Unpreached Sermon Manuscript for Fifth Epiphany

Tomorrow there will be a parking ban in Bristol due to the snowstorm. We will NOT gather for worship. But I wrote a sermon already. I'm especially bummed NOT to be baptizing this weekend but we will get that rescheduled soon enough. Here is what I would have preached...

All of today’s readings invite us to reflect on the nature of what it means to be in ministry together. All of them invite us to reflect on what it means to be the Church in this time and place.

In truth, that is what all of the readings every Sunday are about, and that’s especially true in these weeks of the Epiphany season. Not only has the Light come into the world but that Light yearns to shine through us. We are called to illuminate the darkness wherever we may be: as parents and grandparents, as citizens of this country, as good neighbors. A lot of our readings in Epiphany focus on the call to us, by name, to be followers of Jesus. But this theme is particularly focused in today’s readings. And on top of that we get to baptize Wade and renew our own Baptismal Covenant, which reinforces all of these things.

By ministry I don’t mean the work of the clergy. I mean the ministry of all baptized persons. I don’t mean just what we do as individuals, but what we are called to do as a faith community, as members of Christ’s Body, as St. Michael’s Church. When I was the rector of St. Francis Church in Holden, Massachusetts where I served from 1998 to 2013 we printed, at the top of our bulletins every single week of the nearly 800 Sundays, I worked there;     

          Rector: The Rev. Richard M. Simpson
          Ministers: All the People

This sermon is about what it means to live as if we truly believe that claim. As if the ministers of St. Michael’s Church are truly all of you, the people of God.

Isaiah’s call sounds glamorous at first. But the ministry to which he is called is far from enviable. Isaiah has a mystical encounter with the living God, in all of God’s holiness and tremendous mystery. In that encounter, Isaiah feels keenly aware that he is but flesh and blood; a sinner. Who can stand in the presence of the holy God and not feel unworthy? But that is the beginning of his call, not the end. His sense of unworthiness (and ours!) is of little use to the God who has created us in love to shine forth as light to the world. So God sends the seraphs to Isaiah holding a live burning coal and the seraph tells Isaiah that his guilt has departed and his sin is blotted out.

This is a powerful image and these are powerful words. But in truth it is no different than the absolution we are given each week, even if there aren’t any apparent seraphs or burning coals to reinforce the message: we are forgiven. Our guilt has departed. Our sin is blotted out.  Sometimes it is easier to keep wallowing in guilt and to remain stuck in sin. Sometimes others cannot yet forgive us of the hurt we have caused and sometimes we cannot yet forgive them, or ourselves. But the God who has created and redeemed us in love is a forgiving God, a God who has put away our sins and freed us from bondage. As a forgiven and much loved people, we can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. We can stand in the presence of the living God and say, “here I am, Lord…send me.”

Poor Isaiah was called to a very difficult ministry, though. He will speak, but people will not comprehend; they will look but no one will understand. Isaiah’s task is to put the hard demands of God before a people who are not yet ready to let go of their comfortable lives. And there is nothing Isaiah can do about that except to hold the vision of the Holy God before them. That is a frustrating, to say the least. But that is the work that God calls Isaiah to do. It is a reminder that ministry is about being faithful, not successful. It is a reminder that the message is what is important and it cannot be compromised to make it more palatable to a hard-hearted people living in a hard-hearted time.

The teacher who dares to teach, in spite of the obstacles the educational system puts before him, or the doctor who dares to practice medicine in spite of the obstacles that our health care system puts before her; or the junior officer who tells the truth to their commanding officer;  or the parent who says no to their child even when all the other parents have said “ok”—all of them know what it is like to be in Isaiah’s shoes. All are to be commended for their willingness to be faithful in untenable circumstances, with God’s help. That takes courage, and trust in God.

In today’s gospel reading we find a familiar metaphor, maybe too familiar. What exactly does it mean to “catch people?” I think I know pretty much what it means to catch fish, although I am not much of a fisherman and in my lifetime I’ve not caught too many. I’ve cooked lots of them but that’s a different sermon. Most of my actual literal fishing has been sitting and feeling bored because nothing seems to be happening. So I identify with that part of the story in today’s gospel, these fishermen washing their nets after a long night with nothing to show for it.

Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So maybe that is what Peter is thinking when he tells Jesus that they have been fishing all night and the fish simply are not biting. Or perhaps, if the disciples are anything like church people, then what Peter is saying is “Lord, we tried it that way a few years back and it didn’t work. Therefore we should never ever consider trying something like that again.”

But for whatever reason (and maybe it’s simply because he is just too tired to argue with Jesus) Peter lets down the nets one more time and they catch so many fish the nets start to break. Now it is Peter’s turn to recognize as Isaiah did so many centuries before that he is in the presence of holiness, and in the presence of holiness he realizes his own humanity: “Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

This Gospel reading gives us another perspective on ministry: it’s about when ministry is going well and the nets are overflowing and quite frankly it’s fun and energizing. It’s about when we find ourselves hitting our stride in our chosen professions and life is good. I think we are meant to see this not as a contrast between Old and New Testaments, but rather to notice that ministry has different seasons and times. Both Isaiah’s experience and Peter’s experience are part of the ebb and flow of ministry. In both cases there is a constant: the message is bigger than us. We cannot control whether people will be “caught” or whether they will look and not understand. All we can do is be faithful.

So what is that message exactly, that we are entrusted to proclaim? St. Paul is a pretty good person to turn to if we need to clarify that. Today’s epistle reading was written to a difficult congregation in Corinth, and it’s about as good a summary of what St. Paul was up to as anything he wrote. After reminding the baptized community there that it’s not about him (nor is it about Peter or any of the twelve) he says simply that the message that they (and we) are entrusted to proclaim is about Jesus Christ, the one who “…died for our sins and was buried and on the third day was raised from the dead, in accordance with the scriptures.”  

That is the work we have been given to do. That doesn’t mean that we need to stand on the corner of Church and Hope passing out tracts. But we can learn to live as if we truly believe that we are a forgiven people. We can live as if we know that through Holy Baptism we share in Christ’s death, and his resurrection. We are an Easter people. We won’t always get it right. Sometimes we will speak and act in all the right ways and yet it falls on deaf ears. Other times we will almost reluctantly, almost in desperation, give it one last shot and somehow the timing will be just right, and infinitely more than we could ask or imagine starts to unfold. People get caught and there is new energy and new joy and all things seem possible. The results are not in our control.

I was born and then baptized in 1963 and have been a servant of Christ ever since. I take my baptismal vows very seriously as I pray you all do. In June 1988, I was ordained in the United Methodist Church. Five years later I was ordained a second time, as a deacon in the Episcopal Church at Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut. And then six months after that, on February 5, 1994, I was ordained to the priesthood at Christ and Holy Trinity Church in Westport, Connecticut. This past Wednesday, on the Feast of the Martyrs of Japan, I celebrated thirty-one years as a priest in The Episcopal Church.

You may or may not know the story about those martyrs of Japan, but it is a story worth recalling, so let me do so very briefly before I sit down. The Christian faith was first introduced to Japan in the sixteenth century by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries. By the end of that century, there were probably about 300,000 baptized believers in Japan. Unfortunately, this promising beginning met reverses brought about by politics, both church politics and international politics. Rivalries between different groups of missionaries and conflicts between Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese governments become untenable. So on February 5, 1597, six Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits and seventeen Japanese laypersons were crucified in Nagasaki, Japan. Many other Christians were arrested, imprisoned for life, or tortured and killed. By 1630 the Church had been totally driven underground.

So I ask you: were these martyrs “successful?” Not by any of the modern standards of church growth they weren’t! They went from 300,000 Christians to almost zero, at least who would confess their faith openly. But I’ve been thinking about those missionaries for over three decades now and I think we need to say that their ministry was faithful, even if not successful. They did bear witness to Christ, literally to death on a cross. That’s why we still remember them.

Let me summarize and then let’s baptize Wade.

1.    We are all called to share in the work of ministry, not just the ordained. There are a variety of gifts but one body. It’s a team sport; not a spectator sport.

2.    We are called to be faithful regardless of whether or not the world defines our work as successful.

3.    Through it all, God is God. The work God has given us to do, is not about us. So even our failures and our disappointments can be occasions for us to say “thank you,” because they remind us that we are dependent not on our own efforts or results, but upon God’s abundant mercy.

4.    In all things, we are witnesses who point to Jesus, who even now is in our midst. That is what holds us together. That is what makes us the Church.