Stumbling along: a sermon

Sermon by Jamie Howison on 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 and Luke 5:1-11

From last week’s proclamation of Paul’s great reflection on love—agape—in 1st Corinthians 13, we’ve now skipped right past chapter 14 and landed in the opening section of chapter 15. It is probably worth noting that the skipped chapter is a continuation of Paul’s theme of agape, and how he understands that as the key in foundationally re-shaping the character of the now divided Corinthian church. Here is chapter 15 he begins to take another tack, and his emphasis is on the resurrection of Christ.

This is the message “that I proclaimed to you,” he writes to them, “which you in turn received, in which you also stand, through which also you are being saved.” And that message is? That Christ “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” And why exactly is Paul going back over this material at this point? Because “some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead.” Some of the Corinthian Christians had determined that they would follow the teachings of Jesus, and in that way he would continue to live on with them, but that the whole idea of resurrection was… well, distasteful to their pre-Christian sensibilities. Corinth is a mixed Gentile city, filled with people shaped in an array of religious beliefs, most of which would have seen the physical “stuff” of the world as being debased or secondary to the spiritual. But Paul is a Jew at heart, and he holds fast to both a deep respect for the embodied and to a belief in resurrection as God’s promised future for the world. Where he departs from conventional Judaism—where the whole Christian movement departs—is in saying that Jesus of Nazareth was resurrected not in the fullness of time, but already, in time.

Not that it was easy for Paul to get to that point, for as he himself notes, “I persecuted the church of God.” As it is detailed in the book of Acts, Paul was notorious for valiantly defending the Judaism as held by the Pharisaic movement of which he was a member, relentlessly persecuting the Christian movement as a dangerous aberration. Yet he was then knocked to the ground, and ultimately totally reoriented in this thinking and believing. The risen Christ, he says,

… appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain.

Now if you read the account in Acts of Paul’s conversion—or maybe his new orientation, because he never not believed in God—you’ll see that it shook him to the core, and also rather undid the Christians he’d formerly been persecuting. That point of being utterly turned around is followed by a three-year period in Arabia from roughly 33 to 36AD, which suggests that it takes him some time to get his mind, heart, and soul adapted to this new reality. After that he’s back to Damascus to begin preaching Jesus as the Messiah, but his epistles don’t begin to be written until sometime around the year 50, so some fifteen years after his new call.

There is, in other words, lots of time needed to sort out the deeper meaning of that dramatic experience of the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. It is surely dramatic, but it still takes time.

I think that provides an interesting point of connection to this evening’s Gospel reading, taken from quite early in Luke’s story. This is, of course, the famous story of the calling of Simon Peter, told here in Luke with more detail and character than it is in the other gospel accounts.

Jesus is at the shore of the lake of Gennesaret—also known as the Sea of Galilee—and a crowd is pressing in on him. There on the shore are some fishermen cleaning their nets after a night out on the lake, and so Jesus gets Simon to put out one of the boats into the water, so he can have a place from which to teach the crowd. When he was done he tells Simon to, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,” which strikes the experienced fisherman as a rather poor idea, as the likelihood of any sort of catch in the morning is rather thin, and they’ve fished through the night with no luck. “Yet if you say so,” Peter remarks, “I will let down the nets.”

Well, you know how it works, and soon enough those nets are bursting at the seams, which is such a rich image of the abundance the Christ represents in the world. But dear old Simon Peter is overwhelmed; at least as overwhelmed as Paul had been on the Damascus road. “But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’”

Now prior to this, Simon had used the word epistata in addressing Jesus, which our version translated as “master”, but now he uses the word kyrie, which is an even higher title best translated at “Lord”. As Luke presents it, though, it is a word that falls from Simon’s lips out of deep fear, as in “Oh Lord, please just go, leave me here, my life is a mess and I can’t have anything to do with someone like you.”

“Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid,’” which is literally translated as “stop being afraid,” which I think really catches the spirit of both Simon’s fear and of the depths of Jesus’ call to him. Stop being afraid, for “from now on you will be catching people.” And sure enough, Simon Peter along with James and John pull their boats ashore and set out on the road with him.

But you know that this is just the beginning for Simon and James and John, just as Paul’s dramatic experience on the Damascus road was just the beginning for him. In his case, he takes three years in Arabia to learn and pray and get his head and heart settled around this new vision into which he’d been called. In the case of Simon Peter, he’s out on the road pretty much immediately, walking in the very presence of Jesus. Yet how often does he miss the point, get things wrong, lose heart, and in the end even deny knowing Jesus? Then there’s James and John, called at the same time in this story, and they too will manage some magnificent fumbles along the way, as will all of his disciples.

The call, you see, is just the beginning. There can be terrific clarity to the experience of being called or converted or drawn into a life with Christ, after which there can be a whole lot of fumbling around, trying to figure out which way is up and what it means to actually follow this Jesus. That’s just true.

I’ve told the story before of my own sense of being called into ministry, but it bears being repeated here in a short form. Over the course of about six months in my undergraduate days, I had ten different people tell me I should consider ordained ministry. Very different people, ranging from a kid I was working with who was in a group home to a lovely elderly lady here at All Saints Church, all culminating with the Roman Catholic priest at the Manitoba Youth Centre saying something to me about how the Spirit of God often speaks to us through people. “Sometimes as many as ten different people will all be pointing us in the same direction, and we’re resistant to what they’re saying,” he said to me. “I believe that is one of the ways that the Spirit of God speaks to us in our day.” I was all but struck mute at that moment, so I went home and called my parish priest, who said, “I wondered when you and I were going to have this conversation.” Within a week I was sitting in the office of the bishop, as he plotted out the college where I should pursue my theological studies.

And then those voices all stopped. There’d been ten over those six months, and then Fr. Pinet at the Youth Centre with his extraordinary yet off the cuff comment about paying attention to those voices, followed by a roaring silence.

I told this story sitting around a table in the café at Trinity College where I was then studying for ministry, and this doctoral student pushed back from the table, smiled a bit, and said, “Don’t ever lose sight of those experiences, Jamie. They may to be only crystal-clear ones you get in your entire ministry.” And he was right. Oh, there have been a good many affirmations along the way, and a pretty clear sense that I am where I am supposed to be, but nothing quite like what happened over those six months.

And so I think of Paul, knocked flat in the presence of the risen Christ, and of Peter, trembling at the shore at the very thought that Jesus was kyrie/Lord. I think of Jesus’ calm insistence that they just follow him, and of all they had to learn as they stumbled along after him. And I am consoled, heartened, encouraged, and delighted to be on this way, right alongside of them both. And right alongside of all of you, doing our best to stumble along in following Jesus. It was their calling, and it is all of ours; to follow the great Good Shepherd along the way.