holy fish Is. 6/Lk. 5:1-11 February 7, 2010

We have two stories of encounter with the holy this morning, the sense of the ineffable, the great beyond, the whole new level of being.  I assume Isaiah is having a vision of the holy connected to the temple, maybe while he is praying i n the temple. to be able to speak the message of God, his lips are cleansed by a heavenly being. Still his call. is one destined to be frustrated call. Typically Isaiah resists the call of God, as he feels unworthy. Recently we reflected on the lack of ritual in our time. We've lost a good bit of the sense of the holy. It's reflected in malls and sports arenas more than in churches. Isaiah's call is to frustration. he will tell people the truth but they will be unable or unwilling to hear the message until they reach bottom like an alcoholic.Every time we cross the threshold of the church for worship, we enter into a holy space. That is when this space is a sanctuary.The prelude and the call to worship mark a dividing line between one world and another world.Isaiah has his vision in the temple or with the temple as a focal point in his sense that this was the nexus between heaven and earth.
 

Simon reacts like Isaiah, with trepidation of being unworthy in the sight of the holy. As far as I can tell, Jesus never brings this issue up. Here we see Jesus in the midst of everyday life, where people can gather and fisherman are at work on their nets. . Jesus deals with frustration of working hard and not receiving, of working hard for no apparent benefit, so from emptiness to fullness.. Jesus points to a different sort of fishing, where the fishing boat is the church. They will go far from shore to the ends of the earth.they will move from emptiness to abundance. They will need help with the haul in that their nets will break and the boats will threaten to submerge.  nets to the breaking point, but they leave everything to follow Jesus. Instead of them asking to follow Jesus, Jesus asks them to follow, leaving everything for the new path of Jesus. What do we need to leave behind?

 

Some of our brothers and sister emphasize the call of Christ so much that they lose the rest of life in seeing it as the culmination of the faith. The Christian work, the Christian vocation is fraught with difficulty and frustration as well. The new way of life that Jesus offers is a new way, the willingness to try the other side. With the promise of heaven, we can face the inevitable frustrations of life. I don't see how we can go through the gospels and see it as a sees of triumph after triumph.Yet we can dare to go out into the deep water, because we are the the little boat of the church. We don't have to live out life hugging the shore any more than we feel we need to use a medicine dropper to dispense our love to one another. With the Incarnation, it is my contention that the church has us do holy work wherever we find ourselves. We can bring the holy even  in unholy places to unholy people. After all, we are all unholy in thought, word, and deed, but it is the sheer graceful gift of god to make us all the biblical kingdom of priests, a holy people.-In that sense we are charged with grace, so that every act, every gesture can be a prayer in action, a clear communication of our call as disciples of god in everyday life.