FIFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8 | 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 | Luke 5:1-11

Before I begin my reflections, I just had a feeling while I was listening to the music.  We used to be able to play popular music or songs that people could hum to or sing along with the words, and I always made sure I picked songs that fit the theme I was working on.  And that was wonderful, but we’re unable to do that since we’re on so many stations. But what I just felt, when I was listening to that, is it’s important that you understand why I chose that piece of music that was written especially for our show and what I’m hoping it will affect in you.  And I was just listening to it, and it had a way of just washing my mind away from everything that was a possible distraction.  It was like I just sat there and let the music pour over me and just felt like cleansing water, just getting rid of my distractions so I would be open to whatever God is going to say to you through me, which I truly believe I do that.  And I want you to know I believe I do that.  Otherwise, I don’t know where I get the — how would I say it even — the energy to do this work, because I believe in it so much.  Anyway, I’m just hoping that piece of music works for you as it works for me. 

Now let’s look at the readings, and what’s so interesting about the theme of this particular set of readings, it’s all about God calling people into a relationship with him.  In the first reading, we have the call of Isaiah.  In the second reading, it’s the call of Paul, and in the last, it’s the beginning of the call of the disciples.  He was showing them a miracle, and the miracle was amazingly effective to teach them something about this Jesus who was to them simply an ordinary man.  And now they began to realize this man Jesus had something within him, is someone who has this power inside of him to accomplish things that are beyond what human beings can accomplish.  So there’s always this image when God is presenting himself to someone and inviting that person to enter into a relationship with him, and the relationship is primarily about teaching and preaching who God is.  Then it’s interesting that there’s included a manifestation of some great power, something awesome.  In the case of Isaiah, he has a vision of God and all these angels, seraphim, the highest of all the angels, doing nothing but praising this figure, God, this awesome God.  And what you see in that is the reaction inside of Isaiah is the reaction that each one of these men are having, and that is the first thing they think of is, “Get away from me, God.  I’m a sinful man.  I’m an imperfect man.  I’m an impure man.”  And isn’t it interesting that somehow in religion that is calling us to a high level of moral and truthful life, when God wants to come and be with us, the first instinct is, “I’m not good enough.  I don’t have what you might ask of me to give to another person.  I’m a sinner.”  Paul has a way of doing it.  I love Paul so much, because Paul, when he’s talking about it — Isaiah has this vision of God in heaven.  Paul has an experience of Jesus talking to him, appearing to him, and asking him to be his messenger to the Gentiles, and Paul is aware that he has been crucifying those who believe in Christianity, and he’s shocked by the fact that this God would come to him, one of God’s enemies, that Jesus would come to him and say, “I need you.  I need your talent.”  And that’s a miracle in and of itself, the overwhelming ability of God to look past our weaknesses and our sins.  It so impressed Paul, and then the disciples, they were ordinary guys, fishermen, and they had heard about this Jesus.  They had listened to him, and you’re going to hear more about the way Jesus got to the more intimate way in which he called them, but this was the beginning of their interest in maybe following this man, because he did something extraordinary.  If you’re a fisherman and you get that kind of fish, you’re pretty impressed.  

So what am I saying?  There’s a couple of things that you need to be aware of that is in your destiny, because you have been created by God, and you are called by God to be his prophet, his teacher, his priest, his minister.  It’s amazing, and when you realize that, that you have this destiny in some form, in some — it may be minuscule compared to the work that was done by Paul or Isaiah or the apostles themselves, but nevertheless, you have to believe that, in your destiny, is this promise that God himself will come and dwell inside of you.  And that indwelling presence will make you so powerfully effective, because Isaiah, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, in teaching the future, who Jesus is going to be — there are more references to who Jesus is, how he was born, that he died, and he rose, it’s all in Isaiah.  Where did he get that?  From God.  Paul was such an effective preacher and even it was told that it was a tradition that he raised someone from the dead.  Where did he get all of that?  God inside of him.  The disciples gave up everything, even their lives, for this work, and they were so effective, but they also were empowered with such great experience of having the same power that Jesus had when he walked the earth.  So Jesus is the model of who we can become.  He’s also for us the model of who God truly is, because he is God.  So if you can feel with me what I’m trying to say, I’m saying everyone is called to some degree in this work of God dwelling in them and resonating his strength through them to the people around them that need whatever gift they’re longing for.  

Now I want to be personal and just share with you a vision, an insight.  I don't know what you call it, but I was deep in a meditative state, and I heard God talking to me.  And this is — I don’t want to say that I’m like a Paul or something like that, but in a way I am, that God can talk to you directly.  It’s not — you don’t hear a voice, but if you get deep enough in a meditative state, you can feel, not only hear the voice, you can feel the voice.  And these are the things he was saying to me.  It was really interesting.  It was clear to me that he was describing my call and what he did to me as a human being, which he does to all of us.  I’m not special in this.  And one is, he said, “I want to take you.  I want to take you.  I want to teach you.  I want to hold you.  I want to free you.”  Take me, teach me, hold me, free me.  And I just felt, when I heard those words, that that was somehow the ministry that God has given to me, and then I waited, and he explained some of it.  He said, “Take me means I enter into your life, and I don’t just send you an invitation in the mail that you can read and say, ‘Huh, I guess I’ll go and find out who this is.’”  No, he said, “I enter into you, and I take your hand, and I take you, just symbolically, I take you into a new level of awareness of who you are, why you’re here and who I am.”  It’s more than just an invitation.  It’s a passion for God to want you to be intimately connected to him.  And then what he says, “I want to teach you.  I want to teach you, and I want you to teach others.”  And what’s so interesting about the teaching of God is that it comes in different forms, and one of the ways it comes is through the story.  I don’t see how you can really enter into an understanding of God without listening to the story, the Old Testament and the New Testament.  It is loaded with information and loaded with a kind of symbolic language that ignites something inside of you when you hear it clearly, and you begin to see who God really is and who you can be in him.  So the teaching is not just about information, but it’s about a kind of consciousness of yourself and who God is.  It’s more about not just the story but your story with God.  And then the next one was hold me, and so what he does is, when he enters into you and invites you to do things, he’s not in a way teaching you to do something and you go off and do it on your own and then you kind of come back to him and see what he thought about it.  No, this is where we really get into the intimacy of God living inside of you.  It’s more like he’s there next to you, holding you but actually being inside of you.  The idea of being held by someone is an intimacy where there’s a flow of life between you and the other person.  That’s what God is using.  He uses the strangest — not the strangest but a kind of — I’m glad I didn’t come up with this image, but he did.  “I want to marry you.  I want to be your wife.  I want to be your husband.  I want to be that intimate with you in the sense of we become one.”  So the holding is really a beautiful image, and then the last thing in that vision was free me, free me.  And did you notice that every one of the prophets and all the people that I just talked about, Isaiah, Paul and the disciples, “I’m not worthy.  I’m not worthy.  I’m not worthy.  Free me from shame, and free me from guilt.”  That’s what he wants to do for us.  He wants to free us, and it’s so interesting.  I don't know why we carry this, I don't know, this kind of communal guilt, but one of the things that’s interesting to me about shame and guilt, you can be ashamed of things you’ve done.  But you’re part of the human race, right?  I’m part of the human race, and when you think about it, when you’re in this relationship with humans, you are a part of them.  And when you look at what we’ve done at times in history — there’s just recently the Holocaust anniversary, and you listen to what human nature is capable of doing to other human beings.  When you pick up the paper and you read of abuse and genocide and these people who are so bent on destruction and abuse, and you say, “Well, that’s my race.  That’s us.”  There probably is, unbeknownst to us, a communal guilt for the sins of our humanity, and we have our own, of course, to add to that.  But to be freed of that is the key to God to enter into you, to really fully enter in, to hold you, to completely open your eyes to the mystery of the story, and then to delight in the fact that this is not something that is a general invitation.  No, it’s you he wants, you to do just what you and you only can do and are needed to do for the people around you.  It changes so much for me when I feel this mystical invitation to be a part of the divine heart, mind and intention.  Amen.

Father, your will is that you enter into us and become a part of who we are.  For us it seems beyond our imagining that we, human, broken, sinful, could be elevated to a place of carrying you into the world.  What a privilege, what an honor, what a responsibility, but that’s what you teach us.  That’s what you’re saying.  So free us from the shame and the guilt that might keep us from being so receptive to this awesome gift of you inside of us, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.