Isaiah 6.1-13
Luke 5.1-11
Dr. Matt Samson
Prayer for Illumination – Gracious God, give us humble, teachable, and obedient hearts that
we may receive what you have revealed, and do what you have commanded. Since we do
not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from your mouth, make us hunger for
heavenly food, that it may nourish us today in the ways of eternal life; through Jesus Christ,
the bread of heaven. Amen.
Roughly 49 or 50 years ago, I preached my first sermon at an age when I’m not
always so sure one should be preaching. Or maybe particular youth shouldn’t be preaching.
For reasons long lost to the mists of time, I chose Isaiah’s call for my text, and if I found the
sermon today, I’m sure it had something to do with desegregation in the small Louisiana
community and church in which I grew up. There’s a lot there, but I suspect it was the call
language in the passage that also attracted me, along with the idea somewhere along the way
that I wanted to be a minister. The idea of a calling was important, although I suspect it had
a more individualistic component than I would like to admit today. And I confess that I also
have a much more nuanced view of what it means to be called these days. One only need
to look at the wreckage of our political landscape today to wonder about the calling some
people claim to have in our current circumstances.
Still, the passages we have read this morning compel us in the community called the
Church to consider what a calling might look like if we take our texts and the sweep of the
biblical story to heart. A decade or so after that first sermon, I was ordained and worked in
churches, often as a parish associate, where I learned to take seriously the lectionary readings
that are assigned for particular days in the church year as we tell and retell the stories of
God’s dealings with humankind. I also came to have a clearer understanding of liturgy, what
we usually refer to as the “order of worship,” as the “work of the people.” There is nothing
inherently sacred about the lectionary or our work as we gather, listen for the word, respond
and commit ourselves to particular ways of living, and then go out to witness to what we
have seen and heard, but doing our work here in this place does help us focus on how we
move through our story from Advent and Christmas to Epiphany and Lent and into the Easter
season and Pentecost. What we seek is wisdom for discerning the signs of our times.
So the texts today are the assigned texts, and they insist that we respond to the idea of
being called by either the terrifying divine Sovereign on the throne Isaiah encounters with a
message of judgement to the city, or by the Christ who is revealed to those fishers following a
fruitless night of work on the sea that turns into a haul so successful that the boats begin to
sink. Out of the smoke and fire, the prophet is asked, “Whom shall I send, and who will go
for us?” (Isaiah 6.8), and the fishers are simply told to not be afraid that they would become
fishers of people. We may keep some of the content of Isaiah’s message in background
because it is a complicated word of judgement. Some have said that in his epiphany he is
given a commission rather than a call.1 “Here I am; send me.” And he is sent with a strange
proclamation, even to stop up the ears and shut the eyes of those to whom he is sent until
such a time that the city is laid to waste (Isaiah 6.10-11).
It is not a happy message for a Sunday morning, but given the political situation in the
time of King Uzziah, what we’re dealing with here is unfaithfulness. Isaiah’s first five chapters
provide a baseline for understanding the call for justice that underlies the prophet’s message,
and perhaps the Psalm for today can help elucidate this a little as it insists on God’s
faithfulness: “For though the LORD is high, [God] regards the lowly, but the haughty [God]
perceives from far away”(Psalm 138.6). God’s ways are not the ways of the rich and
powerful, regardless of how much power they want to put in their own hands, even without
an apparent right to either the power or the position. Perhaps in these days, because the
prophet does have access to the king’s court, one message is simply that Manifest Destiny is
not and never has been a Christian doctrine. Rather than making ourselves great, we may
simply cover ourselves in shame.
On the surface, Luke is more accessible. But Jesus himself has inaugurated his
ministry only in the chapter before by reading from “the scroll of the prophet Isaiah” (Luke
4.17): “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because [God] has appointed me . . . to proclaim
the year of the Lord’s favor” (18,19). Here we catch him early in a teaching and healing
journey that has already begun to attract considerable attention. Fred Craddock says that
these would-be disciples are responding a Christ, an anointed one who commands attention
because of his power.2 Anyone who has fished knows what it is like to wait while nothing is
happening, and Jesus shows up, teaches from the boat for a while and tells Simon to throw
the nets out one more time. For fishers, this isn’t leisure; it is work. Yet they acquiesce, and
the haul threatens to sink their boats. And do we hearing this story still have the capacity to
marvel that those fishers simply “left everything and followed him” (Luke 5.11)?
Either way, the one who has had lips purified by a burning coal and those seeking to
meet their subsistence needs are challenged to inhabit different spaces, spaces defined by an
epiphany, a manifestation of the divine in their midst. Ultimately, it is this presence to which
both prophet and fisher has to respond. And if these texts are in some way also our story,
then we also have to respond, without fear–and with the expectation that there is something
new on the horizon. Or maybe it is something old that we need to reclaim and offer as we
seek to orient our lives in accord with the light of this divine presence that appears in the
temple and in the midst of the mundane tasks of our daily lives. Our commission is to bear
this burden of the divine presence into the life of the world. I wish it was original with me,
but this is a world that one scholar has referred to as “God’s beloved enemy.”3
Part of the burden, then, is to seek to demonstrate some form of reconciliation with
this enemy, an enemy defined perhaps most precisely in the enmity that we manifest towards
those who are deemed other than we are, and even in the enmity that we seem to manifest
toward the creation itself. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or
Community?, Martin Luther King wrote the following words, and they provide one point of
departure as he reflects upon the civil rights movement and the other challenges afoot at that
point in American history:
This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s
tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional
love for all men. This often misunderstood and misinterpreted concept has now
become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love, I am
speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying
principle of life. Love is the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate
reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is
beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another: for love is of God:
and every one that loveth is born of God, and
knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not
God; for God is love. . . . If we love one another,
God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.4
When I read this passage from King’s work a couple of weeks ago in preparation for a
Sunday school class, it made an impression because I John 4:7 was the only memory verse I
think I ever memorized from vacation Bible school, probably because is short: “Beloved, let
us love one another, for love is of God.” King continues in this passage in words that are as
prescient now as they were then:
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no
longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation.
The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate.
History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals who pursued
this self-defeating path of hate.5
King is right, I think, but it is important to remember that he is also writing from the
side of those who are struggling in different ways for a seat at the table. Love implies some
sense of reconciliation so that we cannot emphasize love and simultaneously erase our
acknowledgment of the past and the history of from where we have come and where we
find ourselves. There are plenty of bigger issues related to power and abuse of power that
we face today, but you may have heard that the field in today’s Super Bowl will, apparently,
for the first time since 2021 not emblazon the words “End Racism” in the end zone. Instead,
the observer will see “Choose Love”–and perhaps something like “We’re all in this
together.”6 No argument here that these are not valid messages, but there is an issue of what
is being projected, especially on what is always one of the biggest global media events of the
year and the complicated role that sports play in our common life in the U.S. If love is the
last word, then we cannot look away from injustice or cover our shortcomings with silence
even on this most secular of holidays that raises a host of other questions with its glorification
of consumerism and so many other aspects of human life that reflect our enmity with God.
(And I watch too.)
Hence the question mark at the end of the sermon title. Isaiah’s vision of the
sovereign on a throne “high and lifted up” has the seraphs calling to one another “Holy,
Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts.” A powerful image, and both Isaiah and Simon in Luke seem
to want to flee from the divine presence. Isaiah’s words echo through the ages: “Woe is me!
I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people of unclean lips; yet my
eyes have seen the King, the LORD of Hosts!” (Isaiah 6.5). And Simon says, “Go away from
me Lord, for I am a sinful man.” When we accept the call to become fishers of people, we
are accepting call to bring people into the household of a the living God whose presence is
seen in the face of the neighbor–the poor in all places, the migrant who do not deserve to be
treated as pariahs and dehumanized for seeking a better life or fleeing oppression and
violence, as many of our ancestors did, those who find themselves in less than idealized
history because of the racialized history of our nation, those who don’t interpret their gender
or sexuality in the same way as the dominant culture.
In the Gospel, we have to follow the story a bit to see what happens to those first
disciples, but it is worth noting that even Isaiah doesn’t leave us completely hopeless. In the
cosmic ecology of a universe where it is our interconnectedness with other beings, human
and nonhuman, and with the God who ever holds out the possibility of reconciliation, a
shoot yet arises from the stump of the terebinth or oak. Life comes from a stump, much like
the sassafras we have been trying to harvest from the roots of some road work near our
house. The shoots don’t stand alone, and they can’t be harvested merely by trying to pull
them from the ground; they come from the roots, the remnants of what stood before.
I’m reminded of the words I keep on the door of my office at the college. I never met
the Rev. Thomas Threadgill, but he worked in a community in rural Alabama that was
influenced by work from northern Presbyterians who focused on providing education and
other resources for Black residents in the region who had not received those same resources
from our southern Presbyterian ancestors. Only a few years before I moved to Alabama for a
few years, he spoke or wrote these words that were passed to on to me.
No generation – regardless of how apt it is – is required, nor even expected –
to bring any intangible project to its full completion. But, rather, is called upon
to be careful, diligent, and faithful, so that each project is passed on to the
succeeding generation in better repair than when inherited. In addition, that
present-day generation is mandated to involve, include, inspire, instruct,
influence, and inform the approaching generation so that is will be anxious, fit,
and prepared to carry on.7
Love born of God positions us to imagine and to begin to work to implement a future
that reflects an openness to the divine presence. This is the presence that we have beheld in
smoke and fire that purifies us to see more clearly, in a haul of fish, a miracle that is a
harbinger of an abundant future for all of God’s people, and in the resurrection that ever
pushes us to see beyond the horizon of our life and death. It is a presence that comes to us
in a world that is broken and in distress. What signs of presence will we bear?
In the name of the One who creates, liberates, and sustains us. AMEN.
1Christopher R. Seitz, 1992, Isaiah, book of (First Isaiah), The Anchor Bible dictionary, vol. 3, ed. David
Noel Freedman, New York: Doubleday, 479.
2Fred B. Craddock, 1990, Luke, Interpretation: A Bible commentary for preaching and teaching,
Louisville, John Knox Press, 69.3Albert Curry Winn, 1981, A sense of mission: Guidance from the gospel of John, Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, p. 81. The context is different, but Winn also talks about our responsibility to love.
4Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968 [2010], Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community?, Boston:
Beacon Press, 201.5King, Jr., Where do we go from here, 202-202.
6Michael Silver, 2025, NFL to remove ‘End Racism’ messaging in end zone ahead of Super Bowl:
Sources, New York Times, 4 February.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6112317/2025/02/04/nfl-end-racism-super-bowl-dei-trump/.7Rev. Thomas L. Threadgill, 1987, New Trinity Presbyterian Church–Whiskey Rull Road, Camden,
Alabama.