If you happened upon God one day, what would you do? Would you ZOMG?
Luke 5:1-11; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Psalm 138; Isaiah 6:1-13
Let me paint for y’all a picture of something that just doesn’t happen. You’re walking down the road, and you happen upon something you’re not quite used to seeing. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that it’s a guy with a beard who looks remarkably Jewish, with a bunch of other similarly Jewish looking guys milling around him. You’re walking, and walking, and you get close enough to this guy to hear some of the things he’s saying, and you kind of pay attention but for the most part you just keep going on thinking about the house, your job, the family. You’re just going along in your own little world, until this rather Jewish looking guy looks right at you and says, again for the sake of simplicity. “Hi there! What’re you up to today” “Oh I’m just walking around, doing my thing, having a grand old time.” “Well, that’s just excellent. You have a good day!”
In case that was clear as mud, which I’m quite sure it was, it’s the exact opposite reaction as Isaiah, Paul, and Simon Peter had in their encounters with God. When you run into God, or I guess it’d be more accurate to say God runs into you, you don’t leave that experience the same. It might not be as major a change as for the folks in our lessons, but it’s still a change.
Let’s start with Isaiah. As best we can tell, Isaiah was a relative of King Uzziah and had sufficient political clout to manage access to both the King of Judah and the High Priest just about any time he wanted. There’s also evidence that Isaiah was King Uzziah’s chronicler, keeping track of all the things that happened during his reign.
But Isaiah’s biggest job comes about in the year King Uzziah died, around 740BC. In one of the grandest of grand Biblical understatements, Isaiah saw the Lord. That’s… big. He even goes into more detail: Isaiah saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Ok let’s stop there for now. First imagine God himself sitting on his throne at the front of the church, in all his glory, with just the end of his robe filling up the whole place. Now, if you’re got that in your head, you didn’t imagine it awesome enough. Then there were two six-winged seraphim saying to each other “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty!” Though saying might not be the best term, because when they spoke the whole temple shook and was filled with smoke.
It’s small wonder Isaiah’s reaction was fear, and an extremely keen awareness of his sinfulness. But God didn’t leave him there. One of the seraphim touched his lips with a live coal, and said “Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” Then when God asked him to go, Isaiah said “Me, me, me!” When he encountered God, something in him changed.
Fast forward to Paul. If you just look at his account in 1 Corinthians, his experience of God doesn’t sound near as dramatic as the story from Acts, but he was still changed by his encounter with the holy. He went from Saul, the fervent persecutor of the church, to Paul, the apostle to the gentiles. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a more impressive conversion story as his. His experience of God changed his life about as anyone could.
And then there is Peter. Peter’s story is a little reminiscent of Isaiah’s experience of God, but it’s a lot less theatrical, for lack of a better term. Jesus just hops in Peter’s boat one day on the Sea of Galilee and starts teaching. We really don’t know what he was teaching about, but what ends up happening is Jesus says to Peter, “How bout heading out to the middle of the lake and throwing out your nets?” Now who here has spent any amount of time fishing? I sure haven’t, but when is the worst time to try and catch fish? It’s the middle of the day right? Fish are most active at dawn and dusk, and so are more likely to get caught. That’s a generalization of course, but it’s the reason why Peter is a little reluctant to head out. He hadn’t caught a thing all night, so he was likely tired anyways, and didn’t want this carpenter trying to tell him how to do his job.
But when he cast his nets, they had a huge haul of fish, so big that the nets started to break. When Peter realized what was going on, he said to Jesus, “Go away for I am a sinful man!” It’s a lot like what Isaiah said, “Woe to me for I am a man of unclean lips!” They had a very acute sense of their own sin while in the presence of sinlessness. But that’s not even the most dramatic part, it just shows a small part of the transformation they were going through. Jesus says to Peter, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will catch people.”
Now that seems a little odd to say, but Peter, James, and John pulled their boats up on the shore, and then just followed Jesus leaving everything behind. It wasn’t just like they were leaving a job they hated either. James and John were likely in line to inherit the fishing business from their father, Zebedee, and Peter really seemed to love fishing, especially since after Jesus’ resurrection Peter got a little bored and decided to go fishing. But after encountering Jesus, Peter had changed – he was no longer the same fisherman he was before.
That’s what happens when we encounter God, we never leave the same. We don’t often experience God in the same dramatic way that Isaiah, Peter, and Paul did – but there are those folks who do. For us, sometimes it’s in the beauty of a piece of music. Sometimes it’s out in creation. Oftentimes it’s in the quiet moment of a prayer. We’ve all encountered God in some way, otherwise we wouldn’t be gathered together today, and through each encounter we are conformed more to the image of God that we are called to be.