Epiphany
5 - 8 February 2004 – Bishop Owen Dowling
Readings:
Isaiah 6:1-8, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Luke 5:1-11
The story of the people of
God – both corporately and in individual stories – is punctuated by low
points, fresh starts, gaining new perspectives and leaving the disappointments
and sins of the past behind.
The biblical story is like
that time and time again. There are
low periods. The lamp of faith
burns dim or is no more than a smouldering wick.
God seems to have disappeared, or at least be in hiding. The cause of evil prospers.
And then at a given moment a man or woman of God appears and has an
urgent sense of divine call. Their
commitment is then total to listening to God’s word and proclaiming it to
others. Such an overwhelming
experience of God’s call came to Isaiah as he worshipped in the temple.
He must always have remembered this experience, colouring his writing,
his speaking, his witness to God and his influence on others.
The Book of the Prophet Isaiah is one of the greatest books of the bible.
We still get a huge amount of inspiration from it.
Jesus clearly must have meditated on it - the book helped to shape his
ministry. When the Dead Sea Scrolls
were discovered in 1947 there was, amongst the many scrolls and fragments of
scrolls, a very complete and almost undamaged copy of Isaiah.
One of the fascinating things about the book is that it covers two
distinct periods. One is back in
the 8th century BC when the original Isaiah was called in the way we
heard today – in the year that King Uzziah died.
The latter half of the book concerns a time near the end of the exile of
the Jewish people in Babylon some two hundred years later. So most likely it was a ‘second Isaiah’, as he is called,
who wrote in the tradition and under the influence of the first great prophet.
Those with what we would call a conservative view of the scriptures would
claim that it was all written by the one man who prophesied ahead of his time.
Whichever view you take, there’s no doubt that it is a very influential
book that still lives for us in a vivid way today, and clearly was a scripture
that Jesus and the early Christian communities read from and quoted frequently.
Isaiah experienced God’s
overwhelming presence as he worshipped in the temple. The house of God was filled with the smoke of incense.
There were angelic presences. Every
time we worship in the Eucharist we are reminded of the temple scene in Isaiah
6: ‘Therefore with angels and
archangels and with all the company of heaven we proclaim your great and
glorious name for every praising you and saying “Holy, Holy, Holy …”’
We know it so well. In the
Catholic tradition particularly, we appreciate the sense of awe and glory, the
incense, the lights and the glimpse of heaven and the sounds of heaven’s
music.
But it is not disconnected
from allowing ourselves to be changed and hearing God’s call.
Worship, cleansing and sending all go together.
Isaiah knew he had unclean lips – he had worshipped other gods and
spoken harmful things.
God’s answer to his
protest of unworthiness was to give him a vision of his lips being cleansed by a
glowing coal from the altar. It
touched his lips and God said to him ‘your guilt has departed, your sin is
blotted out.’ Then he hears
God’s call and says ‘Here am I, send me.’
Not dissimilar in a way is
Simon Peter’s encounter with Jesus. Peter
has been working fruitlessly all night. In the morning Jesus climbed into Peter’s boat, when there
was too big a crowd on the shores of the lake.
After Jesus had taught the crowds from the boat he told Peter and the
others to launch out into the deep and let down their nets.
Almost sceptically Peter does what he is told and there is an amazing
catch. Peter falls at Jesus’
knees and says ‘Depart from me, for I am a sinful man O Lord.’
He knew, and had no doubt often read, or heard read to him, the account
of Isaiah’s call – and here it was happening to him.
‘Do not be afraid Peter, James and John,’ said Jesus, ‘from now on
you’ll be catching people into the net of God’s love.
Follow me.’
Again this sense of being
overwhelmed, being cleaned and being sent must have remained with Peter and
those first fishermen disciples. They
left their boats behind and set out on a journey of faith with Jesus.
To turn to my original
point – the life of the people of God and of individual followers sometimes
gets to a low point. There’s a
sense of fruitlessness – we’re getting nowhere.
There’s a kind of spiritual drought.
Bad things seem to predominate. But
God keeps rekindling people, giving them a fresh vision, and a sense of
commitment which sustains them through thick and thin.
There’s a memorable
expression in the prophet Zechariah that has kept coming into my mind as I have
prepared this address: ‘RETURN TO
YOUR STRONGHOLD YOU PRISONERS OF HOPE.’ (Zechariah
9:12) That’s what believers
are, ‘prisoners of hope.’ We
are inclined to get imprisoned in our negative attitudes and sense of
inadequacy. There’s the
‘we’ll all be ‘rooned’ syndrome of Hanrahan, and the rather paralysing
spirit of what I believe is called ‘ennui’ – ‘what’s it matter
anyway’ and ‘I can’t be bothered anymore’.
This can happen in churches
and it can happen to people. ‘No
one is interested anymore’ / ‘we’ve tried that before’ / ‘one Rector
goes and another comes but the decline continues; Ho hum!’
BUT WE ARE PRISONERS OF
HOPE and PRISONERS TO HOPE.
It’s time to return
together to the stronghold. It’s
time for a renewal of faith and commitment. It’s
a time deliberately to turn in our lives and leave behind the sins of yesterday
and the regrets that hang about us. It’s
time for a renewal of faith – a time to look forward with a sense of
expectation to new pastoral leadership and a sense of purpose in this parish and
in your life.
We want worship connected
with mission – the worship where we are overwhelmed with awe, maybe even
overwhelmed by a sense of our own weakness or inadequacy – the worship of
cleansing from sin, half-heartedness, lack of commitment to others and to God
– and the worship which will send us afresh.
Here I am send me. Impel me
in the way you want me to go. Help
me to be where you want me to be, and to be with the people you want me to be
with.
There’s a new hymn by Brian Wren, one of the great contemporary hymn writers, which has had a great impact on me. I’ll sing the first verse, then you can join in the other verses. Just remain seated and flow with this great statement for us ‘prisoners of hope’. It’s no. 653 in ‘Together in Song’:
This
is a day of new beginnings,
time to remember, and move on,
time
to believe what love is bringing,
laying
to rest the pain that’s gone.
For
by the life and death of Jesus,
God’s
mighty Spirit, now as then,
can
make for us a world of difference
as
faith and hope are born again.
Then
let us, with the Spirit’s daring,
step
from the past, and leave behind
our
disappointment, guilt and grieving,
seeking
new paths and sure to find.
Christ
is alive, and goes before us
to
show and share what love can do.
This
is a day of new beginnings;
our
God is making all things new.
In
faith we’ll gather round the table
to
taste and share what love can do.
This
is a day of new beginnings;
our
God is making all things new.