Malleable Enough to Become Fully Human

February 6, 2010 – Fifth Sunday After Epiphany

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 138, I Corinthians 15:1-11 and Luke 5:1-11

Abstract: The sermon invites prayerful consideration on two questions: Do you wish to be malleable enough to discover the life of God in new and unexpected ways or will you maintain your known comforts at any cost? How does your need for things to be exactly the way you have known them to be, impede you from being open to invitations to new life? If St. Stephen’s Church chooses life, then it will do whatever is necessary to be nurtured by God even letting go of fear and the comfort of familiar places.


“Set us free” seems to be the recurring theme of our texts this morning from the opening prayer through the Gospel. To trust the Lord’s invitation to drop their nets, the disciples had to learn to be free of their failed experiences, their inability to find fish. Do you have a sense of the empathy of this text for our challenge in finding newcomers to be members of our parish? The disciples have to work hard to be open enough to follow the Lord’s invitation to drop their nets again despite their recent failures. They doubt Jesus and even grumble that they had been exactly on that side of the boat and found no fish. We are about to enter a year of discernment on the parish’s future mission and identity. You might say, oh no, not more discernment about our mission. We have done that before and look at where we are. Obviously that did not work.

Then as the story goes their nets broke with the abundance of fish. Wow! Given the very close connection between the disciples and the life of St. Stephen’s it might be worth exploring what might have made the difference for the disciples. For the moment I am not concerned about the way we catch fish or even newcomers. I am more interested in the disciples’ change of heart. How did they go from finding a scarcity of fish to an abundance of fish? What do you think made the difference between when they dropped their nets out of their own wills and when they dropped them at the Lord’s invitation? Do you think it is merely that their luck was better with Jesus?

Is this Gospel story about luck? I don’t think so. If the story is more than about luck, then I think we have some work to do so we like the disciples might drop our nets anew. If we take nets too literally, we might hear this text as only being about fish or at best finding newcomers. Might we exchange nets for dropping our guard. How do we drop our guard to hear the invitations of Jesus and the Holy Spirit anew? The opening words of today’s collect have given us a clue as to what may be necessary – set us free.

There are different kinds of freedom. For example there is freedom of self-determination and political freedom. We live in the land of the free. For the most part we enjoy a high degree of self-determination in America. There are constraints due to our natural talents and for some a lack of privilege, but compared to many other countries we Americans have great freedom in planning our own destinies. Not too few American presidents have gone from rags to riches and even global influence. Our political freedom follows closely too. We choose to live where we want to live, drive the car that we like, choose friends, give to charities that match our values, worship where we wish, believe what we want to believe in and more.

Through self-determination in a land of political and religious freedom we are the masters of our own destiny. After living in India for a few weeks I have a renewed sense of the privilege of being an American surrounded by the wealth of our country. Though I like most of you are not wealthy I/we benefit from state and federal infrastructure of transportation, sanitation, water and electricity. In contrast in India the power goes off every afternoon. There is not mass transit and traffic is chaotic. Poverty is side by side to wealth. It was a very disorienting context for me. As much as I wanted to be there in India, I was aware of the way my comforts here at home sometimes prevented me from fully entering into this foreign experience. I could sense myself holding back. I had a sense of longing for some of those comforts. At times I am even embarrassed to say that I may have judged some Indians as less through my American lens. We traveled on an overnight train that looked like it had been made in the early 1900’s. It was old and filthy. As a former businessman I found myself wondering why this could not be different. I found the space unfriendly and at times I was frankly afraid and angry at carelessly entering this new context.

Stefani who had been to India before was a bit more comfortable in this very different place. Crossing the street without traffic lights, with hundreds of pedestrians, fast motor bikes whizzing in and out and thousands of old rickshaws I probably would have stood indefinitely at one side of the street without ever crossing over. One day we were crossing the street and I was absolutely terrified, frozen in my tracks with all this traffic fast approaching me from every angle. Stefani said don’t hold on to me and then said, keep walking they will drive around you. They will not hit you. She was right, but wow each time was a trust walk to just cross the street.

I was way out of my comfort zone and yet I would go back. Honestly everything in me says, don’t go back. Yet at the same time I uncovered some insights there that I have not found in any book. I learned about postcolonial theology from a very different lens. It is a lens that will improve the quality of the work I do here in the US. Many postcolonial theologians write about India, but very few have been to India. In these experiences I can empathize with the disciples. I hope when I go back to India in a few years that I will feel a little less threatened by being in such a different context. I hope and pray that I will be set free so that I can more fully enter the culture of India. At the same time I expect that as I plan travel to Africa and to the islands off of Australia to visit with Aboriginal peoples I will have these jarring experiences again.

Over time during our stay in India I was less harsh on myself. I acknowledged that I had come a long way from growing up in a family for whom a foreign vacation was going from one borough of NYC to another. We lived in the Bronx and every year vacationed in a bungalow at the beach in Queens. My brothers and sisters like my self have been to Italy, England, Spain and Ireland. Yet none of us had ever been to Africa or India or places that are not designed to cater to the American tourist’s need for comfort. Stefani had been to Africa and to India. Her growing up was no more diverse and even a little less so than the Bronx as she grew up in Santa Barbara. Yet we both have a passion for hospitality. It is one of the values that literally binds us in marriage. Part of genuine hospitality is learning to be a good guest. The host has all the privilege and power of leading the guest. The guest has to be free to experience the life that the host invites the guest to experience.

Jesus as our host invited the disciples to trust Him. Jesus knew of their failures to find fish in exactly that place, but he was determined to show them a different way of seeing in the same place. As challenging as it was for the disciples to see differently in the same place, the stakes are a bit higher in different places as it was for me in India. For St. Stephen’s you too are being called to see differently in this place and the Spirit may in its own way eventually call you to see possibilities of new life in a different place.

Spiritual freedom is something very different than political and religious freedom. It has to do with the freedom to respond to God and the way the Spirit leads us into new life. Spiritual freedom is not merely about our self-determined desires, but God’s desires for us. Our desires and God’s desires very often conflict. Sometimes the conflict has been named as sin. When our desires dominate God’s desire we are vulnerable to sin. Yet sin is not the only outcome of when our desires conflict with God’s desires. Another outcome is that we become less than we are gifted to become. That is we never achieve God’s full purpose for us and so we settle for being less fully human to be comfortable.

In our home we have a framed set of words by St. Irenaues, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive”. These words were on our wedding invitation and these last seven years have been near our entryway. These words are a reminder to Stefani and me of our commitment to each other. The words are a reminder to our shared commitment to work with each other through love to bring the best out in each other. Bringing the best out in each other is different than covering each other’s back. It means that we open ourselves up to be molded by God. As we both do this, our love deepens for one another.

It requires each of us bringing a willingness to be malleable. By malleable we become like clay in the potter’s hand being molded into something of beauty. I was not totally malleable to my Indian hosts or to the Spirit of God last week. I want to be more malleable because I have had the occasion of malleability in other contexts in my life and the treasures I have discovered like the disciples have been of rich abundance. As I hear the opening collect and then the Gospel, I heard “Set us free of ourselves”. “Set us free of our own desires”. “Set us free to see as God sees”. The OT lesson instructed us to give up our sight and it is implied to take on God’s sight.

The disciples’ seashore context and India seem far away from the realities of St. Stephen’s Church. The disciples had found their inner strength to drop their nets. Instead of nets might we say they dropped their guard so that they could take in the abundance of God. I am working to drop my guard, so that the next time I might more fully enter the Indian and or African experience so I will be free enough to receive the gifts that can only be received in that context. I could stay home and never go again. If I did I would know that the reason would be simply fear and discomfort. Fear and discomfort are signs of a lack of my spiritual freedom. I want to be free to experience God in India and wherever the Spirit leads me.

What about you? Do you wish to be malleable enough to discover the life of God in new and unexpected ways or will you maintain your known comforts at any cost? How does your need for things to be exactly the way you have known them to be, impede you from being open to invitations to new life? Are you willing to let go of experiences of the past that might hold you back from going to new places, initially uncomfortable and foreign to your desired comfort? There is a real choice here. You can stay exactly where you are and leave the work to others. Yet if you do choose out of fear than we like the disciples may not find any new fish. Ultimately if the disciples stayed in that one place they would have gone hungry without anything to eat. To be fed we need to eat what the Lord puts before us. If St. Stephen’s Church chooses life, then we will do whatever is necessary to be nurtured by God even letting go of fear and the comfort of familiar places.