Good morning, Beloved of God. Because today is all about how and when and to whom the Call of God comes, I want to start with the plain truth, that this week has been one of the longest years of my life. I have been overwhelmed by all that’s happening in the world and in this nation. Paralyzed by the enormity and rapidity of changes being made. I am deeply concerned for the safety and well-being of myself and my disabled family members, for my Black, Indigenous, Asian, and immigrant neighbors, trans and Queer friends and family, and so many colleagues for whom the growing litany of executive orders are indeed threatening to undo them. I am afraid -- afraid of speaking too boldly for fear of causing offense, and also ashamed of my own cowardice to speak Truth in a moment that demands clarity of vision, purpose, and direction for the sake of the most vulnerable. I don’t always know what to say, what to do, or how to do it all in love. And I am just as scared as a lot of you are.
None of this bodes well when you’re trying to write a sermon about the three call stories of the three radical church answers today’s lectionary texts. First, I tried to figure out how to proclaim a prophetic word like Isaiah did: A word of warning to an unseeing, unhearing, callous generation that the calamitous trajectory of this present moment will surely end in the total destruction of a God-forsaken land where only ash and stump remain. And yes, a word of hope that the stump is a holy seed, a promise of restoration. Then I thought I’d confront the imperial powers of oppression like Jesus did on the road to Damascus when he blinded Saul, and ask the powerful, “don’t you know that when you erase DEI you are literally erasing God -- who is Dei? Don’t you see that when you dehumanize Trans beloveds and vilify immigrants, you are dehumanizing and vilifying Christ in them? Stop!” And I wanted to underscore that if the chief killer of Christians could become one — if Saul could be so transformed by Jesus and the mercy of his followers, that he released both his name and his power to kill them, and bound himself instead to the gospel of Christ’s Death and Resurrection — then God can transform anyone from an oppressor of the vulnerable into one who Sees the fullness God in them. And so we must keep watch, with the light on and the table set, until every last Paul comes home to Love. And yes, okay, I did just sort of preach both those sermons! But the thing is, at the end of this year-long week, I didn’t need the doomy if truthful proclamation of the prophet or Paul’s methodical defense of Christ’s resurrection and of the grace granted Paul to preach it. I needed the failure of Simon Peter, the human, on one of the worst mornings of his life, because he felt like a mirror, and I needed to be seen. This guy -- He’s got mouths to feed. Taxes to pay. A family to provide for, including a sick and recovering mother-in-law, according to Luke chapter 4. His partners and his community are counting on his ability to do the thing he does -- which is catch fish -- but they’ve got nothing today, no idea if there’ll be anything tomorrow. And I don’t know, but there might not have been much yesterday either. It’s been a rough night in a really rough season, and I think Peter just needs to be done. To clean up, go home, and sleep. But here comes their teacher Jesus who these fishermen know well. And he commandeers Peter’s boat while he’s cleaning his empty nets, and begins teaching the gathered crowd, who are all now witnesses to Peter’s failure. So in my holy imagination, this disciple who we’ll come to know is full of fire, pride, and a desperate need to be important -- is feeling the full weight of the crowd’s eyes on his empty nets. He’s embarrassed, worried, but he’s keeping it together. So when Jesus tells him to cast out to the deep -- where, as every fisherman knows and as I learned this week, the fish don’t gather -- Peter says, “Teacher, we’ve been ‘toiling’ all night and caught nothing.” This word here -- toiling -- it’s not just work, it is hard, wearying labor, the kind that runs a man down and leaves him feeling as empty as his empty nets. They have been toiling all night and caught nothing. But, he says, “because you, Master, told me to, I will.” And when he does, the text says, “they caught so many fish that their nets began to burst. So many that after their partners in the other boat rush to help them, both boats were so full that they began to sink.” And while everyone else is in the kind of awe-struck amazement that makes you question reality the way you would if money suddenly rained down from the sky, Peter -- our exhausted, weary, bone-tired, pride-wounded, human Peter breaks. He falls down. Perhaps in worship -- but I suspect it’s more out of a sheer inability to keep it together any longer. In the face of the incomprehensible abundance and more-than-enoughness of Jesus, Peter sees himself as he really is, falls to his knees and says, not to his teacher but to the Lord, “Get away from me, don’t look at me, for I am detestable.” And church, I get that, cause that is where I’ve been all week. I wanted to stand here and declare from this pulpit, “Here I am -- sent by God to speak God’s truth to God’s people!” But instead, I come from a week of catchless nights: of toiling to complete all the tasks, and to do them perfectly with a smile on my face and a spring in my step, when the truth is I was tripping all over myself. I come from a week of trying to say all the right things to all the people who are looking to me for answers that I should be able to find because fishing for truth in the text is what I do, but the text looked like dark, empty water, so instead I showed up late and empty handed, my failure and imperfection on full display. And I don't want to be seen like this either, I’d rather be left to my own ruin. So I broke down. It was a long time coming but I did. And just like with Peter, Jesus showed up over and over to tell me, “Don’t be afraid. Do what you do. I got you.” On Thursday, it was Pastor Lydia, who asked me over the phone if I was okay, and when I said “I am definitely not okay, but it’s fine, I’m fine, this is fine,” she chuckled and replied, “You’re like the dog in the house that’s on fire, sitting at the table drinking coffee and saying, “This is fine.” Except I didn’t even have coffee. I didn’t even have coffee! So she brought me coffee. The best she could find. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Just do what you do. I got you.” So I did, and Jesus showed up again: In the warmth of Wes and Corrinne and a room full of strangers whose nods and smiles said, “Don’t be afraid. Do what you do. We got you.” On Friday afternoon, it was my mentor Babette. I was still staring at an empty page with nothing to preach when she showed up to meet me for coffee. And at the end of a long talk about who I am, what I am called to, what this week has felt like, and how afraid I am of failing, of being imperfect, of being human, and being judged as lacking and sent away, she said, “Amy. The Spirit never says a thing three times unless she means it. You know she is calling you to be vulnerable. To break open and be real with your people and trust them.” I didn’t want to. I am still afraid. But she said, “Do not be afraid. Do what you do. I got you.” As if that weren’t enough, Jesus showed up for a 4th time that evening. I was standing in front of a mirror in the dressing room at a theater, trying to do my makeup so I could go on stage with Simple Gifts in 30 minutes. And the dam finally broke. And I mean, broke. After leaking for a good 10 minutes and trying to wipe it away, I literally burst into tears telling my people, “I’m not okay, I’m not okay, I’m not okay.” And immediately, like James and John rushing to help haul the fish in the boats before the nets broke, I had 15 healers surrounding me, clearing a room, making space so the flood of all I had been holding in could rush out. And as I sat there, folded over in a chair, heaving and weeping, covering my head and hiding my face, ashamed of my weakness, the other two singers, who are my soul sisters, crouched down to gently rub my back, hold my hand, and remind me over and over again, “Amy, we belong to each other. You are not alone. You are allowed to be human. To make mistakes. To get things wrong and be forgiven. You cannot carry everything; Let us help. We belong to each other. Don’t be afraid. Do what you do: We got you.” It’s a long time since I’ve been so lavished with grace, and never have I felt more undeserving. But it also felt like a call. A new one. To come out. I don’t know if James and John rushed to Peter’s side when he crumbled to the ground, or if they cleared the space to make room for him to be his broken, imperfect self with Christ who welcomed it all. I don’t know if his eyes were all red and splotchy as Jesus freely distributed the abundance of fish to the hungry crowd, while he and his partners finished up their work and left that awful night on the beach behind them. But I do know they all met a God they didn’t expect -- one who called fish from the deep and lavished the whole community with extraordinary abundance. Who did it not to pile shame on a fisherman who was already at his breaking point, but to relieve the pressure of lack. To give them all a way out from their prideful need to do, and carry, and be more on their own than they were meant to. This God obviously could -- and did -- work extraordinary miracles, but he was never like other gods who needed the worship of devotees to retain their power; Instead, Jesus’s miracles were always extraordinarily practical: He fed the hungry because they deserved to eat and be nourished; he healed the sick because they deserved to be whole and engage wholly in society; and he cast out demons because people deserved freedom from the oppression and possession of unseen torment. In the same way, Jesus didn’t call the first disciples to follow him because he craved an audience, but because they craved liberation and by his own design from the dawn of all things, liberation was Beloved Community. Hear me say this again: liberation is not IN beloved community, liberation IS beloved community. Which is to say, as Joe Davis did, We don’t need Jesus to do magic, we are the magic. What we need is each other. We who share the same breath, the same Life Force, the same earth and ground and soil and water; we who are all preserved by the same Source of Creation, who is Christ, our Head: We are Already One Body. We already belong to each other the way fingers belong to hands which belong to arms; the way eyes belong to the face that belongs to the head which belongs to the whole body. Which is why, when an arm is crushed by the empire’s hammer, OUR arm is crushed, and we all feel the pain, and we all have medicine to bring for the healing. It’s why and how I was flooded with an abundance of friends who saw my hurt, felt it as their own, and brought their medicine to me saying “Don’t be afraid, we got you.” Because we belong to each other, and I am theirs. This is the good news Christ gave to Peter. It is the Good News the Spirit proclaimed to me through all the healers who tended my needs this week as if they were their own. It is the good news I now give to you: We belong to each other. “Do not be afraid. Just do what you do. We got you.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AMY COURTSSermons + Songs + Poems Archives
March 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed