24 Feb Sermon for the 4th Sunday before Lent, Year C
The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.
As anyone who has preached even semi regularly will know, sometimes you end up shaking your metaphorical fist at the lectionary compilers. Fortunately, today was not one of those times.
This week we have placed before us three very different encounters with the majesty of God, which I take as an encouraging sign that there is no one right way to experience or to encounter God. And although all three encounters are as individual as those who experience them, they do also have a certain amount in common, not least in the way that ordinary and extraordinary combine and weave around each other.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul alludes to his experience on the road to Damascus, saying that, “Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me.” As we well know, that day was nothing out of the ordinary – Paul was travelling along a road, ready to persecute, perhaps praying, then, boom. God interrupted. The extraordinary broke in, and changed everything.
For Peter, too, the day had started pretty normally. Mending the nets, perhaps grumbling over the lack of a catch, taking Jesus into his boat so he could speak to the people, maybe listening with half an ear to what he was saying. Then an odd suggestion from Jesus, but still, a normal thing to do. Do the thing, cast the net, show this preacher that he doesn’t have a – then the pull on the nets, and a catch so abundant it fills two boats – which were not tiny, by the way. A fishing boat from the 1st Century AD was found buried in the mud on the shore of Lake Galilee in 1986, and it measured 8.2m by 2.3m at its widest point. To give you an idea, that’s pretty much from level with the lectern here to the end of choir – not quite as far as the altar – and as wide as four of the floor tiles. That’s a lot of fish. Too many fish. More fish than is possible, or reasonable, or remotely anywhere near normal.
Isaiah, on the face of it, has the most supernatural of experiences, seeing the Lord in a vision, or a dream, seated on a throne, high and lofty, the temple filled with smoke and seraphs and singing, proclaiming that the whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord – always worth remembering, by the way. And yet, in the midst of all this, he is purified with a coal. Carried by a seraph, yes, but still – just a coal, a moment of familiarity, of ordinary. Even in the most apparently extraordinary of experiences, God still uses the everyday, the recognisable, something to tether us to the earth.
And then what? Well, here, we’re back to the individuality of each encounter, and perhaps a suggestion of possible responses we might make to God, or ways that God might call us.
In Isaiah we see the beauty of availability to God. “Here I am,” says the prophet, harking back to the words of Abraham, of Jacob, and of Samuel, and harking forward, too, to Mary at the annunciation. Here I am. To say this to God takes real courage, in my opinion, and real love. Giving oneself over in this way, whether to God, or to a community, or to a spouse, is not without risk. There’s a beautiful stained glass window of Isaiah in the Washington National Cathedral, and writing about it, Prof. Matthew Moser says, “the self-offering attitude of ‘Here I am’ involves a willingness to be drawn upward, expanded, unmade, and remade, by the voice of the Lord. Isaiah’s elongated body, stretched beyond normal human proportions, serves as an image of what the prophet must undergo if he is to speak the words of the Lord to Israel in the crisis of its judgement and exile. Not only his words, but his very being, will have to be stretched.”
In Peter we see another possibility. He’s clearly bewildered by what he has experienced – it’s good to know we have company in such moments – and Jesus therefore speaks his language. As Peter kneels in a boatful of fish, overcome by the presence of Jesus, that same Jesus says to him, you’re a fisherman. Let’s go fish. Jesus gives him a task he can understand, perhaps a little. He is to be oriented towards the people around him, he is to bring them close to Jesus, to God. He is not to catch people just for himself, to make him feel good or to be his own little disciples: his purpose is directed firmly Godward.
And in Paul, we see yet another possible path, of a ministry born after the resurrection of Christ. We see its fruits in the letter this reading is taken from. Paul sees himself as one link in a chain, that stretches from Jesus and the disciples, to himself, then on to the believers in Corinth, and, we may assume, on from them. It’s disarmingly simple, in some ways: take what you have received; hand it on to someone else. Pay it forward.
I believe that all three of these experiences, these responses, have their parallels in our lives today, whether within or without the monastery. We don’t generally go in for ecstatic visions in the Church of England, but I hope and pray that we all have, and all will, experience those moments when God breaks though and we see, in George Herbert’s words, “heaven in ordinary”.
Prof Moser though puts it well – he’s writing about Isaiah, but I think his words could apply to Peter and Paul too. He says, “Isaiah beholds the glory of God, suffers transformation, and receives the vocation to go into the world, singing the seraphic trisagion amidst the choruses of Babylon.”
Two things, in closing: firstly, “suffers transformation”. Most of our deepest encounters, whether with God, another person, or the world more generally, will change us. Being formed into the image of Christ will change us. And this change will not always be without pain, something I’m sure many of us could bear witness to.
And secondly, Moser’s final phrase: “singing the seraphic trisagion amidst the choruses of Babylon.” The darkness around us, those choruses of Babylon, can sometimes feel very dark and very deep. But it will grow yet darker and deeper if we do not shine our light in its midst. Isaiah’s light was not the same as Peter’s light, nor Peter’s the same as Paul’s. Ours will be different still, and we will be called to shine it in different ways, in different places. I pray that as we go forward from this place today – even if, like the community, we’re going to land back here in less than three hours – we may carry the ‘seraphic trisagion’ with us, proclaiming the holiness of God, the holiness of his earth, the holiness of his people, the holiness of all things, in all we say and do and are. Amen.
Sr. Jessica
Image: Koenig, Peter. Draft of Fishes, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58518 [retrieved February 24, 2025]. Original source: Peter Winfried (Canisius) Koenig, https://www.pwkoenig.co.uk/