The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany-the Rev Melanie Lemburg
The 5th Sunday after Epiphany
February 6, 2022
Let’s talk about failure. What does it mean to you when you hear that
word? What feelings arise? What are the times in your life when you have
felt like you have failed?
Now, imagine, if you will, that God
comes to you face to face. After you get
over your initial shock and awe, you hear God saying: “I have a special job for
you to do for me. I need you to go do
this work for me and to fail miserably.”
There you are, face to face with the Almighty God, and God is asking you
to take something on that you know that you will fail at. Would you do it? Would you be able to say yes?
That’s what happened to Isaiah in our
passage for today. We see God’s call or
commissioning of Isaiah to be God’s prophet, but God tells Isaiah to say to God’s
wayward people: “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do
not understand.' Make the mind of this
people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not
look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their
minds, and turn and be healed."
Then Isaiah says, “Um, ok. But how long do I have to do this for?” And God tells Isaiah, that he will do it
until everything that he’s ever known and loved has been completely devastated;
the people will be sent far away, and the land becomes desolate. Only then, will the seed of hope be
planted.
In our gospel reading for today, we see
Jesus’s call to Peter that also comes out of a night of failed fishing. After having caught nothing all night, Jesus
invites the fishermen to take him out in the boat with him and to cast their
nets into the deep water. Peter is
skeptical, but he does it anyway, and then they make a ridiculously abundant
catch of fish, more than they can take in by themselves. Then fisherman just leave the biggest catch
of their careers on the shore with their boats to follow Jesus, whose own
mission will eventually seem to end in failure—with his death on the
cross.
Scripture shows us, over and over again,
that where we see failure, God sees hope and possibility. And it is curious to me that in the seasons
in my life where at first glance I seem to have failed, I have been called to
dip into deeper waters in my relationship with God.
Are there areas in your life right now
where you have looked upon certain aspects as failures? If so, what would it mean for you to try to
see these aspects through God’s eyes of hope and possibility? In the failures in your life, where has the
new life unexpectedly sprung up like a seed sprouting from a stump? By all human standards, my time at my last
church was an abysmal failure. And yet, one
of the seeds of hope that sprung up in the midst of that challenge and
suffering in my life was an unexpected move to the beautiful Isle of Hope in
Savannah, Georgia. And what a gift of
new life this has been for me, and how much I have learned about God, who is
always faithful, myself, the church, and the world through and because of my
supposed failure!
In conclusion, I’ll share with you a
meditation by Steve Garnas-Holmes that invites you to examine your failures to
find the hidden blessings and to grow deeper in your relationship with God and
others.
“Let
down your nets”[i]
“Put out into the deep water and
let down your nets for a catch.” —Luke 5.4
What
might it mean for you
to
let down your net in these deep waters?
To
listen deeply to someone,
for
what they are saying or not saying,
beneath
the surface…
To
seek even in your most disappointing failure
the
blessing that lurks beneath…
To
seek, in someone hard to love,
the
divine child, wounded, hidden…
To
let the net of your heart
down
into the vast depths of humanity
and
take it all in, with tender compassion….
To
love this world
and
let your heart down into its darkness,
trusting
the grace of the Beloved schools there…
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