Today’s collect – the special prayer for the day which I prayed earlier - began like this. O God, you know us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright.
And don’t we just know it! We cannot always stand upright. There are probably days when it feels hard to stand up at all, after nearly two years of pandemic, with economic pressures mounting, a government that often seems on the verge of collapse, and the shadow of war between Russia and Ukraine looming. Wherever we look there’s trouble, and often that’s on top of the personal or family crises that come to us all in the course of our lives, usually when we feel least able to deal with them.
That prayer might have been written for our times.
But of course, it wasn’t. It’s a modernised version of one of the prayers from the old 1662 Book of Common Prayer, written by Archbishop Cranmer in the 16th century, and his times were even more troubled than ours, with all the turmoil of the Reformation and its aftermath, which eventually cost him his life. But even then, the prayer wasn’t new. Cranmer had pinched it from an old prayer book, or sacramentary, which was said to go right back to the time of Pope Gregory the Great a thousand years earlier in the sixth century. He also knew what it was like to “be set in the midst of so many and great dangers” too. He lived through times of plague and warfare, as Rome was fought over by invading Germanic tribes.
When it comes to trouble, there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s not a moment in human history when someone somewhere hasn’t been living under the shadow of war, poverty, sickness, natural disaster and political upheaval. No one of us gets through life without facing challenges – personal, national or international – which remind us of “the frailty of our nature”. We human beings are small, limited creatures, for all our attempts to puff ourselves up, and we often face trials that are just too big for us, trials that we could never cope with, no matter how clever or hard-working we were, trials which are beyond our power, beyond any human beings power to deal with.
The people of the Bible knew that too.
Isaiah’s vision of God came at a moment of great crisis for his nation. Powerful nations were threatening invasion and they were facing moral and political collapse from within. It was going to end in disaster. Anyone could see that. It was all too much, too complicated. Maybe that was why Isaiah was in the Temple on this day, seeking sanctuary, peace, space to think. But he got much more than he bargained for. He saw God, “high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the Temple”. He saw seraphim, heavenly creatures, flying around God. It overwhelmed all his senses; the smell of the smoke, the sound of the singing, the shaking of the earth beneath him, the sheer beauty of God. And all of a sudden he saw himself and his world, exposed by the light of God’s glory. He saw how small he was by comparison, and how messed-up and tangled everything around him was, mess and tangle that he couldn’t help but be caught up in. “Woe is me!” he cries out. “I’m in a mess, and so is the society I’m part of”. God hadn’t accused him of anything. No one was pointing the finger at him. There’s no evidence that he’d done anything in particular that was especially wrong. But he suddenly realised how frail and fallible human beings are, how inevitable it is that we will hurt and be hurt, that we will let others down and be let down ourselves, however hard we try to get things right.
Simon came to the same moment of revelation in the Gospel reading. This is the man who Jesus later nicknamed Peter, the rock, but for now he was just Simon, an ordinary fisherman in Galilee, who happened to be on the beach mending his nets when this wandering preacher needed a boat to speak from because the crowds were hemming him in so closely on the shore that no one could see or hear him properly. Simon’s boat was the one he chose, and Jesus needed Simon to row him out, so Simon couldn’t help but listen to what he had to say. By the time Jesus has finish, evidently some seeds had been sown in his mind, but he wasn’t completely convinced. When Jesus suggested he puts out into the deep waters to cast his nets he started off by pointing out, as the professional in this situation, that they’d tried that all the previous night and caught nothing. But maybe something in what Jesus had said to the crowd made him wonder, and he seems to have thought to himself, “why not trust this man and have a go”. The rest is history. The catch was huge. It was almost farcically huge, so big that his partners had to bring a second boat out, but both boats almost sunk under its weight. It was the abundance which seemed to bring Simon to his knees. How had this man - a carpenter, not a fisherman – done this when he couldn’t. Just like Isaiah, he realised he was in the presence of something greater than himself, in the presence of God. His first response, like Isaiah’s was to shrink away, or rather to beg Jesus to leave him. But just as God didn’t send Isaiah away, so Jesus wasn’t going to take Simon at his word. Instead, both men are called to follow, to give the imperfect, flawed gifts of their lives in the service of others.
It’s sometimes said that the only essential qualification to be a follower of Jesus is to have been forgiven, and often the forgiveness we need most is forgiveness from ourselves for being human rather than super-human. Many people find that it’s only God’s acceptance of them that convinces them that that’s ok. The first step, the most important step, is accepting that we can’t do this thing called life, that we need his help, that “by reason of the frailty of our nature, we cannot always stand upright” no matter how hard we try. It’s a huge relief when we realise that we don’t have to prove ourselves to God, that life isn’t an Olympic challenge we have to rise to, because we couldn’t anyway. All God asks is that we bring ourselves, as we are, into his presence; he can do the rest. Living the Gospel, loving God and one another, will always be beyond us. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will get it wrong. But God calls us to come to him, to follow him, and to go for him anyway, just as he did Isaiah and Simon Peter, because the greatness of his love is what matters, not the smallness of our ability to convey it.
The strange thing about this story of Peter is that having brought in the catch of a lifetime, he leaves it all behind him. As the people of Capernaum enjoy a bumper supper, and probably breakfast and lunch as well, he heads off with Jesus. It’s as if he is now able to trust that if God could provide so abundantly on this occasion, there will always be enough to see him through, even if it seems as if there won’t at first. As Jesus is arrested and dies on the cross Simon wobbles in his faith, but the resurrection shows him that God is still there, still at work. And Isaiah’s path will not be easy, either. The second half of the reading speaks of the reality that people will see but not understand, hear, but not comprehend, and that he won’t be able to do anything to make them. But the passage ends with the promise that there will always be a “holy seed”, new beginning, because God’s life can’t be destroyed.
God can mend a broken heart, they say, but only if he has all the pieces. Our readings today call us to bring our broken hearts, our broken lives, our broken world into his presence and leave the rest to him.
Amen
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