+Most of us take today’s readings as the Call Story, the Follow Me Story, the Fisher for People Story. This Gospel reading is iconic to our faith for Jesus calls us all with the words: Do Not Be Afraid, from now on you will be fishing (or catching) people.
That’s all good. But I don’t think we can “Be Not Afraid “until we tackle another prevalent theme in today’s readings: sin. It’s is a powerful and often misunderstood word in Christianity. And it’s probably the number one obstacle to living fully into our faith.
So, before we can truly Follow Him and fish for people we need to grapple a bit with sin.
Sin is mentioned, in one way or another in each of our readings today, beginning with the Collect:
“Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins…”
Truer words have never been spoken for sin does indeed hold us in intractable bondage. But the key concept here is that it is our –humanity’s-concept of sin—which binds us. We have the key to unlock the chains of sin, we always have, we just fail to do it. Time and time again.
Sin is referenced in our reading from Isaiah:
“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips…” and then later:
“Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.”
This reading is often heard at ordinations, for it’s a “call” reading…a young man finds himself unmoored, lost, and in his estimation, unworthy of anything good being bestowed upon him by God, but then a seraph, an angel, “blots out his sin.” It’s a beautiful reading, showing a classic redemption scene—the young man is lost---admits it---and then is found, absolved and blessed.
In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we hear:
“Christ died for our sins”
This is a big one folks----it’s a sentence we use all the time but the theology behind it—atonement theology---is a dangerous and for the most part, debunked theory. There’s hours and hours of conversation we could have about atonement theology but for our purposes this morning suffice it to say that (I freely admit this is a simplistic take on the theology and encourage and readers to dig much more deeply) atonement theology suggests that Jesus’ death upon the cross was a sacrifice to appease God for the sins of humanity. There could be nothing farther from the truth----Christ’s death upon the cross was God’s way of defeating the forces of this world –the darkness of the world- the evil of this world which is the source of all our “sin.”
And finally, in the Gospel, Simon Peter says to Jesus:
“Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”
In response to Simon Peter’s lament Jesus says: Do not be afraid, from now on you will fishing for people.” Jesus isn’t judging Peter and Andrew, James and John’s self-worth, he doesn’t care about what has been he cares only about what can be, so he says to them, “come along now, follow me.”
And he says the same thing to us as well. Neither Jesus nor God care all that much about what we’ve done and left undone. They’re much more concerned with who we can be and where we can go. For what our Creator knows is what we were created to be---embodiments of God’s abundant, outlandish, never-ending and amazing Love.
For what God knows and what Jesus preaches is simple: all of creation was built upon the foundation of Divine Love and our job is to be the skin and bones version of this love, spreading it, espousing it, celebrating it in all that we do and with all whom we encounter.
So what about sin? Well first of all you need to know that the Greek word that is translated into the English word sin is more accurately translated as “missing the mark.”
Sin is when we allow ourselves to follow the forces of this world, the forces of darkness, the forces of not-love, the forces of evil instead of the force and source of light and love and goodness, which is God. Sin is when we miss the mark of following God and instead follow our base desires, when we give into our darkest and deepest fears, when we give into doubt, abandoning the hope that is Jesus Christ.
When Simon Peter falls at the feet of Jesus and says “I am not worthy,” when we are consumed by our feelings of self-loathing, of missing the mark, of being consumed with all that is not God, we all need to simply stop and take the always outstreched hand of Jesus, grasp it and then follow him.
For when we do that, when we fish for people instead of fishing for ourselves, when we follow the forces of God instead of the forces of evil we will bring our world ever closer to the dream God had when creating us in the first place.
My friends in this place, the namesake of Simon Peter himself, do not focus on the darkness that creeps into your hearts and souls, focus on the light and life of Jesus Christ who did not die because we are bad, but died so that sin would, once and for all and forever be defeated. Sin won’t win. If we don’t let it. So let us, in all things and at all times, fish for light, fish for life, fish for love.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment