• Isaiah 6:1-8, (9-13)

Unlike Jeremiah’s response to his call to speak for the Lord (see last Sunday’s reading), Isaiah’s reluctance is due to his feeling of unworthiness, which makes God’s call the more astounding.  After a vision of “the Lord sitting on a throne high and lofty,” and surrounded by otherworldly creatures calling “holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts..,”  Isaiah becomes suddenly aware of his status as well as others: “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips….”  What happens next could not have been anticipated.

“Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.  The seraph touched my mouth…”  Isaiah reports, and tells him, “your guilt has departed….”

After this encounter, Isaiah responds: “Here am I, send me.”  He is given the bad news he is to deliver.  He is to confuse people.  When Isaiah asks how long he should stymie understanding he is told, until everything is desolate.

• Psalm 138

The psalmist dwells on the Lord’s steadfast kindness and truth, which even “all the kings of the earth” acknowledge.  But, he also acknowledges that even though the Lord is “high,” the Lord sees and knows “the lowly.”

• I Corinthians 15:1-11

Paul reviews the essential points of his message, “Christ died for our sins, was buried but raised on the third day, appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to “the Twelve” and five hundred others and eventually “to one untimely born… least of the apostles, unfit to be an apostle…” referring to himself, of course.  “But I am what I am, “Paul writes.  Indeed, he continues, if God’s grace has been greater to him, then so will his work on behalf of the gospel,

• Luke 5: 1-11

Luke’s version of this event is more dynamic than Matthew’s or Mark’s, and includes Peter’s spontaneous, bold confession.  Luke presents Jesus as trying to get away from the crowds, which are growing in size and fervor, by commandeering a boat belonging to a fisherman named Simon.  Go back and drop your nets, he tells Simon.  To which Simon replies that they have been out all night fishing and caught nothing.  But he defers to Jesus’ request and goes back out into the water.  They cast their nets and quickly haul in so many fish the boat could sink!  Simon is so astounded at the bounty, he falls to his knees  and pleads for “the Lord to leave, for I am a sinful man.”  His business partners, James and John, are witnesses.  Jesus says that the words that will change Simon Peter’s life as well as the arc of the entire narrative of Luke/Acts and the narrative of the church.  “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”  After they get back to shore, “they left everything and followed him.”

Isaiah encounters God’s complete and total otherness and blurts out, “I am a man of unclean lips….”  But through this same experience, he also comes to believe just as assuredly that God took the initiative to do something which Isaiah would have never imagined possible.  God bridged the gap by sending a representative (a “seraph”) with a live coal from the altar to assure him that his “guilt has departed.”  This experience is so vivid to Isaiah that he can feel the touch of the hot coal on his lips.  The psalmist also marvels in a less personal observation that although the Lord is elevated “high” above us, the Lord “knows” the “lowly.”  Paul, too, is still amazed that God would select someone as unfit as he for a leading role in the church.  Simon Peter also had a profound experience of God’s “bounty” and, by responding to the direct invitation of Jesus, is introduced into a whole new way of looking at life and living his life.

Consider some of the details of Luke’s story more closely,  Simon Peter and his business partners, James and John, are putting their nets away after a long and unproductive night of fishing, which is their livelihood.  Jesus tells them to launch out again and cast their nets one more time.  Although they are tired and have no expectation of success, they acquiesce to one whose words and demeanor must have sparked their interest.  In just seventeen words (in English), Luke transforms this event into an epiphany: “When they had done this, they caught so many fish their nets were beginning to break.”  Fully aware that he is the presence of the wholly other whose trait is always a profound abundance, Simon Peter falls to his knees and, echoing Isaiah, confesses his incompleteness in the presence of such overwhelming generosity.  But Luke does not leave this as just a personal experience.  This experience entails an invitation: take this life-changing awareness of generosity and become a witness to others so that they, too, become witnesses to such staggering generosity.  Peter, James and John say ‘yes’ to this invitation given  by Jesus and the rest is (literally) history.

In his brief but intensely insightful study, The Call and the Response, Jean-Louis Chretien focuses his sharp attention to detail on this openness to experiencing and living life as response to abundant generosity and the spontaneous connection to others this decision inspires.  Chretien writes:

“I experience the joy of seeing, of touching, of hearing, of attentively exercising the diverse possibilities that are mine always seeing, touching, hearing something other than myself, out in the world. Saint Thomas [Aquinas] following Aristotle makes this an irreducible principle: Non potes homo santire absque exteriori sensibili: ‘man cannot feel without some external sensible’.  Each and every sensation starts by consenting to the world, and from this ground only can it ever return back to itself.  The joy of being is of another order than self-sensation and self-enjoyment.  Every joy is fueled by a pure yes, rising like a flame, without curling back on itself.  One never says yes to oneself, which is why one is never truly oneself except in saying yes.”  (pp 122-123)

Despite feelings of inadequacy,  Isaiah, Paul, Peter, Jame and John said “yes.” 

The invitation of Jesus, as the only appropriate response to the staggering abundance they had just experienced, was to invite three fishermen to turn to “fishing” others.  Through tired, blurry eyes one morning, these three accepted the invitation and did indeed turn their attention to others.  They said “yes.”