February 9, 2025 – The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany
Zane Scarlett
I am sure that there are people who are self-confident, and always feel up to the task ahead, who are sure that they are more than adequate to handle whatever comes along. I am sure that there are people like that, but I am not one of those people. If you are one of those, bless you, but I do not know what that is like. I feel that I have somehow fooled enough people to get by in life – so far. But tomorrow I may be found out. In the meantime, I will answer God’s call to help spread the message of God’s love. Just as in our Baptismal vows, my response is “I will, with God’s help.”
As I read it, the Bible is filled with people like me. In today’s lessons, we meet three such people. In each of our readings, we find someone who has been chosen by God for a task that they think they are not qualified for. The task is to be a messenger – to help spread the message that God is love, that God forgives, that God is mercy and grace. God calls and makes God’s presence known in ways that are personal for each person that is called. God appears to each of us whether we recognize it as God or not. When we do recognize it, and answer, lives are changed. We become messengers, whether by our words or by the way we live our lives.
Isaiah saw God as a king sitting on a throne. This happens in the year that King Uzziah died. The book of 2 Kings in the Bible tells us that King Uzziah was king for 52 years and that he was a good king. This was the only king that Isaiah had ever known, so the king’s death must have shaken Isaiah. “We had a good king, what will the next one be like?” God appeared to Isaiah as a king – the image of a powerful, good king was an image that Isaiah understood. But Isaiah knew that he was a sinful man, and he believed that no sinful man could see God and live. Isaiah confessed his sinfulness and instead of dying, he was told that his sins were forgiven. Isaiah understood that it was God’s mercy that allowed him to live, so he volunteered to be a messenger for God. Isaiah knew that he was sinful and unworthy, but his epiphany was that God does forgive out of God’s abundant mercy. When that mercy was accepted, Isaiah said “Here am I, Send me.” In his confession and acceptance of forgiveness, Isaiah becomes the model for us all. God called and Isaiah responded, even though he felt unqualified.
Paul said that he was the most unqualified of all the disciples because he had persecuted other disciples for their belief. Persecuting others for their beliefs seems to me to be an exercise of fear and weakness. It comes from a place in someone’s heart that is filled with evil and hate. It is a place of darkness. You might say that Paul was working in this darkness when God appeared to him in a blinding light of self-awareness. Jesus is the light of the world and when He came to Paul it was as the light of understanding. Paul understood power over others and God came to him exerting a great power that caused Paul to reconsider all that he had learned before. When Paul came to understand what he had seen on that road to Damascus, he became a super-disciple. He was the ultimate messenger for God, even though he felt the least qualified for the job. Paul knew it was the saving grace of God that allowed him to live though that smack-down that God had given him. Paul never ceased to spread God’s message of mercy and forgiveness. This was a man who had not shown mercy to those he persecuted. His epiphany was that mercy should be shown to all because God offers it to all.
Peter was a fisherman. He knew fish, he could work all night with just his partners for company and not have to talk very much. So, Peter was not the obvious choice to be God’s messenger. He had just had a particularly bad night of fishing when Jesus showed up. Peter was cleaning his nets that had only caught debris. He was thinking about how to tell his wife that there would be nothing to eat today. He was at a low point when Jesus asked for Peter’s help to deliver God’s message to the crowd of people. Peter responded and listened to Jesus’s message. But it was only after Jesus told him to go to the deeper water to fish, that Peter saw God in the boatload of fish. Fish is what Peter knew and that is where he saw God. Peter had been literally working in the dark and Jesus brought him into the light. Jesus’s lesson was that to fully see God, Peter had to do more than just listen to the message. He had to go deeper. He had to show trust in Jesus and follow Jesus’s command. Peter was willing to help deliver the message even though he was himself a sinner and felt unworthy of the task. Jesus showed him that God could produce a greater catch than he could ever imagine. Peter’s initial fear was replaced by reverence when he recognized who Jesus was. Jesus’s call to follow Him was accepted and Peter left the great catch, his boat and his previous life behind as he accepted God’s call to catch men. Jesus called him, and after Peter’s confession of his sinfulness, Jesus forgave his sins so that Peter could become a messenger of God’s mercy and grace.
These lessons recall to me the hymn, “Amazing Grace” which has been on my mind for some time. It has been with me that the story of this song tells the story of mercy and grace that these lessons demonstrate. The story goes that John Newton was a slave trader. You might say that he was a catcher of men, quite literally. On a sea voyage with a cargo of human beings, a particularly bad storm came up. Probably much of the human cargo was lost as the ship was tossed and flooded. But John Newton survived. He had seen God in that storm and when he got back home, he was so shaken that he turned away from that former life. He studied theology and became a priest. Later, as a parish rector, he was finally able to put into words his feelings of God’s amazing grace toward him, a grace that allowed him to survive when so many others did not. A grace that granted him the chance to say to God “Here am I, send me, let me be a messenger for you.” His words were joined to an existing hymn, and as part of the worship service on January 1, 1773, the song was first performed. It has spread around the world, delivering the message of God’s forgiveness, mercy, and grace.
Br. Lain Wilson, of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist says “Jesus comes to us now, in the particularity of each moment and each circumstance, and waits for us to meet him. Look for him with open eyes, hear him with open ears, receive him with open hands, and engage him with an open heart. Pray for fresh encounters to meet him anew each day.” Have you had an epiphany as you have come to know God? You may see God as a king on a throne, or as a blinding light, or in a storm or in a mess of fish. I see God in the scampering squirrels, the golden glow of trees reflecting the setting sun, and in the excitement and joy on the face of a child as she first discovers that she can crawl. The Epiphany lesson for today is that Jesus is calling you to be His disciple. Like everything else in our understanding of God, it may not be what you expect. However, whenever, wherever you see God, answer the call with “Here am I, send me.” Show God’s mercy to others. Be a messenger with your life by your actions.