February 8, 2004 - Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Isaiah 6:1-13
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Luke 5:1-11
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"Encountering the Holy in the Ordinary"

“Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”  “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

Two encounters, centuries apart, and both produce an identical result.  Isaiah and Simon Peter both have encounters with the Holy, the Other, that leave them overwhelmed and trembling.  The experience has them excited and exhilarated, but clearly also sensing that they’re distinctly out of place.  Sort of like the night “old lonesome George Gobel” – I guess I’m dating myself -- was on Johnny Carson’s show after Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. had been on.  There were all there, sitting on the couch, and Gobel’s line brought down the house, “Did you ever imagine that the whole world was a tuxedo and you were the only pair of brown shoes?”  When we encounter the Holy we are powerfully reminded that God is Other than what we are.  God is totally different and it is that difference that at once excites us, terrifies us, and overwhelms us.

At the turn of the last century a German scholar, Rudolf Otto, produced a book we’ve been using ever since: The Idea of the Holy.  In that book Otto describes what Isaiah and Simon Peter experienced as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the mystery at once tremendous and yet fascinating.  When we encounter the Holy we’re made aware of just how overwhelming it is, our minds cannot take it in, and yet, terrified as we are, we’re drawn to it.  Otto said that the encounter with the Other causes us to realize that we’re creatures, less than what we’ve experienced, but that it also calls forth a response in us that leads to some of the best expressions of human intellect, art, and compassion.  The encounter with the Holy, the ability to have that encounter in itself, is one of the things that make us human.

The encounter with the Other, then, leads to a transformative moment.  We come away from what we’ve experienced with a new sense of who we are, of what our purpose is, and what life is about.  Encounters with the Other have led people like John Newton, the captain of a slave ship, to become an ardent abolitionist.  We remember him as the author of “Amazing Grace” – he heard “how sweet the sound” was and it changed him forever.  I could go down a huge list of people who have made a difference in the world because they had an encounter with the Holy and it left them different – and yet the same, because they finally discovered who they were.

            Another scholar who made significant contributions to this study was the American, William James.  James’ book is entitled Varieties of Religious Experience and one of the things he identifies is that people are, as he calls it, once or twice born.  He says the once born person understands, “from the outset, their religion is one of union with the divine.”  This would describe Jonathan Edwards’s wife, whom he described as being “once born,” since there was never a time in her life that she had not felt close to God.  It’s good that she did, because I’m sure it helped her live with Edwards.  After all, her biography is entitled Marriage to a Difficult Man.  Others are twice born, because, as James says, “there lurks a falsity in its very being,” and for whom “renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of truth.”  I think twice born describes most of us – it certainly describes Isaiah the prophet and Simon Peter the apostle, along with most of the people in the Bible.  What we see in James is the reality of the shift in the sense of self that comes as a result of the encounter with the Other – it is a transformative moment.

Peter’s situation is intriguing to me; I suppose because there really isn’t a hint of a miracle.  Jesus just tells them where to fish and they do and do well.  Though there are folks from “Up Nort’” who will tell you that to know the best place to fish and then to have the willingness to share it would certainly qualify as miraculous.  Regardless, Peter realizes something is different about this teacher he’s hooked up with.  In that moment he’s had an experience of the Holy and it has hit him at the core of his being, exposed, as James would say, “falsity” that has plagued his life.

Peter has confronted again and again, as do we all, the reality that we can’t make this thing called life happen by ourselves; that there is more to life and to getting it ‘together’ than we can muster from within our feeble selves.  And then, right there, there’s this person who shows me that there’s more to me that I ever thought possible and that there are resources inside myself and in cooperation with others that I never dreamed I had.  Peter experienced God in that moment and it changed him, transformed him, for good.

Part of our life together is to help each other to come to the point where we can encounter the Holy in the ordinary, the everyday of our lives – just as Peter did while fishing and Isaiah did when he went up to the Temple to pray.  What that entails is our becoming willing to embrace the ordinary and to realize that God, the Other, the Holy is there waiting for us to discover the Divine presence.  It’s not for nothing that God keeps showing up in unlikely places, like burning bushes and little babies, and in the person we’re sitting next to right this very moment.  Scholars talk about the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, who then likes to engage in self-disclosure – that’s what we see in this morning’s readings and that’s what we should be experiencing on a regular basis in our life together.  The Holy is here, if we look.  I guess that’s the reason I so like to quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Aurora Leigh, “Earth’s crammed with heaven/and every common bush afire with God;/ But only he who sees takes off his shoes;/The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”  The Holy is here if we can bring ourselves to realize the truth of it, and open ourselves to receive it by simply being who we are.

I suppose that brings up the question, “then who am I?”  There’s a Dr. Pepper commercial that has a very snappy little tune with lyrics that say, “Just be you.”  Ah, good, but which you?  The you of MTV – now in the doghouse for tastelessness?  The you of pop culture?  The you of any one of hundreds of competing ideologies?  Contemporary society says “be you” and then proceeds to tell you which you you are to be.  God, on the other hand, simply wants us to be ourselves – because God has made us in God’s image and likeness.

I appreciate what Robert Wicks has written in Touching the Holy: “Personal awareness of self before a loving God is also important because it helps self-confidence to grow and be more resistant to the assaults of failure or rebuff.  Thus, it allows our character to develop and enables the presence of God within us to be felt in a good way by others.  It is not that we forget or deny our faults; rather, we are better able to put them into perspective instead of being crushed by them.  As Rabbi Abraham Heschel observed: ‘Man sees the things that surround him long before he becomes aware of his own self.  Many of us are conscious of the hiddeness of things, but few of us sense the mystery of our own presence.’  Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, and other spiritual figures were an exception to this.  They had a real sense of self and manifested ‘pure presence.’  Due to their honesty, self-confidence, and lack of defensiveness, they let their personalities be felt to the fullest.  Thus their sense of self had a wonderful impact on others and many who encountered them directly were changed in the process.” [pages 25-26]

The encounter is the starting point, whether it is as grandiose as Isaiah’s overwhelming experience in worship or Simon Peter’s simple fishing trip.  The encounter will come for each one of us and in a myriad of ways – sunsets or mountains, the touch of someone we love or a flash in which we see someone or something in a wholly new way.  The encounter will come, and it will come in the everyday of our experience, because that’s where the Holy waits for each one of us.

First we must embrace the ordinary, accepting that it is the field in which God chooses to work – and appropriately so, since it is God who made it all to begin with!  Then we must embrace ourselves, as Wicks pointed out so beautifully.  Then we can be open to what God desires for us and for us to be for those around us – it’s a risky business, no question, but necessary if we are to be the you we were meant to become.

Let me stress, again, how important it is to accept ourselves, and in doing so embrace the ordinary.  We spend so much time trying to be something else, or measure up to other’s expectations, and, unfortunately, often religion is used as an excuse for this (the whole guilt trip thing).  When, as I read it, the Scripture points us again and again to self-acceptance as we are, where we are – I like to call it the “Mr. Rogers moment” where we come to realize that God loves us “just the way we are.”  At that moment the true transformation has begun because then we have to live out our lives as the image of God and this may actually change the way we look at not only ourselves, but others and the world around us.

To look at Heschel again: “Verbally, we seem to be committed to the idea that man is created in the likeness of God.  But are we committed to it intellectually?  If the divine likeness is our premise, then the question arises: How should a being created in the likeness of God act, think, feel?  How should we live in a way which is compatible with our being a likeness of God?” [Wicks, p. 27]  Those are the kinds of questions that we have to ask ourselves as we embrace our own ordinariness, accept it, and realize just how powerfully the Other can embrace us right at that point.  Then we have to get on with the business of living that reality in the ordinary, the everyday, as we potentially become the means by which others are brought to a new sense of God, of self, and of the world in which they live.  It’s a wonderful, scary, lovely thing.

Is it any wonder that Isaiah and Simon Peter reacted the way that they did?  It is overwhelming to think about the implication of who we are, what we can do, and the love we can share.  It all begins with an encounter – an encounter that can happen any day, or even everyday, if we are open to God’s mysterious presence that pops us where we least expect it.  Browning was so right, earth is “crammed with heaven,” if only we open ourselves to perceive it.

I guess, too, that’s why worship becomes so important.  As Paul Byers notes in his book Christian Worship: Glorifying and Enjoying God, we’re not here just for what we can “get out of it,” we’re here to get “the big picture” and begin to see the world as God sees it.  We see how big it really is, how small we are, and yet how much God cares for us – and we’re transformed, able to reach out, and to love and care in whole new ways.  This goes along with something else Byers says, “Christian worship may be distinguished form other kinds of worship in that those who are pulled in are also sent out.”  The awe and wonder leads to, “Here am I; send me.”  Isaiah was sent to preach God’s word of recovery to Israel. Simon Peter went on to be a “fisher of men.” You and I are sent from this place to bring the same message they did – God is not far from you, God is right here, if you look.