February 7, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Surprise

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 138
Isaiah 6:1–8
Luke 5:1–11

The tensions between ecstasy and order, between spiritual freedom and group cohesion, between mystics and administrators have persisted for the full two thousand years of Christian history. They show no sign of abating. Mystics always make prelates nervous, but it seems they are always with us.

Harvey Cox
The Future of Faith

They say every cloud has its silver lining; one of the silver linings for me in having to go back home last week was a chance to celebrate Scotland’s heritage around the celebration of Robert Burns’s birthday with some proper haggis and neeps (turnips) and tatties (potatoes.) Then I was delightfully surprised this week to see the Tribune reporting that the United States Department of Agriculture is about to lift a ban on importing haggis to the U.S. from Scotland, a ban that has been in place for some years now. So now we’ll all be able to enjoy that rare delicacy.

We are thinking about surprises today as we reflect on our scriptures together gathered here in community. A favorite writer of mine, Annie Dillard, has a superb essay called “An Expedition to the Pole,” in which she reflects on what it is like attending church. She is a regular church attender, and she offers this thought on the experience. “On the whole,” she writes,

I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews because the sleeping God may wake. . . . The waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

Isn’t that a great image? I love thinking of our ushers handing out signal flares and life preservers along with the bulletins. There’s something of Annie Dillard’s warning in our stories today in these two amazing texts about encounters with the power of the awesome God. In Isaiah’s call narrative, we find Isaiah doing something probably quite ordinary—visiting the temple—and yet this visit this day results in a mystical encounter with the Holy God of Israel in which Isaiah encounters the awesome nature of that God. The temple, he says, is filled with just the hem of God’s robe.

It’s a great story, a great warning to us in a culture that too often domesticates God. John Calvin loved this passage; he saw in it one of the central paradoxes of our life of faith, because in it Calvin encounters the mystery of the God who is the creator of all things, the “ground of our being.” And alongside that mystery we encounter God’s willingness to condescend, to come down to humanity in love so that we might begin to encounter the mystery of God. Calvin wrote how God comes down in three particular ways: in scripture, as the Word of God, revealing God’s love and God’s loving relationship with humanity; in the Sacraments, in Baptism and Holy Communion, The Lord’s Supper; and, ultimately for Calvin, God descends, God comes down in love, in the incarnate Christ, in God taking on human flesh. In the Isaiah story there is a great, we might say, sacramental moment when in the encounter with the awesome God a response is evoked, a response of fear of God, of honesty, of confession when the prophet acknowledges, in God’s presence, “I am a man of unclean lips among people of unclean lips.”

The sacramental moment is when something ordinary becomes special. This happens as a coal is taken and touched to the prophet’s lips. It is what Calvin calls in his definition of sacrament “a visible sign of an invisible grace,” God’s grace. God’s love is cleansing, is healing on the prophet. There’s a connection here, we might say, between worship and the context of the sacraments and vocation, calling. There’s a similar movement that happens in today’s gospel story of encountering God’s grace and God’s power in Jesus’ call of Simon, who will become Peter. This is a narrative in which we encounter the life-altering power of God’s word. The writer David Ostendorf reflects that in this passage in Luke, “God’s word is present in Jesus calling, pulling, pushing us outward toward new and boundless horizons.”

Again the encounter happens in the context of the ordinary: an ordinary day at work for Simon and his colleagues fishing. A poor day’s fishing to be sure—there’s not much out there to catch. It’s interesting to me that the characters in this story—Jesus, Simon, who will become Peter, and then James and John at the end who leave to follow—are the same characters that we read about in Luke’s story of the transfiguration, just a few chapters after. Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration is there with Peter and James and John. I think Luke’s asking us to make a connection here that in this story there is a transfiguring moment, a moment of revelation or epiphany in the miraculous catch of fishes and that’s how we have to see that. This is not Jesus as some kind of heavenly depth sounder who discovers elusive shoals of fish. This is a story of miracle, of a sign pointing towards the nature of Jesus.

Simon has a profound religious experience and, like Isaiah, acknowledges fear, acknowledges brokenness, confessing “I am a sinful man.” Jan Richardson, a writer and retreat leader, says that when she reads this passage she has lots of questions, questions I think we would all share. “What do I really believe about the ways that God works in this world? Have I grown fixed in my expectations about what God is up to? Do I have eyes to see the surprising ways in which God moves in the midst of situations whose outcome I think I already know?”

That’s the challenge inherent in Annie Dillard’s reflection about church. Do we come to church in the routine of our week, knowing that we will sing some old hymns and we’ll hear a scripture reading, or do we come open to the surprising ways in which God might move as we gather around the Word, around the Table, encountering Christ.

Thomas Merton, great mystic of the twentieth century, said we’ve got ourselves into a position where because of misunderstanding the distinction between the natural and supernatural, “we tend to think that nothing in a person’s ordinary life is really supernatural except saying prayers or performing pious acts of one sort or another.” Merton indicts us for separating the spiritual and the secular, because he argues that in the incarnation, in God taking on human flesh, everything in the created order becomes holy, everything is touched by God. Remember Hopkins’s great nature poem, “God’s Grandeur”?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
it will flame out like shining from shook foil.

Part of the beauty of Hopkins’s poetry are the cadences and the alliteration: “shining from shook foil.” I think that concept of “flame out” is itself reference to the transfigured reality that the world is charged with God’s glory, with God’s grandeur. There’s a famous story that Thomas Merton tells about an epiphany, an encounter with that glory in the ordinary as he’s walking in the streets of Louisville. He says,

In Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs. It was like waking from a dream of separateness to take your place as a member of the human race. I had the immense joy of being [human], a member of the race in which God himself became incarnate. If only everybody could realize this, but it cannot be explained, there is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun.

Isn’t that beautiful how Merton’s sense of the supernatural, of the awesomeness of God, is rooted in the reality of relationships with ordinary people like you and me whom he sees with faces shining like the sun on the corner of Fourth and Walnut? On the corner of Michigan and Delaware. It is what Douglas Dunn, the Scottish poet, calls “the transfigured commonplace.” That transfigured commonplace I believe happens when we gather in community in the presence of God’s Word; when we come to the Table and encounter God in ordinary things of the world made special, bread and wine, which become for us visible signs of the invisible grace of God, a grace that calls us to put down our nets in deep water, that calls us to new places and new possibilities, and I know this because it happens.

It happens to ordinary people like you and me, not just to special people, to saints, to holy people, or particular castes, priests, or ministers who speak openly about calling and vocation. It happens to everyone, I believe, because I know people who, because of their encounter with God and community and bread and wine, give up high-paying jobs to teach in the Chicago public schools; people who leave home and family and comfort of the bounty of the United States to go and work in microcredit financing in the poorest countries in Africa. We have seen and heard stories of people who’ve given up to go and work with and bring relief to the most marginalized and poorest in Haiti.

You know them, too. Some of you will have experienced this already, but we all can—this sense of, as George MacLeod puts it, “the eternal seeping through into the physical,” of God’s presence breaking in on us, calling us to new places, to new meaning in our lives. Our hymn puts it this way:

Hands of the world stretch out
your mystery to touch
and longing to believe a truth beyond our reach
to sing in joy, to cry in grief,
to know your meaning for our life.
(“Now to Your Table Spread,” by Shirley Erena Murray)

Amen.