The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

5th Sunday after Epiphany February 6, 2022 Let’s talk about failure. What does it mean to you when you hear that word? What feelings arise? What are the times in your life when you have felt like you have failed? Now, imagine, if you will, that God comes to you face to face. After you get over your initial shock and awe, you hear God saying: “I have a special job for you to do for me. I need you to go do this work for me and to fail miserably.” There you are, face to face with the Almighty God, and God is asking you to take something on that you know that you will fail at. Would you do it? Would you be able to say yes? That’s what happened to Isaiah in our passage for today. We see God’s call or commissioning of Isaiah to be God’s prophet, but God tells Isaiah to say to God’s wayward people: “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.' Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed." Then Isaiah says, “Um, ok. But how long do I have to do this for?” And God tells Isaiah, that he will do it until everything that he’s ever known and loved has been completely devastated; the people will be sent far away, and the land becomes desolate. Only then, will the seed of hope be planted. In our gospel reading for today, we see Jesus’s call to Peter that also comes out of a night of failed fishing. After having caught nothing all night, Jesus invites the fishermen to take him out in the boat with him and to cast their nets into the deep water. Peter is skeptical, but he does it anyway, and then they make a ridiculously abundant catch of fish, more than they can take in by themselves. Then fisherman just leave the biggest catch of their careers on the shore with their boats to follow Jesus, whose own mission will eventually seem to end in failure—with his death on the cross. Scripture shows us, over and over again, that where we see failure, God sees hope and possibility. And it is curious to me that in the seasons in my life where at first glance I seem to have failed, I have been called to dip into deeper waters in my relationship with God. Are there areas in your life right now where you have looked upon certain aspects as failures? If so, what would it mean for you to try to see these aspects through God’s eyes of hope and possibility? In the failures in your life, where has the new life unexpectedly sprung up like a seed sprouting from a stump? By all human standards, my time at my last church was an abysmal failure. And yet, one of the seeds of hope that sprung up in the midst of that challenge and suffering in my life was an unexpected move to the beautiful Isle of Hope in Savannah, Georgia. And what a gift of new life this has been for me, and how much I have learned about God, who is always faithful, myself, the church, and the world through and because of my supposed failure! In conclusion, I’ll share with you a meditation by Steve Garnas-Holmes that invites you to examine your failures to find the hidden blessings and to grow deeper in your relationship with God and others. “Let down your nets”i “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” —Luke 5.4 What might it mean for you to let down your net in these deep waters? To listen deeply to someone, for what they are saying or not saying, beneath the surface… To seek even in your most disappointing failure the blessing that lurks beneath… To seek, in someone hard to love, the divine child, wounded, hidden… To let the net of your heart down into the vast depths of humanity and take it all in, with tender compassion…. To love this world and let your heart down into its darkness, trusting the grace of the Beloved schools there… i. https://unfoldinglight.net/2022/02/02/let-down-your-nets/