Lessons:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
For the past few months I have been serving as a chaplain intern at Good Samaritan hospital. This is part of my preparation for ministry and the experience has been harder and more rewarding and more exhausting that I could have imagined.
There is a chapel on the west end of the 3rd floor which is probably the quietest place in the hospital. When you walk in the lights are softer and the buzzing and beeping which is a constant undercurrent of noise in the rest of the hospital disappears in a hush.
Every weekday at 11:45 the chaplains who are available hold a quiet service of prayer. Anyone who is in the hospital is invited to attend, as a chipper overhead announcement reminds us each day around 11.
Two weeks ago I was the only chaplain available for the service. Part of the responsibilities of facilitating this time of quiet and prayer is checking the two prayer request boxes which are built into the walls of the chapel. They are square and brass and in the middle of the box are two narrow slots, forming the shape of a cross, through which you can slip thin, green prayer request notes which can be written on with the small little golf pencils which are there in case you do not have a pen on you (this is especially important if you find yourself there in a hospital gown I’d imagine.). Our practice is to check these boxes every day at 11:45 and to pray aloud these written prayers, with whomever is there.
Two weeks ago was the first time I opened the prayer boxes. I wrestled the key into the lock and as I pulled the brass boxes out of the wall I nearly dropped them. They were so heavy and unwieldy. Which was surprising for an instant, but then felt right. Somehow the heaviness of the boxes seemed appropriate, even though from a practical standpoint it seemed unnecessary. It’s hard to imagine anyone stealing these prayers and the papers they were written were so light, practically insubstantial. And yet the prayers being offered, prayers of hope and despair and gratitude and grief were heavy and holy and it seemed only right that they were held in something so solid and substantial.
Heavy is not a word we often associate with God…nor is it a word embraced anywhere these days. We live in a time and a culture in which heaviness is not valued, often even outright rejected. And sometimes that is ok….sometimes our hearts are healthier and our joints happier if our bodies are lighter, sometimes we need to get rid of those decades’ worth of National Geographic magazines or our collection of garden gnomes. But when lightness becomes the ultimate spiritual state to which we aspire, and a feeling we associate with God and Jesus, we might miss the strength and power and safety found in heaviness.
And I know, I know, Jesus tells us “Come to me all you that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest….for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” and I love that passage and it eases my soul…
But Jesus also tells us to pick up our cross and follow him…
In today’s passage from Isaiah we have this trippy vision of the prophet in the throne room of God and God’s hem filling the whole hall and the six winged seraphs calling to one another in that refrain we still sing out together every Sunday “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts. Heaven and earth are filled with his glory.” In Hebrew the word for glory, specifically God’s glory, is related to the word for heavy. One commentator gives the image of God’s glory being so heavy that heaven could not contain it and it fell to earth and created this world.
God’s glory was so heavy and abundant it fell to earth and Created the beauty and wonder that surrounds us…God’s glory is the seed and the soil, the ground of being, of the Douglas firs and the fireflies and the cheetahs and the rocks which we kick underfoot and the fish…all the fish.❤️
Simon, called Simon Peter and eventually Peter, was a fisherman. He lived near the lake and spent his nights hauling in his catch with his friends and neighbors, his days cleaning and mending his nets and resting for the next time out on the lake.
Certainly he had met this Jesus before. Jesus had been in his home, healed his mother-in-law of a fever, shared a meal with him. But this encounter is the call to Simon, This encounter with load of fish so heavy it almost breaks the nets and sinks the boats is what brings Simon to his knees.
This image of Jesus sitting in the boat, preaching to the crowds on the shore reminds me of the image of Jesus preaching and teaching in the temple just a couple of Sundays ago. But this time Jesus’s altar is the world, to borrow the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, and God’s glory and abundance is a revealed just beneath the surface of the water.
And that abundance can both breathtaking and frightening. Following Jesus is not an easy thing. When we are face to face with the heaviness and power of God’s glory it can bring us to our knees, screaming out like Simon that Jesus should get away from us, that we are not worthy to follow him. The the heaviness of the sin and unworthiness we think we carry in our hearts paralyzes us.
But Jesus cares nothing for Simon Peter’s objections and cares nothing for ours. Jesus does not forgive Simon because forgiveness is not the issue, he simply responds “do not be afraid”. Jesus does not wait for Simon Peter to get his affairs in order, or even to deal with all those fish he just caught, instead he tells him to drop everything and follow him.
Jesus calls us to drop the heaviness of the things we think are holding us back. We are called to drop the anxiety that there is not enough time. We are called to drop the fear that we might do the wrong thing so better not to try. We are called to drop the belief that we can’t make a difference anyway so why bother.
And the good news is that we do not have to do that alone. I mean, those nets did not haul themselves into the boats. God’s abundance that Jesus revealed just under the surface of the water that day was pulled in by a group of folks working together. That abundance was shared by the community. And when Simon and James and John and all the other unnamed folks in the crowd that day dropped their nets because Jesus changed their lives they did it together.
We are in this together, with one another, and Jesus is in this boat with us.
I love that the shape of this sanctuary is like a boat…a boat where together we encounter Jesus’ abundance and God’s glory like those at Lake Gennesaret that day some 2,000 years ago.
Like that day in the boat, in this place Jesus points our attention to the table and uncovers God’s glory and love in the most ordinary objects of this world, bread and wine.
In this place the glory of God is uncovered in words and song and in the meal we all share.
In the beginning, God’s glory was so heavy it fell to earth in creation and infuses the very air we breathe and the wine we drink and the bread we eat together. The heaviness and glory of God fell to the earth in the form of Jesus who calls us together and calls us to this table and feeds us and then send us to do his work in the world.
When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
Amen.