This sermon was preached for the online virtual worship service of St. Andrew's for the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 9, 2025. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 6:1-8, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Luke 5:1-11, and Psalm 138.
In labor with my first child, my son, there came that moment when the midwife looked me in the eyes and said, “This next push will do it.” All of a sudden, the entire weight of the enormity of what I was doing - bringing a new human being into the world - came crashing down on me.
I just kept saying, I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I can’t do this. But I didn’t mean the pushing part, I meant all of it. I wasn’t ready to be someone’s mother. How could I ever have believed I could be someone’s mother. God bless my twin sister, who stepped in at that point, looked me in the eyes and said in her best matter-of-fact emergency room nurse voice, “Mia, this is happening.” She might have said something encouraging, too, like you’ve got this, but by that point, it was, in fact, happening, and sure enough, two pushes later, there he was in my arms. My son. And just like that, I was a mother.
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| And just like that, I was a mother. |
In our Gospel passage today, a small group of fishermen have been absolutely failing at their jobs all night long when Jesus comes along and tells them to cast their nets once again, in deeper waters. Suddenly, their nets and boats begin to overflow with an absolutely comical amount of fish. In response, Simon Peter falls down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” In the presence of the Messiah, confronted with God’s abundant generosity made manifest as boatloads of fish, Simon Peter is overcome by feelings of unworthiness.
What he says to Jesus is just so human. “Get away from me, Lord!” Peter pushes away the very source of the miracle he feels he does not deserve. I love him so much in this moment because I know that move well.
It’s like when a friend does the sort of extraordinary, above and beyond favor for you that makes you inwardly cringe with embarrassment and guilt. When someone gives you an exorbitant gift that you know you can never repay. Or when your mother-in-law shovels your entire driveway while watching your toddlers and your husband graciously forgives an expensive mistake you made without even blinking an eye, and you think, what have I ever done to deserve such love?
When we are confronted with generosity that makes us painfully aware of our own miserliness, beauty that makes us feel ugly, and the sort of pure innocence that makes us feel dirty, we have a choice. We can slip into shame that makes us want to push the other away and hide forever, or, or, we can choose to stay in our amazement. We can choose to stand in the presence of a miraculous glimpse of divine love, humbled in our gratitude.
Overwhelmed by divine majesty, Isaiah has a similar reaction to Simon Peter. "Woe is me!” Isaiah cries. “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!" What’s fascinating about Isaiah, though, is that he’s made clean by an angel, with the live coal. His guilt is banished, his sin is burned away. Then, and only then, is he able to step forward and say, “Here I am, Lord, send me!”
But Jesus does no such thing. He does not forgive Simon Peter or wipe away his sins. Jesus takes Peter as he is, takes them all as they are. This is happening, Jesus says to the fishermen. And I am calling you to so much more. You will be catching people. In the Gospel of Matthew, this call scene is even clearer - Jesus says: “I will make you fishers of men.”
It’s clever word play - catching fish, catching people, fishermen, fishers of men - but really there’s nothing about fishing that especially qualifies you to be an evangelist. Simon Peter, James, and John were not chosen because they were more virtuous and pious than the other folks around, or because they had special skills, or even because of their promising potential. The disciples were chosen precisely because they were just anyone.
“For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle,” Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians. “But by the grace of God I am what I am.”
All throughout the Gospels, Jesus takes the most ordinary things and transforms them into something extraordinary: water to wine, a few loaves to a feast, empty nets to bounty. Jesus takes the most ordinary people and transforms them.
My very first sermon here at St. Andrew’s I told you that all of my preaching could boil down to: “the Good News of God in Jesus Christ is that you are worthy of love just as you are.” Today, though, I want to nuance that a little. The Good News of God in Jesus Christ is that in the end, it’s not really about our worthiness at all. It’s not about what we deserve, or what we are ready for. We are loved because of who God is. Not because of who we are, not in spite of who we are, but because of who God is and how God loves - abundantly, scandalously, outrageously. What the stories of Isaiah and Peter and James and John show as well, is that we are called not because of who we are, but because of who God is.
It is the live coal touched to Isaiah’s lips by the angel that qualifies him to speak the word of God to the people - not any efforts of his own. But by the grace of God I am what I am.
When Simon Peter fell down at Jesus’ knees in amazement, painfully aware of his own shortcomings, he needed Jesus’ voice in that moment just as surely as I needed my twin sister’s. Peter was slipping into fear at that moment, fear and shame that made him want to push Jesus away. Jesus’ voice pulled him through to the other side: into gratitude and awe. Do not be afraid. This is happening. This vocation - to discipleship and evangelism - to be catchers of people, to be a mother - it is happening in the midst of all your unworthiness, your unreadiness. Remember that the disciples were entirely failing at catching fish before Jesus came along.
If you’ve ever been to the ordination of a priest or the consecration of a bishop, then you’ve seen that dramatic moment when the person to be ordained lies face down on the ground, arms spread out. A posture of humility. A bodily reminder that we are not called to the sacred work because we are worthy of it, or even because we are ready. Priests don’t say, “I believe I am so qualified.” We say, “I believe I am so called.” And bishops say, “I am so persuaded.” This is happening.
To be Christian is to be faced with a call to sacred vocations, of the sort that will demand the best from us, that can’t help but transform us, that we know deep in our being we could never be worthy of on our own accord: marriage, parenthood, priesthood, teaching, advocacy, leadership, military service. We are all called to the sacred vocation of following Christ in an urgent and unjust time.
It gets a bad rap these days but there’s a bit of the Eucharistic prayer we used to pray in Rite I, that goes like this: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”
I get why people may feel this way, but this prayer is not actually about inflicting us with a sense of shame about how terrible and sinful we all are. What I am reminding myself, whenever I pray it, is simply this: We are not welcome at this table because of who we are. We are welcome because of who God is. And so is everyone else. That’s cause for gratitude. For humility, and awe. Tapping into that gratitude - that’s the key to persisting through self-doubt, whether in the face of repeated defeat or unearned victory, whether it’s self-doubt caused by empty nets or miraculously full ones.
So much of our lives these days are about proving our qualifications, about working toward this or that reward or recognition. Certainly many, too many, have endured childhoods that taught them love and affection must be earned, too. The corollary, of course, is that we also spend far too much of our time debating and judging what others deserve as well. Who exactly is entitled to food, housing, healthcare, citizenship? Safety? Mercy…?
When we say that the Christian understanding of God’s grace brings true freedom, this is what we mean. We mean we are free to leave behind the question of what we do or do not deserve, once and for all. But this freedom comes with consequences for how we are to love, as well. As Dorthy Day, the Catholic social activist who dedicated her life to serving all sorts of people trapped in the poverty of the Great Depression, once noted: “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
The people around Jesus reacted to his radical love in two extreme ways. When Jesus lavished love on the outcast, dined with the notorious sinners, and healed the wretched, the righteous rule-followers became enraged. When Jesus’ calls for integrity and compassion exposed the religious elites’ own hypocrisy and greed, they plotted to kill him. We must never forget that when humanity was confronted with God’s goodness in human form, we put him on the cross. And yet, a hodgepodge of ordinary others - Peter, James, John, Mary, Mary, Mary and Martha - responded to Jesus’ abundance totally differently. They gave themselves over to gratitude, left it all behind to follow him, and allowed themselves to be transformed.
It takes courage to receive abundance, generosity and grace without pulling or pushing away. It takes wisdom to convert feelings of shame, inadequacy, and fear into reverence, awe, and gratitude. But that act of faith is precisely what empowers us to be an instrument of God’s love and grace out in the world. Never stopping to question whether we deserve it, but never questioning whether our neighbor does either.
But by the grace of God I am what I am.
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