It's About God

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Communion Meditation for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany - February 4, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8 /1 Corninthians 15:1-11/Luke 5:1-11]

“In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord…”

            I can remember the first time I ever came across this passage from Isaiah. I was in junior high school, our church had burned and we were worshipping in the local community center. We were having an all-night vigil for New Year’s Eve. I was sitting, paging through my Bible as some folks were singing. I came to Isaiah and started reading and that passage struck me like a ton of bricks: “. . .I saw the Lord.” My heart yearned to experience what Isaiah had. I wanted to see the Lord. But the truth is that God is “high and lifted up.” God is beyond us and our comprehension. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Scripture we read that it is a fearsome thing to fall into the hands of the living God. So, Isaiah, lost in prayer, has something awesome offered to his sight.

            Awesome. We hear the word ‘awesome’ bandied about quite a bit these days. We hear it applied to everything from great natural wonders, like the Grand Canyon, to a song, or even a hamburger. Let’s remember the origin of the word – it means the ability to inspire or to be expressive of awe. And ‘awe’? It’s a word derived from the Greek word achos, pain. Awe, then, is that feeling of veneration, terror, dread and wonder we feel at something greater, profoundly different than us. So it would be appropriate to say that the Grand Canyon, or Lake Michigan, is awesome. We could even say that a great ‘boomer’ of a thunderstorm, hurricane or tornado is awesome. Anything less would really be misusing the word, for example to say “that hamburger was awesome” is to miss the point. A hamburger may be delicious or it may be cooked to death, but it’s never awesome.

            I guess that is part of our problem. We play so fast and loose with language and ideas that we forget the essence of what our faith is about. Anselm long ago offered this as  proof for God’s existence: “God is that greater than which cannot be thought.” In other words we can’t wrap our heads, even less so our hands, around God; though, God knows, we try. We try to project God into a figure, an image that we can wrap minds, and sometimes even our hands around. We do it in hundreds of ways. One of my favorite illustrations of this is a story told about a clergyperson who walked into a church where he spied a huge banner in the front that said: “GOD IS OTHER PEOPLE.” He snorted, went rooting about, found a great big black marker, came back and put a comma in just the right place: “GOD IS OTHER, PEOPLE.” And that’s the point of what Isaiah saw, and Peter, and Paul. They came up against the hard reality that God is God and that we are not. What we know, what we can know is limited and all of it revealed to us by God.

            So, when we come to worship we need to come realizing that we’re not here to do God a favor. We do this because this is what we’re supposed to be about and that ultimately it completes us – if we can get away from it all the time having to be about us. I was inspired and gratified by last Sunday’s symposium with our covenant class. I appreciated the honesty and openness of our young people. I also appreciated the wonderful exchange and acceptance I saw going on between the teens and the adults there in that room. But I came away realizing that, regardless of age, we’re still stuck thinking that church and that worship is about us, about me – because it isn’t; it’s about God. We need to realize, as I’ve pointed out before, what Annie Dillard points out in Romancing A Stone, that we ought not to come to worship all dressed up in fine clothes, but rather come in hard hats and appropriate padding. Because we ask the God who made heaven and earth and who holds them all in being to come and be with us – and GOD DOES COME, GOD IS HERE! We’re playing with dynamite and we have no concept of it. God help us to open our eyes as the eyes of Isaiah, Peter and Paul were opened to see the Lord “high and lifted up”!

            We come to worship, to ascribe worth, because we should be drawn to know, to see, to love and to be loved and embraced by this living God who, as the church fathers said, condescends to us. The Creator God wants us to know, to love and to experience the fullness of God’s presence. We forget, too soon what both Isaiah and Peter experienced; when we come into the presence of God we realize just how little, how powerless we are. That’s why natural phenomena, like tornados, thunderstorms, and other powers of nature frighten us so.  We can’t control them, they make us feel small. So, too, when we come into God’s presence, we are humbled, awestruck and opened in a wonderful way. As I’ve said before, this is what Rudolf Otto talked about at the turn of the last century in The Idea of the Holy as the mystery at once tremendous/overwhelming, yet fascinating. Isaiah, Peter and Paul were all overwhelmed by their experiences of God, but they were also fascinated, captivated and drawn to what they’ve experienced.

            Peter went fishing with this carpenter turned teacher from Nazareth and had an experience that blew his mind. He knew his business and this teacher says, “Drop the nets over there,” he complies and what happens is beyond his comprehension. He opened himself to listen, as did Isaiah and Paul, and was not only given a glimpse of the living God, but called to a new level of service. John Shea, the wonderful story-telling theologian, says it well:

“Following Jesus’ instruction leads to abundance and fullness. If people open themselves to God, God obliges. Divine reality suffuses the disciples. The nets are filled to the breaking point and the boats are filled to the sinking point. Since this is not how they usually experience themselves, Simon and the others are amazed and overwhelmed. Simon’s response reflects the proper and prescribed attitude for all who happen upon the immensity of God. The fullness and abundance of divine reality dwarfs him. He experiences his own smallness and inadequacy. He is not worthy of what he has experienced. The greatness of the Creator and the smallness of the creature go hand in hand. Simon is in a long line of quaking humans.

But Jesus names Simon’s response differently and offers another possibility. Simon is not conventionally pious but wrongfully fearful. The awareness of God makes him tremble and crushes him down. If he clings to the knees of Jesus, he must be on his own knees. Simon does not embrace the fullness; he wants it to go away. This is hardly what Jesus wants. So he instructs Simon not to be afraid. Instead, he is to use what he has experienced to bring others to the same experience. As Jesus has caught him, he is to catch others. Forget fear, it is time for adventure. So when they brought this fullness (their boats) to shore, when they moved out of the deep waters of abundance, they left everything they used to do and dedicated themselves to catching men and women. The word has been heard.” [The Relentless Widow: The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Preachers and Teachers, p. 39]  The awe, the healthy fear reminds us of who we are, who God is, and what we’re to be about: sharing the story, living life toward God.