Nancy E. Petty
February 4, 2007 – Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-13; Luke 5:1-10
Holy Stumps
Our generation and perhaps all generations have had the notion that a vocation, a call, demands of them perfection, talent, worthiness. Certainly Moses feared that he lacked the skills to lead the captive Israelites out of Egypt; and, as in our readings today, Isaiah feels his own unworthiness to be an obstacle to God’s call; and likewise, in the New Testament, Simon Peter begs on bended knee not to be a fisher of people because he insists he is entirely unable, unfit, to rise up and follow Jesus. Amusingly, Jesus ignores Simon Peter’s reservations every bit as insistently as God ignores Isaiah. Perhaps, since the West seems to have laid hold of the Judeo-Christian tradition as if we owned truth, perhaps we have lost sight of what the East knows very well: that to know nothing, to say nothing, to seek nothing, to hear nothing—literally to be empty as a plate or an abyss—is not only not a bad thing but a necessary step toward receiving a call from the God we serve.
Growing up as a Christian and as a Baptist, (and I’m sure you Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians and Catholics can say the same) I have had to unlearn practically everything I was taught about faith, about right living, about virtue, and even about so important a matter as that facing Isaiah and Simon Peter: namely, a call to the ministry. I was taught that being a Christian was about doing: sword drills, mission trips, circle meetings, deacons’ meetings, committee meetings, financial considerations of the church. We were busy, busy, busy in my church, as Pullenites are similarly busy. We bustled from meeting to meeting, whispered in church, rushed to claim our favorite pew, and took notes while the minister preached (dis-similar to what happens at Pullen). What were we thinking? Did we imagine that somehow we ourselves, out of our fullness of self, could somehow trump God’s plan for us? But more than that, more than the busy-ness and thinking we could outwit God, we also picked up a load of misconceptions about ourselves. We were either drowning in sin—worms, scourges, unworthy vessels of the Lord—or we were chosen, better than, specially tuned in to the will of God, and only too happy to march down the aisle and rededicate our lives to the Lord in an excess of humility. So which was it and which is it? A wretch, as John Newton calls himself in the hymn we just sang or are we “In the Garden,” walking with Jesus in exclusive conversation—the chosen ones?
Isaiah and Peter, though centuries apart, are more like us than even we know. Both feel they are not good enough to respond to God’s call. But where among the many characters in the Hebrew scripture and in Christian teaching is the perfectly suited woman or man, ready and willing to serve, without reservation, without the pride of excessive humility? Religion and our culture of entitlement and privilege have told us that we are either not good enough or too good, and unless we can free ourselves of those extremes, we will never be free to stand in the alternative place of living out of God’s truth for us. We are not, as Christians, to be engaged in the business of defining ourselves, judging ourselves, deciding for ourselves what to do as Christians. We are, rather, in the state of grace that calls for contemplation of the divine, for meditation, and for emptying ourselves of our own notions so that we can hear, see, and understand God’s desire for each of us. When we can free ourselves of not being good enough or of thinking we are too good, then we are ready to receive whatever God has in store for us.
When I read the Isaiah passage, my favorite part is the last verse: The holy seed is its stump. Metaphors such as this one give us some clue of what a merging of East and West, of sinner and saved, would look like. The gift of unworthiness is found in that metaphor. The gift is, of course, the holy seed that grows despite all our efforts to ignore or destroy it. The unworthiness is the stump, that portion of the terebinth or oak that remains rooted in the truth of God and of us. All of us have experienced the stubbornness of stumps. We grind them, burn them, pour weed killer on them, and yet, despite all our efforts, the spring brings yet another sprouting of the holy seed in the ground of what is. We work so hard at getting rid of the stump. Our culture has taught us to be obsessed with covering up what isn’t pretty. We are obsessed with getting rid of everything within ourselves that others have called inappropriate or unacceptable. We distract ourselves from what we perceive as ugly by putting the shine on our virtues. We hide our mistakes, we hide the unfavorable reports, we silence the rumors, we hold fast to our secrets, we remain in the closet with those parts of who we are that we think others will judge. But that is not what we need to be doing. No, we need to see the stump as that part of us that holds that holy seed that is miraculously planted by God alone and is waiting to spring forth.
What precedes the transforming moment for Isaiah and for Simon Peter is a low and honest place of seeming hopelessness and unworthiness. Only until that moment is squarely faced and survived is willingness and hopefulness possible. Recovering alcoholics will report that they had to reach a rock bottom before they could admit their powerlessness and surrender themselves and all their circumstances entirely to God. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, speaks tellingly of the steps preceding a true conversion, the chief of which is surrender. This stage is painful, a bitter pill to swallow, a point at which, according to Henri Nouwen, many simply cut and run. But in so doing, they return to the world of either / or, the world where they must be “good” or “bad” but never honest. Maybe Isaiah and Simon Peter are inviting us to be honest with ourselves this morning. Maybe you’ve lived your whole life thinking that you weren’t good enough to do something that was in your heart—your passion. Or maybe you are living your life thinking that you are far too good to do that one thing God might be calling you to do. And maybe you’re sitting here having both of these feelings at once. If you are, the scriptures have something to say to you this morning. They are saying that we all come to God in our humanity, with all that that implies, that we do have limitations. But the scriptures are also saying that precisely out of that, out of all of your humanity, your limitations, your sinfulness, your fear—your stump—there is something holy and good and profound about who you are, as you are, and about what you have to offer to this world. Whether we like it or not, we are Holy Stumps—we are less than perfect human beings who hold a divine spark within. We can chose to see ourselves as only the stump and stay stuck in our unworthiness, our sinfulness, our fears, our limitations. Or we can be that holy seed that is waiting to sprout out of that stump and we can understand ourselves and live our lives as God’s goodness in this world—God’s holy seed—God’s mercy and forgiveness and truth and justice and mercy and love and open arms. This is who we are and who we can be. We are stumps shooting forth the holy and the divine.
Religion and Christian teaching got it all wrong. We are not worms, wretches and unworthy vessels. And our world, our culture, also got it all wrong. We are not better than, entitled to, chosen ones, and too good to. As long as we live in these two worlds it will be difficult for us to be who God has created us to be. But if we can see ourselves as holy stumps—less than perfect and yet containing the holy and divine—then we can also respond as Isaiah and Simon Peter and be God’s faithful disciples in our world.
Often, I find that poets say best what the human heart knows and feels. Wendell Berry captures the spirit of Isaiah and Simon Peter and what I am trying to say in a poem he has entitled, Lift up the dead leaves. I leave you with his thoughts.
Lift up the dead leaves
and see, waiting
in the dark, in cold March,
the purplish stems, leaves,
and buds of twinleaf,
infinitely tender, infinitely
expectant. They straighten
slowly into the light after
the nights of frost. At last
the venture is made: the brief
blossoms open, the petals fall,
the hinged capsules of seed
grow big. The possibility
of this return returns
again to the seed, the dark,
the long wait, and the light again.
-Wendell Berry
The holy seed is its stump! It is God’s amazing grace and it is our hope.