Hope and Healing for our Wounds

In a few minutes, we will sing these words,

Will you love the you, you hide if I but call your name? / Will you quell the fear inside and never be the same? / Will you use the faith you have found / to reshape the world around, / through my sight and touch and sound / in you and you in me?

Perhaps these are the questions that both Isaiah and Jesus are asking us in today’s scriptures.

Isaiah 6 is the story of Isaiah's call to prophecy in the year King Uzziah died. Uzziah had been an effective King for over 50 years who had delivered economic, military and spiritual prosperity. The King tried to serve God but forgot he was an earthly king. His own arrogance led to his death. After the King’s death, Isaiah had a vision.

Isaiah describes that he sees the Lord sitting on the throne, high and lofty. The surrounding angels’ wings covered their faces and their feet that symbolized their readiness and service. Isaiah utters his confession, “Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man with unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” The angel flew to him with a live coal that had been taken from the altar and touched his mouth, and in that moment, he was free of his guilt and his sin was forgiven. We can learn from Isaiah’s willingness to admit his brokenness and receive healing and forgiveness from God.

We struggle to admit our brokenness that underscores our fatigue and frustration when we try to solve our own problems. How do you approach the Prayer of Confession we read each week? Is it just another reading or an opportunity for that kind of brutal honesty before God? When we admit our brokenness, God’s forgiveness restores our hope. I’m uncertain that we appreciate the power of confession and the significance of forgiveness that reminds us that there is no way to know God without being changed.

In his book, The Wounded Healer, Jesuit priest Henry Nouwen normalizes our

woundedness. He writes,

“Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt…Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually.”

How do we, in our desire to love and serve God, name our wounds? Perhaps these last few years in particular, we have experienced fear, frustration, exhaustion, and the emptiness of not knowing. Only when we are honest about our wounds can we find healing and hope.

The Gospel reading from Luke begins with fatigue and frustration experienced by both Jesus and the fishermen he meets. While Jesus was standing beside the lake and the crowd was pressing in on him, he saw two empty boats on the shore and saw an opportunity.

Reading between the lines, Jesus was exhausted and needed some distance. Even though the crowds were hungry for his teaching, Jesus needed a few more boundaries.

Jesus got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon. The fishermen were nearby washing their nets and Jesus asked Simon to push the boat a little way from the shore so he could teach the crowd.

Imagine the scene from the disciple’s standpoint. “The fishermen were washing their nets” indicated they had completed their fishing at least for a while. Jesus had not yet discovered that they had fished all night with terrible results – they had not caught a thing. Certainly they were tired of fishing, tired of being in the boat and tired of failing at what they were supposed to be good at.

So when Jesus asked Simon to “put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch,” Simon confronted that reality by saying, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.”

Pay attention to what Simon did not say; Simon’s willingness to not engage Jesus with “we’ve already tried this, we’ve already attempted what you are saying, we did this all night, we are experts, we know what to do and it did not work. He didn’t go there.

Instead, Simon simply agreed with Jesus, “Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” In other words, Jesus asked Simon to go against what he thinks he knows and has experienced. Jesus asked him to go deep where Simon knew it didn’t work before.

In her book, Finding Courage in the Face of Injustice, Bishop Marianne Budde clarifies Jesus’ call to act ,

“When the decisive moment comes in the midst of a whirlwind and we are called to act, we need to do so trusting less in ourselves than in the power and the energy that is compelling us forward… When the moment comes to you and to me to be brave in some way, we do so trusting less in ourselves and more in the spirit that is driving us… but what a relief to meet God in the moment of change.”

Like the disciples, we also have to throw our nets out into the deep waters. Shallow, tentative paddling is not allowed if we are to discern where God is calling. This requires us to take risks. We could fail and come up with nothing. The boat could capsize. But we will try again, even though it didn’t work before and trust Jesus who told us to try again.

Will we love the we, we hide if He calls our name?

Will we quell the fear inside and never be the same?

Will we use the faith we’ve found

to reshape the world around,

through His sight and touch and sound

in you and you in me?