Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 2010

Text: St. Luke 5:1-11

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

It was a hot and steamy night in Shreveport, Louisiana. I’d just gotten off work from my job at the pharmaceutical distribution plant, which at that time was strangely host to our diocesan seminary, Cranmer Theological House. That’s because the half-billionaire owner of the company was a former Episcopal priest and wanted a seminary on his property. So he built the most expensive chapel in the nation (per square foot) and invited Bp. Grote to make it, and another small building, home for a new Reformed Episcopal seminary. Additionally,tThe seminarians would be given jobs at the company to pay for their tuition. When we started working there, the other hundred-plus people at the plant began to refer to us affectionately (sometimes not so affectionately) as “the monks.” That’s because they knew that every morning we seminarians would have to get up early in the morning and get to the chapel by 7 am for Morning Prayer.

Well, this night maybe it was that I was feeling just a bit more “monkish” than normal, but after work at about 10 pm, I decided to walk from my job in Building 4 across the dimly lit campus to the seminary chapel to pray. Like all the seminarians I had a key, and I opened the heavy door to the south transept and I entered alone into the holy, quiet space. The chapel was entirely dark except for the moonlight that was seeping in through the stained glass windows. I took a few steps forward to where the bank of light switches were located, and I flipped on the lights above the stone altar. The light reflected off of the mahogany paneled wall behind the altar which was just enough light to softly illuminate the rest of the chapel, and to reveal the intricately crossed pattern of curved beams above the nave, which cast their strange shadows towards large, clear glass windows of the rear wall which surrounded a very high, very large cross in the center.

I walked across the cedar floor, for some reason tip-toeing as I went, I think because every slight sound echoed from the forty-five-foot high vaulted ceiling, and the noise made me feel that I was somehow trespassing in a place that was not entirely friendly to me. At the second redwood pew on the right I genuflected and then gently pulled the kneeler down with my foot, knelt down, and began to pray.

Actually, I just knelt in silence for few minutes, trying to quiet my heart after the long day. But then, after some time, a prayer began to form in my mind. “Lord, let me know Your presence. Let me know that You’re here with me. Let me just get a sense that I’m not here in the darkness by myself, but that You’re here, and you hear me.” At that moment a loud crack resounded from somewhere behind me. I felt my ears pull back like I can never figure out how to do voluntarily, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I suddenly felt the impulse to flee from the chapel, but I didn’t; I stayed, although I felt enveloped by a sense of dread like I had asked too much. And so I began to pray again. This time it was the words of the 51^st Psalm that spontaneously began to flow from my lips:

“Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness; according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences. Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin…”—the great penitential psalm.

But as I came to the end of the psalm, a sense of peace and security fell down over me and that sense of fear and dread just sort of melted away into the darkness. You see, I had experienced what some have called “the horror of the holy,” and because I didn’t run away from it, but faced it, I was transformed by it—to however small a degree.

God’s holy presence makes us see ourselves as we truly are, and it’s only then that we can change.

This is what happened to St. Peter in our Gospel lesson this morning. At this point in Peter’s life he hadn’t yet become a full-time disciple of Jesus. He’d heeded Jesus’ call to come and follow him, and he’d even had Jesus over to his house to heal his mother-in-law. But at this point Jesus’ mission was still fairly local—in and around Peter’s home town of Capernaum. And so it seems that in the meantime Peter kept his “day-job” so to speak. He continued in his vocation as a fisherman, fishing upon the Sea of Galilee with his brother Andrew and their partners James and John.

Actually, it wasn’t a day-job at all. It was decidedly a night job. We might call it the graveyard shift. And on this particular night Peter and his partners had been out on the sea from the early morning hours, through the dawn, and maybe even into mid-morning, casting their nets in all their usual good holes, and no doubt trying their luck in places where they didn’t normally fish, because the fishing was so bad that by the end of this night the final tally was a big fat zero. I watch a lot of “The Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel, so I know what bad moods fisherman get in when their string of pots or their nets come up empty. All that wasted time. All that wasted effort. And this is where Peter is in his psyche while he’s washing his nets on the seashore, when Jesus walks up and asks for a ride on his boat to use it as a floating pulpit. And then after he’s done preaching—and you’ve got to believe that all Peter is thinking throughout the sermon is ‘When is it going to be done? When can I get back and finish cleaning my nets so I can go home and go to sleep?”—but after Jesus is done preaching He has the audacity to tell Peter to row out a little further and throw out his nets again for a catch. You can just imagine what Peter would like to say: “Look, Jesus. I know my job. I know all there is to know about fishing on the Sea of Galilee. I’ve been doing it my whole life. You can make a fine table and all, but why don’t you leave the fishing to me.”

There’s a funny old English proverb that goes something like this: “Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.” That might sound pretty odd to our ears, but it means: don’t presume to give advice to an expert. Well you’ve got to imagine that’s what Peter was thinking right about that moment. But with remarkable restraint for Peter—you know, the guy who as always opening his mouth and inserting his foot—all Peter does say is: “Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net.” “I don’t get. But You’re the master, you’re the teacher; so at your word I’ll do what you say.” That is really remarkable. That’s not obeying only after you’ve understood all the reasons why the Lord wants you to do something, but simply because that’s what the Master’s Word calls you to do. That’s not obeying because you already believe; that’s obeying in order that you might believe. And that’s a principle that we ought to take from this passage and apply to our own lives, when the Lord is calling us to obey Him, even though we can’t figure out why or how it’s going to work out for our good. “At thy word I will obey, Lord, because you’ve given us Your Word, and You are the Master. I will obey in order to see, in order to believe.” Some may call that blind obedience. But it’s the kind of obedience that gives us sight, because it’s the obedience that trusts that the Lord knows what He’s doing, and that He has a right to command our obedience, and that He will make all things work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15).

And when Peter does this, he receives more than he could ever have imagined. He receives a miracle of grace. As soon as he throws the nets in to the water, it seems like every fish in the Sea of Galilee jump into them. So many fish filled the nets that in fact the strain was too great and the nets began to break. Even when the other disciples came to help, it wasn’t enough. As they dragged the nets into the boats the boats were filled beyond capacity and they began to flounder. It was the greatest catch of fish these men had ever seen on the Sea of Galilee.

But how did Peter react to the miracle? You’d think he would have jumped up and down and shouted and pumped his fists in the air, like I do when I catch a fish (since it is such a rare occasion). We might even have expected Peter to remember to thank Jesus and maybe even try to sign Him on as a new partner. But no. Instead, he turns and falls down before Jesus feet in an act of worship, and then tells Jesus to go away. “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!”

You see, in that instant Peter suddenly realized that Who it was he was in the presence of—that he was in the presence of the Holy One; that this was no mere Rabbi, no mere teacher, but that this was the Lord incarnate, the Son of God come in the flesh. And all he wanted to do was get away. You see, because the presence of the Holy One suddenly made him aware of his sinfulness, his lack of holiness, in way or to a degree that he’d never experienced it before. And he was terrified.

It’s the same reaction that you see throughout the Scriptures when sinful humanity is suddenly thrust into the presence of the Holy God. Isaiah, when he saw the Lord high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filling the temple, fell down on his face and said, “Woe is me, for I am undone! For I am a man of unclean lips… (Is. 6:5). When Job finally got his wish to confront God and give him a piece of his mind, Job said, “I put my hand over my mouth, for I am vile, and what shall I say to You” (Job. 40:4-5 paraphrased).

You see, as long as we keep God at a comfortable distance, and as long as we start looking around on the horizontal level and comparing ourselves to other people, we can feel pretty good about ourselves. We can feel pretty cocky as Peter was pretty cocksure of himself before he witnessed the miracle. We can even think we might have a couple of words to say to God if we ever got the chance. But as soon as we allow ourselves to be truly confronted by the God of all holiness, all that self-assurance gets deflated in an instant, and we realize that none of those comparisons with other people matter one iota, because we suddenly understand who we are as compared to God, and we know how far we’ve fallen short of His glory.

That’s why it’s so important to get into the holy presence of God. Because until we can see ourselves as we truly are, we can never repent of the sin that we so easily sweep under the carpet or justify. When we come under the piercing gaze of the One “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” all that hiding and justifying goes right out the window. But until we allow that to happen we can’t change. We can’t have our evil exposed and forgiven and healed. But when we do allow that to happen, we can come to a whole new level of spiritual maturity.

Look again at what happened to St. Peter. After Peter makes his confession of sin and tells Jesus to get away from him, you’ll notice that Jesus doesn’t oblige him; He doesn’t walk off over the Sea of Galilee and leave him in his sin. Instead, Jesus speaks His word of grace to Peter. “Fear not.” “Fear not, Peter. I’m not going to cast you into the sea. I’m not going to bring about a mighty wind and tempest to hurl you from your boat and drown you. You’ve recognized your sinfulness. You’ve recognized Me to a whole new level. Now it’s time for you to move ahead in your service to Me. From now on you will be fishers of men.” And the text says that from that moment, “they forsook all and followed Him.”

You see, beforehand Peter and the others were not yet prepared to be full-time disciples of the Lord. They weren’t ready to move forward into the ministry to which He was calling them. But after that confrontation with His holiness they were changed. They were transformed. They had a whole lot more transformation to undergo, but this was one big step towards their ultimate transformation as apostles of Christ. And we can undergo that same kind of transformation and become more useful to Christ if we too would come regularly into His holy presence.

So how do we do that? How do we get into the presence of the Holy One and be transformed by that presence? Well, perhaps first, we can get into holy worship. We can get into the divine liturgy. And I don’t mean we need to pump ourselves up, and get all excited. I mean we can get into the holy presence of God by putting ourselves into the liturgy in our hearts and our minds, rather than just with our lips, repeating the same old words we say every Sunday. We need to really hear those words. Words like the ones I just quoted a minute ago: “all hearts are open; all desires are known; no secrets are hid.” We need to let those words form our attitude towards God’s holy presence. Words like “We do not presume to come…We are not worthy…We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.. The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable.” We need to let the words of the liturgy keep before our minds and in our hearts Who it is we are coming before today, and the great miracle that occurs every time gather together in His Name—that we are no longer on earth, but in the very courts of heaven itself to appear before His holy throne. Words like, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts; Heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High.”

Second, and very simply, we need to learn more about God. We need to learn about His holiness. We need to learn about His awesomeness and His majesty. If we don’t come to know the true God, we will create one according to our own imaginations. One who is safe. One who doesn’t challenge us. One who therefore can’t transform us. Read books like R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God, or watch the video series. I’ve got them both if you want to borrow them. But seek to know the one true, holy God, for apart from that knowledge you will never know who you truly are, and you will not be able to change to reflect Him.

But most importantly, we need to allow the revelation of God in his holy Word to be the light that exposes our darkness that we may repent and be healed. We need to come to the Word of God and submit to the pain of being exposed, like Peter who didn’t jump off the boat, but submitted to pain of coming to know his sins more clearly by the presence of Son of God. Jesus said, “I am the Light of the World. He who follows Me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” The light shines into the darkness, and if we submit to it, it casts it out, and we have life.

Come into the presence of the Holy One. Know Him that you may know yourself, that you may know your sin. For it’s only then that you can know His grace. +