What Can We Leave Behind?

Scriptures: Isaiah 6:1-8, Luke 5:1-11

Isaiah and Peter.  What marvelous characters.  They are both towering figures in response to God and Christ, leaving a legacy of mission and service that stir us all, and yet at the same time they are so human, so easy to identify with, so much like us.  Simon Peter anxious and whining:  “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.”  Isaiah fearful and cowering:  “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”  And yet, and yet:  “…if you say so, I will let down the nets.”  “yet my eyes have seen the King the Lord of hosts.”

The stories of Isaiah and Peter are reports about responses to the call of God even when every human impulse in them wants to pull away.  These two scriptural passages are meant to demonstrate how God and Christ call each and every one of us, no matter our protestations, no matter our circumstances, no matter our initial unwillingness.  Neither God nor Christ will give up on us.  And it doesn’t matter who we are.  As one commentator has said about Peter (but it could apply to Isaiah as well):  “Christ selected rough mechanics — persons not only destitute of learning, but inferior in capacity, that he might train, or rather renew them by the power of his Spirit, so as to excel all the wise of the world.”

“Renew them by the power of (Christ’s) spirit” – that’s what’s going on with Peter in the boat.  It starts out as a home-y little tale – even beginning (in the NRSV translation) with a line that sounds very much like “Once upon a time…..”:  “Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret…..”  Kick your heels back and enjoy a fishing tale – that’s the feeling you sorta expect to have.  And the first few verses lead you right along that line.

But then when you get to the point of Simon’s plaint, there comes the challenge:  “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”  Do we really want to go into the deep water?  Isn’t it more comfortable to stay near the shore, even if it means that the day’s catch is going to be little or nothing?  Why should we respond to Jesus?

But respond Simon Peter does.  And look at what happens!  “When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.”  As a matter of fact, both boats got filled up.  What a success story!

Now, I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of this scripture, because it strikes me as a prime passage for the proponents of the prosperity gospel to utilize.  You know:  give your life to Jesus and follow him and great riches will be your reward.  You and I know it doesn’t work like that.  And in fact what Jesus does to Simon and James and John when they get back to the shore is ask them to leave all that they have caught:  “When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.”

Left everything.  That’s a pretty daunting prospect, isn’t it?  Kate Huey, reflecting on the meaning of this passage for us, says, “How big is your boat? Simon’s fishing boat that day on the shore of Lake Gennesaret was large enough to hold a lot of fish, and it would have taken a lot to sink it.  And it would have taken something very big to get its crew simply to walk away from it and the livelihood it must have represented.  Our boats — our sources of livelihood and security — are substantial, too.  It would take a lot for us to walk away from them. Perhaps it strikes us as wholly unrealistic and even irresponsible to walk away from our work and the people it supports, including ourselves.  But then perhaps that’s not the point of this story.  Perhaps what matters most is how Simon responds with awe and wholehearted commitment to something that makes him painfully aware of his own limitations and unworthiness.  At this point, he has no idea of the cost of discipleship, even now he walks away from the very thing that has provided him a living.  When Jesus the carpenter convinces the veteran fishermen to strike back out into the deep after a long night of frustration, the yield that day is more than enough to convince them that something really big is happening here, and in their encounter with Jesus they become keenly aware that life holds much more possibility than simply fishing for fish.  What does it look like to ‘strike out into the deep,’ when we’re tired and convinced that there are no more people interested in the good news we offer?  What surprises, and experiences of God’s overflowing grace, await us?”

You’ve heard me refer before to Dietrich Bonheoffer’s idea of “the cost of discipleship”, and Kate Huey is right to invoke it here for that is what Simon (who will become Peter) and James and John need to weigh.  Bonheoffer puts it pretty bluntly when he says, “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.”  Luke, though, says it so simply:  “they left everything and followed him.”  But the action is far from simple.  And the consequences are far from being understood in the moment.  But what has to be weighed is what it is we can leave behind.  What is it we can leave in order to be followers of Jesus?

We’ll come back to that question.  But there’s one other aspect of both of our scriptural stories that needs to be noted:  the unworthiness that both Simon Peter and Isaiah feel in the presence of the divine.  Peter:  “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  Isaiah:  “Woe is me!…for I am a man of unclean lips…..”  (I kept having flashes while reading these passages of Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey as Wayne and Garth kowtowing with their “We’re not worthy!  We’re not worthy!” shtick.  Too much mis-spent television watching in my youth, I guess.)  Certainly, here’s a place where we can identify with Peter and Isaiah.  Whatever it is that God is calling me to do, I’m not sure I’m really up to it.

It is no wonder that Isaiah is feeling unclean and unworthy.  Just look at where he is – a huge other-worldly place where angelic being called Seraphs  appear; these are scary flying snakes, probably the size of sea serpents that are singing with loud, almost ear piercing, voices constantly proclaiming God’s holiness and glory.  And Isaiah cowers before them.  The word in verse five that the NRSV translates “lost” could also be translated as “ruined”, and in the Hebrew it could mean “to be destroyed” or “to be brought to silence” or even “made in the likeness of God”.  In fact, all three meanings are possible.

And God picks up on the third of these meanings, touching Isaiah’s lips with a hot coal as a symbol that he is not unclean, that he is not to remain silent, but that he is made in the image of God, and he is to be sent.  Isaiah’s response is one of the truly great, most direct verses in all of scripture:  “Here am I; send me.”  Right on a par with “they left everything and followed him.”

Down through the ages people have responded to those twin calls.  I think of Francis of Assisi who renounced his family’s wealth in a most dramatic manner to give himself fully to serving God, depending on God to supply his needs.  I think of Clarence Jordan, a Georgian who was troubled by racism and economic injustice so much so that despite degrees in agriculture and ministry he ended up founding Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia — an interracial farming commune, in which all people were treated as equals.  With his doctorate in theology Jordan could have gone on to pastor a big steeple church, but he chose to stay with Koinonia.  I think of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, who gave up a privileged position in Chicago society to work with the poor in downtown New York and espouse a pacifism that was at odds with her own faith community.

Now, none of these – or countless others we could cite – may be examples that you or I would want to emulate.  But what Francis of Assisi and Clarence Jordan and Dorothy Day – and Isaiah and Peter, for that matter – have to offer us is a way of looking at and thinking about what kind of a response we can make when God and Jesus call us.  What is our “Here am I; send me?”  How many fishes can we leave in the boat or on the shore?  What do we need to give up in order to accept the cost of discipleship?

Author Annie Dillard has a wonderful line suggesting that when we go to church we should wear crash helmets, receive life preservers, and be lashed to the pews just in case God shows up.  That was certainly Isaiah’s experience.  He was thrown for a huge loop.  But it didn’t take him long to recover.  He is given a glimpse of the deeper reality:  “…the whole earth is full of God’s glory” – and no matter his protestations he is given the opportunity to respond.  Isaiah says “yes” to God’s call.  Peter follows Jesus in sharing the good news of God’s coming kingdom.  Even the Christian-hater, Saul, is given a new name, Paul, and in the process is given a new life direction and a transformed vocation.

When Jesus tells Peter that from now on he will be “catching people” (note, by the way, the different emphasis in Luke from that in Matthew and Mark and their “fishing for people”) what is it that has changed for Peter and James and John?  David Albert Farmer puts it this way:  “Up to the moment of Jesus’ challenge to them, from all indications, the fishermen had been mostly concerned with fishing for fish, and almost instantaneously, as a result of a single encounter with Jesus from all we know, they change their focus.  They didn’t stop fishing for fish altogether, any more than Jesus had left behind carpentry altogether, but the focus now would be on trying to help people open themselves, awaken themselves to the presence of God within them.  That is what fishing for people is all about; it’s certainly not about how many human fish we can catch.”

In other words this passage of Jesus’ call to Peter and James and John is not really about evangelism, although it has often been used for that purpose.  Rather, at its core it’s about what happens in our hearts and minds and spirits when we feel the Spirit calling us, and we need to respond.  Witnessing with the glow that comes from a Christ-oriented life, we will find that people are caught up in the transcendence that comes from us and will want to share in that glory, as did Isaiah in the temple.  All it takes is a “Here am I; send me.”

Our response begins when we bring ourselves before this communion table in order to share with God and with one another the promises that Jesus gives us through the gift of his body and blood.  The piece of bread that we eat and the sip of juice that we take are simple actions; yet, they have all the profundity of God’s and Christ’s call to Isaiah and Peter behind them.  Jesus not only asked Peter to leave everything and follow him.  He also said, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  Come to this table; hear the promise that Christ offers you; and be prepared to respond.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy