SERMON
at
Christ Church, Watertown, Connecticut
Epiphany V
February 7, 2010
by
The Rev. Stanley C. Kemmerer, AHC

“We tried that once, and it didn’t work.”
“How can I, when…”(fill in the impediment)
“I’m really not that good at” (fill in the task someone is being asked to perform)

Jesus had probably had better days than the one Luke records in this morning’s Gospel.

He’s standing by the Lake of Gennesaret. A crowd is pressing around him. He’s preaching and catches sight of two boats close to the bank, their occupants on the shore, washing their nets. “I know how to get a little distance from this crowd,” he thinks. “I’ll have one of these guys put out a little from shore, giving me some breathing room.”

He finishes preaching and now he gets another idea. A different idea: “Put out into deep water,” he says to Simon, whose boat it was, “and pay out your nets for a catch.” Oh, boy! Can’t you just see it? As Simon explains, “Master, we worked hard all night long and caught nothing.” They’re tired. They’ve been up all night. They’re disappointed. When Jesus got (uninvited, we have to believe) into their boat they were probably thinking of getting some rest. They’ve done him a favor. Now this!” Talk about “no good deed goes unpunished!”

But, more gracious than one of us probably would have been, Simon says, “but if you say so, I will pay out the nets.” Maybe that will convince the preacher. The “We tried that once, and it didn’t work” didn’t!

They get a surprise: “when they had done this they netted such a huge number of fish that their nets began to tear, so they signaled to their companions in the other boat to come and help them; when these came, they filled the two boats to the sinking point.”

Are they embarrassed or what? When Simon Peter saw this he fell at the knees of Jesus saying, “Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.” (“I don’t deserve this! I doubted you!”)

Same thing with Isaiah, who saw the Lord Yahweh seated on a high throne; his train filled the sanctuary; above him stood the seraphs, each one with six wings: two to cover its face, two to cover its feet and two for flying.

The foundations of the threshold shook with the voice of the one who cried out, and the Temple was filled with smoke. I said:
“What a wretched state I am in! I am lost,
for I am a man of unclean lips
and I live among a people of unclean lips
and my eyes have looked at the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.”

We all have our excuses, don’t we? Our fears, our insecurities, our feelings of inadequacy or unworthiness. Our laziness. Our cynicism.

I know how many times in my sales career I’ve had to convince myself to call again on companies who have refused to see me, who have told me they never use what I sell or they do use it and are very satisfied with one of my company’s competitors. I also have paid a lot of bills and taken a lot of vacations on the commissions from some of those same companies because, when I tried later, the decisionmaker had changed. Or they’d had a bad experience with the competitor. Or they remembered something I’d said and it had changed their minds.

At some point in their job searches most of my clients tell me there’s “nothing ‘out there.’” No jobs. The economy is bad. They’re too old. They don’t have a college degree. They’re too young. The technology has changed from what they know how to use. There are no jobs in their field in the area where they live and they can’t/won’t move. I also know what happens when they step aside from using the methods jobseekers have always used to find jobs and try the counterintuitive ones we teach them, because I’ve had the perverse satisfaction that comes from congratulating them on the ideal situations they report they’ve teased out from the “out there” where they had claimed nothing was.

If people aren’t interested in the Church any more why does our Centering Prayer group draw the numbers it does, regularly. Why is Compline at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle or at Christ Church, New Haven standing room only in Seattle and in the hundreds already in New Haven. Why, when I visit a hilltop in Taize in France, does my 20 year old host tell me of the thousands who stay in tents and are fed in soup lines for weeks on end in the summer so they can pray there? And, even in April, when I visit and attend candlelight vespers which goes on for hours in a hall filled to overflowing, is no one looking at their watches? And these are young people. And their focus is not judgment and “Jesus saves.” It’s the environment. It’s peacemaking. It’s feeding the hungry.

When we hear “I’m not good at” (fill in the blank of whatever task we are approached to consider performing/responsibility we are asked to consider taking on, do we consider how much farther ahead our experience of the Kingdom here on earth might be were our response to continue, “but I’ll do what I can with this much.” “Can I get help with/be directed to learning more about this part of it I don’t know yet?” Or “I’m better at….and I’ll be happy to take that on.”

This morning’s lessons show us that help is there. It took care of Isaiah’s unclean lips. Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding in his hand a live coal which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. With this he touched my mouth and said:
“See now, this has touched your lips, (I didn’t say the “help” never involves
some discomfort or stretching….)
your sin is taken away,
your iniquity is purged.”
That done
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying:
“Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?”
I answered, “Here I am, send me.”

In the Epistle, St. Paul reminds the Corinthians of the gospel he preached to them is only what I had been taught myself and that, if worthiness were the criteria he’d not have met it. I am the least of the apostles; in fact, since I persecuted the Church of God, I hardly deserve the name apostle, but by God’s grace that is what I am and that grace has not been fruitless.

Now. True Confession time: I told you last week I was dreading Clergy Conference. I waved some of the topics under your noses so you could see why.
Like the disciples, I got some surprises.