Luke 5:1-11
Pastor Delmer Chilton, a Lutheran pastor who’s served congregations throughout the southeast, tells people when he’s asked about his call story that when he was a boy, he had been in the tobacco field on a hot summer day, after a pop-up thunderstorm. There was steam coming off the tobacco leaves, and he was up to his knees in red mud when he saw a preacher drive by in an air-conditioned Ford Fairlane. Right then, Delmer told God, “Yes, Lord, I can do that. I will do that. I will become a preacher.”[i]
It turns out the story isn’t true, but Delmer tells it because people have an expectation about what a call story should be. We expect call stories to center around a single moment of clarity, like the one Paul experiences on the Damascus Road when he is blinded by a light from heaven that flashed around him.[ii] Or the one that Martin Luther had when he was caught out in a ferocious storm and lighting struck nearby. The story goes that the terrified Luther called out and vowed to become a monk if God delivered him safely.
From stories like these, we expect call stories to show a person’s unquestioned and immediate obedience to God.
But there are far more people in Scripture who follow God’s call imperfectly, stumbling along the Way.
In Exodus we hear the story of Moses who argues with God, saying that he isn’t comfortable speaking in public, so he couldn’t possibly lead God’s people.
Jonah also argues with God when he is sent to Nineveh. First he tries to hide and then he tells God he doesn’t like the Good News he’s been given. He doesn’t want God to save the Ninevites.
When Jeremiah is called, he too argues, telling God he is just a boy and in today’s Old Testament reading, when Isaiah is called, he argues that he is not qualified to be a prophet because has unclean lips.
In today’s gospel, we have Luke’s account of Jesus calling Simon Peter, James and John to follow him. Now, time has passed since he preached in the synagogue in Nazareth where the crowd wanted to throw him off a cliff. In the verses immediately before these, Luke tells us that Jesus left there and traveled to Capernaum and preached in more of the synagogues of Judea.[iii] He’s a popular teacher and there is a crowd with him when he reaches the lakeshore of Gennesaret or the Sea of Galilee.
People who have been there say there is a rise in the shoreline so when Jesus got into Simon Peter’s boat and went a little bit away from the shore, it would have provided a platform for Jesus, similar to an amphitheater stage.
First he teaches and then, after he finishes, he commands Simon Peter to go farther out to sea, into the deep water. And once they are there, he tells them to let down their nets, and they are overwhelmed by the abundance of fish that they catch.
Suddenly, instead of being afraid of going hungry or not having a catch to sell, the fishermen have more than they can handle and just as it looks like their nets will burst and their boats will sink under the weight of the haul, they call others over to help with the catch and to share in the abundance.
We don’t know exactly what prompts Simon Peter at that moment to fall down and repent at the feet of Jesus, but Luke tells us that when he sees the scene on the boats, Simon Peter drops to his knees and cries out, confessing his sinfulness and calling Jesus not only Master, but Lord.
We can speculate that Simon Peter didn’t think he deserved to be with Jesus because he was a sinner. But Jesus doesn’t shun him or cast him away. Instead, he commands him, “Do not fear.”
They are the same words the angel says to Zechariah at the announcement that Elizabeth will bear a son (1:13); the same words Gabriel speaks to Mary when he tells her she will be the mother of the Son of God. (1:30) They are the same words that later in Luke, Jesus will speak to Jairus whose daughter is ill (8:50) and to the crowds when he addresses them as his flock. (12:32)
In each of these human encounters with the holy, God speaks these words.
When God calls you to a task or a place, Jesus’ words here are a reminder that God is with you in that kingdom work and you do not need to be afraid.
Importantly, Jesus never tells Peter, “Don’t make mistakes.” Or “Don’t bother if you can’t do it perfectly.” Jesus knows who Peter is; we know that this is the same man who will deny Jesus three times on the night before his execution. But God calls him anyway.
Like Delmer Chilton, my call story doesn’t have a lightning bolt moment. When I returned to the Church in college, I was in a tradition that didn’t ordain women but I thought I would pursue a masters degree in biblical studies. I was accepted to a graduate program, but at the time, I was living in Virginia and I couldn’t afford to move and to pay tuition, so deferred my admission and I moved an hour south and got a job waiting tables, and that’s where Jamie and I met. Four years later, when Casey was thirteen months old, I was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, and in the midst of the chemotherapy and radiation treatments, I was cared for by an amazing chaplain at the local hospital. She was one of the first female pastors I had met. A few years after that, we became ELCA Lutherans when we joined our neighborhood congregation outside Philadelphia, and our associate pastor was another woman. By the time I returned to the idea of a call to ministry in 2006, I had been in four different congregations, and every one of them was served by women in ministry. The witness of those women and my conversations with other pastors who identified gifts for ministry in me helped me hear God’s call to congregation ministry.
I still remember some of the earliest conversations I had about ministry. I am very grateful that I had already learned it was okay to say, “I don’t know.” I didn’t have to try to be the expert; I just had to be faithful, putting one foot in front of the other and taking the next step forward. There’s still a lot that I don’t know about God, the Bible and about ministry, but through all of it, I hear what Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Do not fear.”
The Good News is that God who created and loves you knows where you’ve been broken and where you in turn have broken others, and this same God is calling you to participate in the kingdom’s work. Not perfectly, but faithfully. And to every one of us, God says, “You are not alone. I am with you. Do not fear.”
Let us pray…
Holy God,
We give You thanks for your mercy and love that you see each one of us as we are and invite us into your Kingdom work anyway.
May your Holy Spirit give us courage and strength to answer your call to follow Your Son Jesus and cast wide the net of Your love for the world.
Amen.
[i] Chilton, Delmer. The Gospel According to Aunt Mildred: Stories of Family and Faith (p. 45). Brasstown Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[ii] Acts 9
[iii] Luke 4:31,44
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Luke 4:21-30
Tonight the LA Rams and the New England Patriots are playing in the 53rd SuperBowl and for the last two weeks, the excitement has been building for the hometown fans of these two teams. But it’s not just the diehards who are choosing sides. You also have the people who think the New Orleans Saints were robbed of their chance to play and want to see the Rams lose, and the people who want the Rams to win because they don’t want New England to either take home another trophy or tie the Steelers’ record for SuperBowl wins. The divisions run deep and each side thinks the other is the losers.
Hearing today’s gospel lesson, we see that this instinct to choose sides and create an “us” and a “them” is as old as the hills.
The gospel reading picks up in the middle of a story where Jesus has returned to his hometown of Nazareth and he has just finished reading during worship at the synagogue. For his reading, he chose these words from the prophet Isaiah:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
After he concluded his reading, Jesus sat down, saying, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And at first, everyone responds positively and admires him. And, it’s clear from the reaction of the crowd that when Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor, they think that they are on the winning team.
But then he continues teaching, explaining what God’s word is for them in that particular time and place, and rooting his lessons in the scripture of their faith and ancestors.
First, Jesus recalls one of the miracle stories of Elijah. Elijah was a Jewish prophet who “lived in the northern kingdom of Israel during the ninth century BCE.” We hear his stories told in First and Second Kings. [i] Elijah argued with the people who wanted to worship the Canaanite god Baal, defending Yahweh’s claim to be God alone, to the exclusion of all idols. [ii]
In First Kings Chapter17, Scripture tells us that there was a famine and no one had enough water or food. The word of the Lord came to Elijah and he left Israel and traveled to Zarephath, a town in the Gentile, or non-Jewish, region of Sidon which is Lebanon today. And when Elijah got to the town, he went to the house of a Gentile widow and he asked her to cook for him. Like everyone else, the woman had very little but she took the little bit of meal and oil that she had and she cooked for him, and when neither the meal nor the oil ran out, she cooked for her son and for herself that day and for many more days, and they survived the famine.
The second story that Jesus recalls happened during the time of Elijah’s successor, Elisha. We get this story in Second Kings Chapter 5. The northern kingdom of Israel had been attacked repeatedly by the Assyrians, and in one of the Assyrian conquests, a girl was taken into the household of Naaman, the general of the Syrian army. When the general contracted leprosy, the girl told him about the prophet Elisha and eventually the general was invited to come and see him in Israel. When Naaman arrived, Elisha never even came out to greet him though; instead, Elisha sent word to him to bathe in the Jordan River. Naaman scoffed at the prophet’s instructions and was almost too proud or stubborn to follow them, but one of his servants persuaded him to do what he had been told, and he bathed and was healed.
With these two stories, Jesus reminds us that the kingdom of God is never “ours” alone. The year of the Lord’s favor is for everyone. God’s love for the world crosses boundaries and borders, regardless of whether they are constructed by religious institutions, society and culture, or for political or legal reasons.
And that’s when people get angry.
But Jesus never promises that the gospel is easy. Later in Luke Chapter 6, he will teach :
32 "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.[iii]
The boundary breaking character of the gospel, especially as we hear it told by Luke, cannot be ignored, even, and maybe especially, when it angers people.
This past Friday was the fifty-ninth anniversary of the beginning of the Greensboro sit in when four young black men from North Carolina A&T took seats at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave when they were denied service. After their action, sit-ins began happening in cities across the South and by the summer, restaurants began to integrate. All these years later, it’s easy to sum up the events of that summer in a sentence or two, but you can be certain that on that February 1, 1960 and in the months to follow, people were filled with rage at the ones who were saying that separate was not equal. The instinct to choose sides and create an “us” and a “them” is as old as the hills.
Sadly, all these years later, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull examples out of our headlines that illustrate how we continue to choose division over unity, hate over love, and “us” over “them.”
But the Good News is that despite our human nature —
the sinfulness and brokenness that turns us in on ourselves —
God doesn’t stop crossing boundaries or borders.
To each of us who thinks we are beyond redemption,
God steps over that imaginary line and says,
“No. You are mine.”
“You are loved.”
“You will live.”
And to the person against whom we want to rage, out of anger or fear, the person whom we want to put outside God’s love and mercy,
God steps over that imaginary line, too, and says,
“No. You are mine.”
“You are loved.”
“You will live.”
Our challenge today isn’t to be Monday morning quarterbacks, wondering how we would have responded that day in the synagogue, whether we would have been filled with rage with the crowd or followed Jesus as he passed through the midst of them.
Our challenge today is to see where we have built boundaries and borders in our lives here and now; where we have created divisions that have no place in the kingdom of God, and to see those whom we have tried to place outside God’s love and mercy. For those are the very same people whom we are called to love.
With these stories, Jesus invites us to choose again,
to choose unity over division and to chooser love over hate.
Let us pray…
Reconciling God,
Thank you for sending Your Son Jesus to show the world how vast your merciful love is;
Forgive us when we forget the Good News that You love us, when we cannot love ourselves or others.
By Your Spirit, give us courage to love as you first loved us.
We pray in Jesus’ name,
Amen.
[i] “Elijah,” Enter the Bible by Luther Seminary. https://www.enterthebible.org/oldtestament.aspx?rid=31, accessed 2/2/2019.
[ii] “Elijah”, Fausset's Bible Dictionary on BibleWorks 8.0
[iii] Luke 6:32-35
Tonight the LA Rams and the New England Patriots are playing in the 53rd SuperBowl and for the last two weeks, the excitement has been building for the hometown fans of these two teams. But it’s not just the diehards who are choosing sides. You also have the people who think the New Orleans Saints were robbed of their chance to play and want to see the Rams lose, and the people who want the Rams to win because they don’t want New England to either take home another trophy or tie the Steelers’ record for SuperBowl wins. The divisions run deep and each side thinks the other is the losers.
Hearing today’s gospel lesson, we see that this instinct to choose sides and create an “us” and a “them” is as old as the hills.
The gospel reading picks up in the middle of a story where Jesus has returned to his hometown of Nazareth and he has just finished reading during worship at the synagogue. For his reading, he chose these words from the prophet Isaiah:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.”
After he concluded his reading, Jesus sat down, saying, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And at first, everyone responds positively and admires him. And, it’s clear from the reaction of the crowd that when Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor, they think that they are on the winning team.
But then he continues teaching, explaining what God’s word is for them in that particular time and place, and rooting his lessons in the scripture of their faith and ancestors.
First, Jesus recalls one of the miracle stories of Elijah. Elijah was a Jewish prophet who “lived in the northern kingdom of Israel during the ninth century BCE.” We hear his stories told in First and Second Kings. [i] Elijah argued with the people who wanted to worship the Canaanite god Baal, defending Yahweh’s claim to be God alone, to the exclusion of all idols. [ii]
In First Kings Chapter17, Scripture tells us that there was a famine and no one had enough water or food. The word of the Lord came to Elijah and he left Israel and traveled to Zarephath, a town in the Gentile, or non-Jewish, region of Sidon which is Lebanon today. And when Elijah got to the town, he went to the house of a Gentile widow and he asked her to cook for him. Like everyone else, the woman had very little but she took the little bit of meal and oil that she had and she cooked for him, and when neither the meal nor the oil ran out, she cooked for her son and for herself that day and for many more days, and they survived the famine.
The second story that Jesus recalls happened during the time of Elijah’s successor, Elisha. We get this story in Second Kings Chapter 5. The northern kingdom of Israel had been attacked repeatedly by the Assyrians, and in one of the Assyrian conquests, a girl was taken into the household of Naaman, the general of the Syrian army. When the general contracted leprosy, the girl told him about the prophet Elisha and eventually the general was invited to come and see him in Israel. When Naaman arrived, Elisha never even came out to greet him though; instead, Elisha sent word to him to bathe in the Jordan River. Naaman scoffed at the prophet’s instructions and was almost too proud or stubborn to follow them, but one of his servants persuaded him to do what he had been told, and he bathed and was healed.
With these two stories, Jesus reminds us that the kingdom of God is never “ours” alone. The year of the Lord’s favor is for everyone. God’s love for the world crosses boundaries and borders, regardless of whether they are constructed by religious institutions, society and culture, or for political or legal reasons.
And that’s when people get angry.
But Jesus never promises that the gospel is easy. Later in Luke Chapter 6, he will teach :
32 "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.[iii]
The boundary breaking character of the gospel, especially as we hear it told by Luke, cannot be ignored, even, and maybe especially, when it angers people.
This past Friday was the fifty-ninth anniversary of the beginning of the Greensboro sit in when four young black men from North Carolina A&T took seats at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and refused to leave when they were denied service. After their action, sit-ins began happening in cities across the South and by the summer, restaurants began to integrate. All these years later, it’s easy to sum up the events of that summer in a sentence or two, but you can be certain that on that February 1, 1960 and in the months to follow, people were filled with rage at the ones who were saying that separate was not equal. The instinct to choose sides and create an “us” and a “them” is as old as the hills.
Sadly, all these years later, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull examples out of our headlines that illustrate how we continue to choose division over unity, hate over love, and “us” over “them.”
But the Good News is that despite our human nature —
the sinfulness and brokenness that turns us in on ourselves —
God doesn’t stop crossing boundaries or borders.
To each of us who thinks we are beyond redemption,
God steps over that imaginary line and says,
“No. You are mine.”
“You are loved.”
“You will live.”
And to the person against whom we want to rage, out of anger or fear, the person whom we want to put outside God’s love and mercy,
God steps over that imaginary line, too, and says,
“No. You are mine.”
“You are loved.”
“You will live.”
Our challenge today isn’t to be Monday morning quarterbacks, wondering how we would have responded that day in the synagogue, whether we would have been filled with rage with the crowd or followed Jesus as he passed through the midst of them.
Our challenge today is to see where we have built boundaries and borders in our lives here and now; where we have created divisions that have no place in the kingdom of God, and to see those whom we have tried to place outside God’s love and mercy. For those are the very same people whom we are called to love.
With these stories, Jesus invites us to choose again,
to choose unity over division and to chooser love over hate.
Let us pray…
Reconciling God,
Thank you for sending Your Son Jesus to show the world how vast your merciful love is;
Forgive us when we forget the Good News that You love us, when we cannot love ourselves or others.
By Your Spirit, give us courage to love as you first loved us.
We pray in Jesus’ name,
Amen.
[i] “Elijah,” Enter the Bible by Luther Seminary. https://www.enterthebible.org/oldtestament.aspx?rid=31, accessed 2/2/2019.
[ii] “Elijah”, Fausset's Bible Dictionary on BibleWorks 8.0
[iii] Luke 6:32-35
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