Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, February 6, 2022              (today’s lectionary)
Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
Today’s lectionary stories are testimonies of hope and overcoming.
Isaiah’s vision of the Lord catches him and collapses his ego, which is immediately replaced by the power and glory of God-in-him.
Well, no, not immediately. First Isaiah speaks his words of broken ego and humility.
Woe is me, I am undone! For I am a man of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
His confession opens the treasure chest of heaven, and the seraphim fly in Isaiah’s face and sear his lips with a sacred fiery ember. Then the angel spoke to him.
Look, now your wickedness is removed, your sin is no longer.
And the Lord cried out from upon his throne, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
Isaiah looked up, felt his burning lips, and knew his soul was already filling up with words waiting to be said to the “people of unclean lips.”
Here am I, Lord. Send me!
A thousand years later the story continues. Jesus rescues Saul as Yahweh rescued Isaiah, from the people of unclean lips. Renamed Paul, he shares his story with friends in Corinth.
Last of all, as to one born abnormally, Jesus appeared to me.
Paul compares himself to Jesus’ other disciples as “an abortion compares to a living child.” No matter. God called him, lifted him and trained him, then walked with Paul all the days of his life.
By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective.
And before Paul there is Simon Peter, the fisherman who suddenly could catch no fish but then whose nets just as suddenly were filled to bursting at the word of the New Guy, the itinerant preacher, the one they mentioned last night in the tavern, here he was on shore, telling Simon how to do his work and even borrowing his boat to preach from. Simon went on cleaning up, catching a word of two of preaching over his shoulder.
When Jesus finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water and lower your net for a catch.”
Simon rolled his eyes, protested, obeyed, and the fish that poured into the nets seemed to know no bounds, they just kept coming, and Simon knew he was in the presence of God.
Just like Isaiah, just like Saul, Simon fell to his knees.
Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.
Without God’s intervention it’s a tricky thing to find a good position on the continuum of guilt. Left to my own over- or under-thinking, I never do enough and never can, and guilt is my daily bedfellow. OR I never do enough and just don’t care. Sin is crouching at my door, and I open the door at the first knock. Either way, God seems more and more like a distant idea than a close-by companion and friend.
But God does intervene. In his mastery of my situation, God knows me. During this ongoing journey of being reborn one day at a time, I notice sometimes that he knows me better than I know myself. I might even experience a moment of epiphany, a glimpse of what Clare Loughrige and friends call God’s “indomitable and all-embracing divine harmony.” (see their chapter on Enneagram 9)
In Romans 12 Paul pointedly uses the present imperative active tense (“be transformed and keep on being transformed”) to help us understand the miracle of God’s work IN us, while we do, and keep on doing … our part.
Doer by Clarence Heller
 An artist makes art.
A mother nurtures.
A carpenter builds.
A gardener pays attention.
A grandparent plays.
A friend listens.
A poet dreams.
A dancer flies.
And God, God loves it all.
When we walk and talk with God, doing life is such a joy.
(Watercolor, La Peche Miraculeuse, 1886-1894, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot, hanging in the Brooklyn Museum)
 (Isaiah 6, Psalm 138, 1 Corinthians 15, Matthew 4, Luke 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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