When God Turns Up

A sermon on Luke 5:1-11, Isaiah 6, and 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 for Epiphany 5, 2025, Preached at St Paul's, Ashgrove

Luke 5:1-11, Isaiah 6, and 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Through the Epiphany season we reflect on God showing up in human experience. So, I’d like to invite you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine God showing up right here where you are.

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What might you do in response?

I’d love to see what each of you imagined if you are willing to share it in a comment or message. My guess is that there would be something unique about each person’s imagining, and there would also be interesting common themes.

Each of our Bible readings today presents a unique vision of what it looks like when God shows up. Let’s look at each unique perspective, then go back and find those common themes.

Isaiah 6 refers to a disastrously ominous time in Israel’s history. Twenty years after the year in which this scene is set, the Kingdom of Israel will be obliterated by the Assyrians, and will not rebuild or recover, ever. There is no darker time recorded in the Old Testament histories. It was a time when everyone’s eyes and ears and imaginations were filled with images of the power of Assyria: enormous images of Assyrian kings, their armies and their god. The people of Israel and Judah were appropriately terrified by stories about nations Assyria had already conquered.

At that dark, terrifying time, Isaiah had a vision of the Lord. He paints a picture that incorporates elements of Assyrian imagery but reveals the Lord as gigantically bigger than any Assyrian king or Assyrian god. The hem of the Lord’s robe is big enough to fill the temple, which is the biggest building any of them can imagine. This is an utterly ginormous God.

The people of this time probably thought God had abandoned them, and the prophet says, ‘No, God was there! If only they had eyes to see! God was enormous – even then, even there! And God wasn’t silent either. God sent prophets but nobody listened.’

This vision may have been written in this way for the people of Judah, to the south of Israel, much later when they were terrified at the military build-up of the next superpower, Babylon. The message to them is clear:

• The Lord is still enormous – way bigger than the Babylonian gods and kings and all their armies.

• The Lord is still speaking through prophets.

• The question is: Will you listen this time?

In our own day, when we are frightened by what we see on the news, we can close our eyes and picture Isaiah’s vision of the Lord - exalted, enormous, holy – way bigger than the gods of finance and technology and war. All the things that seem to set the course of history are puny compared with our Lord.

Notice, though, that the purpose of this vision is not to pat people on the head and say ‘There, there. Our God is bigger than their God so everything is will be OK.’ That is decidedly not the message. In that situation, nothing was going to be OK, yet God was still present and still huge.

God was present but what was God doing? God was sending prophets to speak the truth to people who wouldn’t listen! What good does that do those people who won’t listen? Not much! But maybe it isn’t about them. Maybe it is about future generations. Maybe it is a message sent through time, so we can know that:

Even in the darkest of times there was light.
Even in times of deception and disinformation, there was truth.
Even in times of despair there was hope.
Even in times of terror, God doesn't abandoned humanity. 

We see this in recent history as well as ancient history. We know that Hitler didn’t listen to people who opposed him. Think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Anne Frank, the White Rose martyrs, to name just a few. They didn’t live to see much good come from their message, yet their words matters to us, almost a century later. Their truth and courage fortify us to speak courageous truth today, when we face a international crises and in the everyday challenges of life.

Simon was repairing his fishing nets after a dismal night on the lake. An unproductive night wasn’t a national catastrophe, but it may have meant several families would go hungry that day.

When an itinerant preacher climbed into Simon’s boat, God turned up and gave him more than he could deal with. Way too many fish. Too much abundance. Now, I would have expected him to sell the fish and put the money away as a cushion against lean times ahead. That’s what a sensible person would do, isn’t it?

But no! When they brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed Jesus. When God transforms scarcity into abundance, everything changes, not just the bank balance. When God turns up in our everyday reality, God doesn’t just fix a few things, God changes everything.

So, God sometimes turns up, overwhelmingly enormous in times of national catastrophe, and calls us to speak truth that might be ignored until a future generation. And God sometimes turns up with overwhelming abundance at a moment of personal scarcity, and calls us to follow Jesus. But those are not the only ways that God turns up. In I Corinthians, Paul wrote, “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received.” Here we see God turning up in the receiving and handing on of sacred story, tradition. In our age of individualism, this might be the one we most easily forget.

I want to be there when God turns up. I want to be the one who sees and hears and feels God’s presence. I want to be the one who has the emotional experience – even if the emotion is terror.

I want it to be about me. But that’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be about me to be real.

God turning up and being enormous in a temple in the eighth century BCE can still give me courage to face the dark forces that oppress our world today.

God turning up on the lake of Galilee to transform a family’s personal scarcity into abundance can still give me courage to follow Jesus.

God doesn’t only turn up in the visionary and miraculous. God turns up every Sunday in every church when we tell each other that story about

Jesus dying for our sins, and being buried,
About him rising on the third day,
And him being seen alive by a crowd of hundreds
And by some key individuals who were sent to tell the story to others
Who told it to others
Who told it to others
Until it reached us in Australia in 2025.

You might remember that in John’s Gospel Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ God is with us no less than God was with Isaiah and Simon Peter.

Paul didn’t see or hear or touch the risen Jesus. His encounter with Jesus was later, in a vision, but he still counts himself as a witness to the resurrection. This doesn’t make him arrogant, though. He describes himself using a derogatory word that is quite a bit worse the polite English ‘one untimely born’. It is not a word I would want anyone to use to describe themselves, or anyone else, but it underscores the sense of being small and unclean, which seems to be the universal human response on encountering God.

Simon Peter said: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’

Isaiah said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips!’

Most days we try to convince ourselves that we’re OK – not as courageous as we’d like to be but not complete wimps either. Not consistently loving, but not consistently hating either. Not too bad. But when ultimate reality crashes into us for just a moment we are undone.

Genesis tells us we are made in the image of God. When the image faces the reality every distortion becomes excruciatingly apparent. Our eyes are opened to the sparkling amazingness of all we are called to be and at the same time our eyes are opened to the grubby reality of what we have actually been.

People see God, and they cry out, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m a mess!’ And what does God do? Does God say ‘Yeah, look at you! You really are a mess! Get out of here!’ Not once!

In Isaiah, God’s response is more like, ‘OK, you’re worried your lips are not clean. Here, let me clean them for you.’

When Simon Peter asks Jesus to leave because he feels sinful, Jesus says, ‘Nah, I don’t think so. You’re coming with me! I’m going to teach you and challenge you and train you until you are ready to take the good news about me to the world.’ On the previous night, Simon Peter had failed utterly at the thing he did best – catching fish. Now, Jesus has given him way too many fish. In the same way, Jesus will take this brash, impulsive young man, with all his inadequacies, and transform him into a foundational leader in the church.

When Paul met Jesus, he was doing everything he could to destroy that church. Even then, there are no angry words from Jesus, just a call for reflection: ‘Hey Paul, what do you think you’re doing?’ Jesus stops him, gives him time to reflect, then gives him a job.

And what about us, as God turns up each Sunday in the sacred story we tell each other, in the songs we sing and the prayers we pray, in a piece of bread and a sip of wine? As we come face to face with God, we also come face to face with sense of inadequacy. We’ve all done wrong in the past. Maybe even this morning. And when we come to church those wrong things might – sometimes – be all we can think about.

It isn’t comfortable. It’s tempting to walk away so we don’t have to face those things. But if we stay and let God deal with us, God will always deal with us the way God dealt with Isaiah, Simon Peter and Paul. The best predictor of future behaviour is past action – even for God. So God turns up in church and says to us, ‘Let’s get you cleaned up. Let’s get you strong enough to stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things. And let’s get you a job that’s worthy of you.’

Thankfully, we are not all given the arduous tasks that God have Isaiah, Simon Peter and Paul.

But just like Isaiah, we are called to speak the truth to people who probably won’t listen.

Just like Simon Peter, we are called to preach the gospel of Jesus.

And like Paul, we are called to apply ancient knowledge about God to totally new situations.

Are we up to the task? Of course not! But we gather every Sunday and say to each other in the name of God: ‘Let’s get you cleaned up. Let’s get you strong enough to stop doing the wrong things and start doing the right things. And let’s get on with the job we’ve been given. Together.’

So let’s pray:

  
May you meet God this week
In story and song,
In prophetic witness,
In international crisis and in daily life,
And there may a bigger perspective
Shift your focus 
From scarcity to abundance
And from inadequacy to vocation
In the Kingdom of God
Who is above all things
Who is in all things
And who transforms all things. Amen.

With Love from Rev Margaret