Catching People A Sermon

Catching People
Isaiah 6: 1-13/ I Corinthians 15:1-11/Luke 5:1-11
5th Sunday after Epiphany/ Year C/ February 7, 2010

The life to altering power of God’s word spoken, heard, and heeded, is dynamically evident in the story of the call of the disciples from the gospel of Luke from the very beginning the church is claimed that the word spoken in the beginning the word that became the incarnate in the fullness of time is the consistency and constancy of God at work in the world. From the moment that God spoke let there be light, there was light. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses led the people of Israel out of bondage. When the word of the Lord came to the prophets, they called the people to return to God. When the voice spoke from heaven proclaiming the beloved son, God’s favor rested upon Jesus to go forth and spread the good news.
From the moment that Jesus left the wilderness, until he came to the seashore that day, his words, actions, and deeds brought the people out to hear his message of love, repentance, and salvation. What set Jesus’ words apart? From town to town and in the synagogues of Judea the people were given hope because Jesus proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God. They had heard of his remarkable powers of healing and never compelled to come, to see, to hear, and to listen. In this person, God’s word came alive and lived among them. In this story from Luke, God once again moves, as God has moved previously among and with the people of Israel, toward new and boundless horizons. Here God beckons; here in this place God’s anointed reveals and lives and makes real God’s word for the people to hear and see and experienced people.
The word has come to dwell in the midst of everyday lives, everyday people and everyday fishermen. Throughout Biblical history of the word has moved vertically from God to the people, now the word begins to move horizontally outward and outbound from Jesus to the people around him. It falls on the ears of crowds hungry for that word; it falls on the ears of Simon, James, and John, afraid, amazed, attracted, and ready. Not knowing what lay ahead on that open and uncharted journey. From their everyday lives and their fishing boats, they left everything and followed him, unbound, outward-bound, horizon-bound, captured by a word that they would, in turn, carry “on the ground” among people waiting for it, listening for it, yearning for it.
God’s living word cuts to a victim of pressing crowds and the lives and laborers of common people. It shakes the sweep of human history. It alters the lives of those who hear and heed. God’s living word cuts through daily life with the gift of freedom: the radical, radicalizing freedom that enables a person to leave everything and to follow. God’s living word draws people in. It calls and pulls and then pushes people out. As Simon, James, and John clean their nets after a night of unsuccessful fishing, they listen to this word that Jesus offers. And then they are astounded, when they find their nets filled to overflowing with fish that had eluded them only hours before. When they put back into shore, Jesus invited them to join in the journey, to become fishers of people, in that moment they left everything and followed him. The word came t them and captured them. They left their boats and nets. They left the old way and followed
Heard and seen and heeded, God’s living word demands our decision: it lays upon us the choice of staying in the boat or leaving everything and following, of moving into that transformative moment into the fullness of life. When our ears and eyes and hearts are truly opened, we cannot turn back. For followers of the living word, life is and can never be the same. It is forever altered.
But hearing word is not enough. Acting upon it is inherent. The demand to respond is always present when Gods’ living word is spoken. Jesus was very clear about those who heard but did not act: the word of the lord is not to be taken lightly. Hearing and acting upon the living word is not simply about “catching others” as the old Sunday School song used to say. God’s call has consequences. Following has a price.
But sometimes, I think, we have forgotten what it means to be called. We live in a time when it is difficult to hear the word, or see it made manifest in movement or in miracle. The crowds did not always press eagerly in to hear the living word and enact. Lives, nations, seemed empty. The workers are not always ready to leave everything and follow Jesus to the ends of the earth, or even into the neighborhood. We who proclaimed the word do not always believe fully in its power. We ourselves are not free of clogged ears or closed hearts, and we may not be ready to heed fully the living word, to that radical call to freedom; a call that compels us to turn away from accommodation to the ways of this world, ways that lure and entrap us and hold us in bondage.
A friend of mine a pastor in a small church in Wisconsin, just outside Madison sent me a link to a story about how his church responded to the call of Christ to leave their nets and go into the world. Last Sunday, they called of church, not because of weather, even though they have over 40 inches of snow on the ground. Instead people took seriously the call to reach out and touch lives of people around them. Instead of singing and praying and listening to a sermon as is their tradition, every member of the church volunteered to work that day at a local mission. People volunteered at the local nursing home to be adopted children for the lonely and the neglected. Some volunteered at the local food pantry restocking shelves, cleaning, sorting through the various applications for help and putting them into the priority categories that had been established but never really followed. Some members met at the church and baked hundreds of cookies for the local Habitat For Humanity Bake sale that was to take place this weekend.
Wayne told me that one family who came for the first time that Sunday got a Surprise when there was no worship service. But they joined in the fun that day and decided on the spot to become members. They said, if this is how they did church at least once a year, it was for them. That day over 100 people volunteered their time and talents and their energy to bring the Good News to their community in a concrete way. They left the security of their traditions, their nets so to speak and followed Jesus into the world. The Banner above the door to their sanctuary read: “JESUS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING! WE HAVE FOLLOWED!”

What does that mean for us? It means that when we see, hear and listen we too must make a response. When we follow, we take upon ourselves the work of Jesus. We become one with him. We’re no longer satisfied with sitting and waiting to die, we become involved. We’ve heard. We’ve seen. We’ve experienced the life giving presence of the living word. JESUS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING. LET’S FOLLOW HIM!

Sermon – “No Litmus Test for Jesus”

Society in the United States in 1917 was one filled with much fear and misunderstanding. The end of the Progressive Era and its Social Gospel message of reform, the onset of World War 1, and the Bolshevik Revolution raised anxieties in the minds of many Americans. One significant manifestation of this fear was the rise of xenophobia; Americans grew more and more wary of outsiders. This nation, which was built on the sweat and blood of immigrants from many different countries, now turned its back on these very same people. Beginning as early as 1882, ideas of immigrant restriction had been circulating with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. A decade later, the Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1 8 94, argued that the best way to keep out “undesirables” was a literacy test. Their campaign bore no real fruit at the outset as the various initiatives passed by Congress in 1896, 1909, and 1915 were vetoed by presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson. It wasn’t until 1917 that a literacy bill was finally passed and made to law over the veto of Wilson. The United States had created in essence a situation where immigrants had to pass a litmus test in order to gain entrance. There were already in the law books litmus tests for African Americans and former slaves. Now anyone wanting to become a citizen of the United States had to pass a test.

The immigration policy of the United States in the wake of World War 1, which was capped with the passage of the Johnson-Reed National Origins Act in 1924, presents a situation all too common in our human history, both personally and communal in. Similar situation said existed through out human history and still exist even today. We hear the echoes of these feelings articulated in the first lesson that we heard today from 2nd Kings.

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Sermon – “Tranfigured and Transparent”

One of my favorite places is a mountain top in Western North Carolina, nearly every summer when I went to church camp there I would climb it. It was there that I first felt the presence of God. Sitting there on the rocks looking out the valley below, listening to the wind, and watching the clouds slide slowly across the afternoon sky I would feel that I was in another world, in another place, another time. I could sit there for hours, but always had to come back down to the everyday routine of camp life. I’m sure we’ve all had those moments when we are closest to the divine mystery, the presence of God. Sometimes it is on the mountaintop, sometimes it’s in the valley, sometimes it’s in even the most mundane everyday activities of our lives.

Kenneth Grahame in his wonderful little book “The Wind in the Willows” tells of a time when Ratty and Mole were called upon to search for a little hedge pig that had gone missing. The two best friends who lived along the river’s edge had taken their boat out onto the water to search the riverbanks for the missing hedge pig. As they searched, they found themselves on a part of the river they had never seen before. The trees and bushes overhung the river, dappling the water with their reflections. The air with heady with the perfume of the flowers and bush’s that surrounded them. As they moved slowly up the river the air began to change, the light became brighter and the music of the insects and birds became louder. Ratty, who was sitting in the front of the boat, was filled with awe and wonder if the sound of this strange and beautiful music. He asks Mole if he can hear this beautiful sound. At first, Mole could not hear it, but then as they approached an island in the middle of the river, Mole was suddenly overcome with the joyous sound of music. At that moment, as they stepped out of the boat onto the land, they were surrounded with a brilliant white light, and the music intensified. Suddenly they came upon a sight too beautiful to behold, they saw the Great God Pan standing in the midst of the glade with the tiny hedge pig curled up asleep his feet. As they approached the sight, the vision vanished, leaving them filled with awe, wonder, and fear. They had witnessed a theophany, a manifestation of the presence of God.

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SERMON – “A Whale of Tale”

Bless thou, the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts
that they be of profit to us and acceptable to thee, oh our rock and
our redeemer. Amen

Today I want to tell you a whale of a tale, it is about the prophet Jonah, and perhaps it too is about us.
Jonah was a man of faith, a man who loved his God and his people, yet Jonah got himself into a mess of trouble.

It all began when the word of God came to Jonah in a dream.

In this dream God told Jonah to leave Israel and to go to the great city of Ninevah and to preach against it because of its great wickedness.

God’s opinion of Ninevah did not come as a great surprise to Jonah, the evil of Ninevah was known throughout the world.

Ninevah was an ancient city, built in the dim recesses of time by Nimrod, the mighty warrior, and the violence of Nimrod seemed to have been stamped upon his city – it was a den of iniquity and the source of much suffering upon the face of the earth.

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