenty of people in need of release and healing, now that he had proven himself, it was time for him to take care of his own, they were likely thinking, but Jesus heads them off knowing that he has a wider view, a mission much bigger than Nazareth. So he tells it like it is, “Truly I tell you no prophet is accepted in his hometown” he says, going on to explain that both the prophets Elijah and Elisha healed and helped foreigners rather than just sticking close to home in their work. This was not well-received, then, when a rampant version of localism, or what we would call nationalism, was popular, and the sentiment was to take care of your own and let everyone else fend for themselves. However, that wider mission was God’s task for them in the old times, and it was still God’s task for Jesus as it is for us today. The unpopularity of God’s wider mission was instantly clear as the Nazarenes went from celebrating Jesus to wanting to hurl him off a cliff. Jesus was indeed right: no prophet is accepted in his or her hometown. They just could not change their view of Joseph’s son or, if they could, they could not accept that the role of a prophet is telling truth to power and it is bigger than one’s own hometown or state or country. No wonder Jeremiah was so intimidated when God called him. “I am only a boy,” he says, feeling unworthy of this role, but God tells him, “You will go to whom I send you and you will speak whatever I command you.” God gave Jeremiah the words and the mission to go out to other nations and kingdoms “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” And God did indeed protect Jeremiah so he could do that just ,as he protected Jesus when his own townspeople wanted to throw him off the cliff. We have a choice, just as the people of Nazareth did. God did not force them to change, God merely showed them the model of change and love in Jesus Christ. When they were not yet ready for that, God protected Jesus, just as he had protected the prophets before him. Just like God gave Jeremiah the words to speak to God’s people, so does God continue to give words to and protect prophets today, like Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who put God’s wider mission first in calling for unity in her address at the National Cathedral on January 21. She did not call for the kind of unity that says we all have to agree on everything, but instead cited three foundations for unity: 1. To honor the dignity of every human being just as God created them. 2. To seek out the truth and be honest in public and in private and 3. To be humble, because none of us knows everything, none of us is perfect; we all make mistakes and we should all have the ability to learn more, admit our mistakes, to be forgiven and to forgive others. Bishop Budde went on to say “unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree. “ She went on to say that striving for unity is not always easy, “Unity, at times, is sacrificial, in the way that love is sacrificial, a giving of ourselves for the sake of another. Jesus of Nazareth, in his Sermon on the Mount, exhorts us to love not only our neighbors, but to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us; to be merciful, as our God is merciful, and to forgive others, as God forgives us. Jesus went out of his way to welcome those whom his society deemed as outcasts,” Bishop Budde emphasized. And some have condemned Bishop Budde for calling for unity and seeking mercy for the marginalized, even though she was doing exactly what Jesus did. Prophets indeed are not accepted in their hometowns. Jesus was trying to show the people of Nazareth and us that community extends to all of God’s creation and life is not a binary. People are not all good or all bad; they are not just citizens of their community but not their world; they are not only an x - whatever x is and not also sometimes y, whatever that is. Jesus was indeed Joseph’s boy from Nazareth and also God’s son. Jesus could care for the people in Capernaum And the people in Nazareth, even when they could not always care for him. Jesus could help upstanding citizens and those just trying to stand up. But Jesus especially knew that the ones who needed him most, were the ones who others had marginalized because they were poor, foreign, sick, alone, or different. Like Jeremiah, we too are called to pluck up our courage, to tear down barriers, to destroy discrimination, to overthrow injustices and to build up love, planting seeds of hope for all of God’s creation. In fact, it is even easier for us than it was for Jeremiah because we, unlike him, have Jesus’ model to follow. If we seek to create inclusiveness or unity for all of God’s creation, then we are truly continuing Jesus’ work on earth. To be united does not mean that we are always going to agree but it does mean that we will always seek to respect and care for all of God’s creation, especially the parts that others might try to exclude. And if others try to throw us off of a metaphorical or actual cliff due to our actions of mercy, love, and justice, well, Jesus gave us the model for that as well: just pass through the midst of them and get back to God’s work. Amen Pastor Michelle Fountain |
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