A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Epiphany:
Of Mighty Warriors, Vocations & Dents
February 4, 2001
The Rev. Bruce R. Bramlett
Rector, St. Paul’s Church.
Links to the Lessons:
Judges 6:11-24
I Corinthians 15:1-1
Luke 5:1-11Today, our lessons invite to think about the question of vocation. Vocation is different from that which we do to earn a living. Vocation is that term that religious people use to speak about God’s ever present call for us to join in the process of mending the world. It is God’s specific task offered to us to gather the energies that make for growth, new life and reconciliation and to employ them to make the dream of God come more to fruition what, using the old familiar phrase, we sometimes call bringing about the Kingdom.
Specifically, they invite us to look at a particular aspect of God’s call, namely, that of our personal response to it. I don’t know about you, but most of the time, I suspect most of us struggle to keep our act together from one end of the day to the next. We all have feelings of being overwhelmed with the tasks we have on our plates, feeling inadequate and all too small to meet the demands that life sends our way. Even the Lord’s Prayer holds up one way for us to address that fear and anxiety by telling us to trust God enough that we pray for our daily bread--nothing more.
For those of us who seek to learn that wisdom for ourselves, we struggle with the anxiety and fear of what the future holds for us, whether the breezes of life that sustain us might swell into storms that blow our meager security away in a moment, leaving us naked and hungry. Whether or not we gracefully admit to it, few of us will avoid those feelings.
The first response of our lessons is at one and the same time comforting and disconcerting. The good news is that God comes to us and declares, "The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior." These are the words that God spoke to Gideon in calling him to take up the defense of his people against the Midianites. Now, I suspect that Gideon’s first response may well have been to question whom the Lord was speaking to. "Mighty warrior?" Gideon was a poor farm boy of a small clan of the weakest tribe of the Israelite people. Surely, God wasn’t speaking to him.
Nevertheless, it is good news of a sort. The truth of the matter is that God is always and everywhere here, present, and is always and everywhere here for and with us. We, by contrast, are often so preoccupied with our own toil, anxiety and burden that we cannot hear, see or perceive that God is in fact present for us.
Another fact is that, as someone has said, we are all "dented." You know, that’s what a can of tomatoes sometimes looks like in the store to make us afraid that the tomatoes might have gone bad. While we do in fact heal from the wounds of our lives, there remains a residual-- a permanent reminder of our engagement with life. We go through life accumulating dents. It doesn’t mean we’re bad or not useful; the dents just become a part of us.
What that also means is that none of us is completely whole. Sometimes we labor under the added burden that we are unable to experience God’s presence in part at least because we ourselves are so alienated from God by our own failures, by our fears and anxieties and our sense that we are completely alone that God is simply shut out. Sometimes we feel that God is impotent, unable to help us, or that God is at least uninterested or distracted and inattentive to our plight. Like Gideon, we complain that while God may have been there for us or God’s people in the past, God sure seems to have lost track of the mess we’re in right now. We focus so much energy on our own mess that it is hard to hear or appreciate the call to open to God. In our Gospel, we can hear a frustrated and tired Peter chiding Jesus when told to let down the nets that he and his crew had been fishing all night without success.
There’s a second response that our lessons offer that is both troubling and liberating. If you read those texts closely, it’s almost as if God acts like an endearing yet eccentric kindly father who says, in effect, "Yes, yes, of course my child." But then God doesn’t go on to say, "Well, I see what you mean. I’ll go next door and ask your neighbor who’s better equipped." Or, "I’ll drop back when you’re not having such a bad day." God doesn’t say, "Relax, I’ll take care of it for you." No, God says, "Well, get going and I’ll be with you. I’ll commission you as my messenger because you’re just the person I’m looking for."
And our response is always, and I mean always, "Who, me?" We endlessly rehearse our inadequacies and run our fingers over the dents, the fears, the places where we hurt and have crinkled surfaces to our lives. But God will not be dissuaded. God seems to be a bit hard of hearing sometimes. Then, like Jesus telling Peter and his crew of tired and worn out fishermen to let down their nets again after having not caught a thing all night, we hear God simply say, "Come on, I need you and I’ll be with you. Try again, only this time go out deeper. Go farther out than you’ve tried before. Go out and stretch yourself to become more and more of what you already are. Take the risk. Get out of your self-indulgent rut and give it another shot."
What we must hear in these lessons today, in the calling of Gideon, Paul and Peter, is that God and God’s work in mending the world and making it whole is intimately connected with us and with the work we have been given to do. God needs us to finish the task. God needs us to open ourselves to becoming the people of greatness that God has created us to become. And God promises, and we have story after story to emphasize it, that God will always and everywhere be there-- to stand with us. God will not-- and perhaps even can not-- do it by God’s self.
The second thing we must hear today is the often repeated scriptural acknowledgment that God insists upon calling us who are dented, flawed, failed and inadequate, too small and weak, too much of unclean lips and flawed hearts, unfit to be called apostles. In short, God knows us and loves us as we are—and if we are sinful, and pained, and dented, that is not important.
This voice that comes to us is the voice of absolution, freedom from what we are now and who we have been, to become truly who and what we really are created to be. What is important is the tasks that God has for us to be about. We are called forth to take up the skills, talents and resources that we have and join them together with those of others in the Body of Christ to carry forth the work of being God’s people in the world. We are called into community for support, love, mutual care and healing to get on with the work. And, because we are a part of a larger body, when we get weary or tired, when we just don’t think we can do it anymore, we can rest in the arms of each other’s love and know the healing and empowering love of God which makes us whole and restores our spirits.
Finally, it is the power and call of God that sparks and inflames our callings to ministry. It is not our own energy, our own creativity or success. We are not made whole by getting our own acts together and winning the game of life. As Paul says so beautifully in our second lesson, "I am what I am by God’s grace, and that grace is not in vain." We are, by God’s uncanny and mysterious graciousness, what and who we are. We are "OK" as is, dents and all, to be and to do, to witness to God’s healing and life-giving love in and for the world. Our task is more that of letting go and being willing and open to being transformed by grace-transformed by love. We must risk going deeper, farther, out beyond our comfort zones to put down our nets and see what will happen. God will be with us. Give it a try. Amen.
The Lessons
The Hebrew Scriptures: Judges 6:11-24a
The angel of the LORD came and sat under the oak at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites. The angel of the LORD appeared to him and said to him, "The LORD is with you, you mighty warrior." Gideon answered him, "But sir, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, 'Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?' But now the LORD has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian." Then the LORD turned to him and said, "Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby commission you." He responded, "But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family." The LORD said to him, "But I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them." Then he said to him, "If now I have found favor with you, then show me a sign that it is you who speak with me. Do not depart from here until I come to you, and bring out my present, and set it before you." And he said, "I will stay until you return."
So Gideon went into his house and prepared a kid, and unleavened cakes from an ephah of flour; the meat he put in a basket, and the broth he put in a pot, and brought them to him under the oak and presented them. The angel of God said to him, "Take the meat and the unleavened cakes, and put them on this rock, and pour out the broth." And he did so. Then the angel of the LORD reached out the tip of the staff that was in his hand, and touched the meat and the unleavened cakes; and fire sprang up from the rock and consumed the meat and the unleavened cakes; and the angel of the LORD vanished from his sight. Then Gideon perceived that it was the angel of the LORD; and Gideon said, "Help me, Lord GOD! For I have seen the angel of the LORD face to face." But the LORD said to him, "Peace be to you; do not fear, you shall not die." Then Gideon built an altar there to the LORD, and called it, The LORD is peace.
[Return to Top] [Return to Origin]
The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.
The Gospel: Luke 5:1-11
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
[Return to Top] [Return to Origin]