Can you believe we have pushed into the second week of February already?  Back to the typical fare out of the lectionary site I use and the lectionary itself.

• Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
• 1 Corinthians 15:1-11
• Luke 5:1-11
• Psalm 138

For the second week in a row, we get the story of a prophet being called.  We had Jeremiah last week and this week we get the classic Scripture where Isaiah says, “Here I am.”  Would have been nice if the pastor hadn’t already had the congregation sing, “Here I Am Lord” last Sunday.  There are parallels in the two stories as each has their mouth touched by God, one gets words from the Almighty while the other has his mouth cleansed.  Isaiah in a way gets both the cleansing and the words as God tells him exactly what to say to the people.  Perhaps a juvenile way to look at it, but I always thought Isaiah had it pretty easy as far as accepting the call goes.  Honestly, after having the vision and seeing the things that he saw, how do you not just stand there with mouth agape and say, “sure, I’ll do whatever you want me to do?”

Hints of the greatest commandment top start the Psalm.  Giving thanks with his whole heart is the Psalm writer.  Hints of the hymn “Great is Thy Faithfulness” in the second verse.   Interesting to me in the context of reading two calling stories in the last two weeks that there would be something about God answering a call in this text.  Like I said Sunday, this is not an equal partnership, but we do have a God who loves us beyond cause, beyond reason and beyond our own means.  Perhaps verse seven is another connection to what Jesus was talking about this past Sunday, as the NRSV says, “Though the Lord be high, he cares for the lowly…”  A slight taste of the 23^rd Psalm in the eighth verse and the I love the mix of three separate phrases to close it out with the final words being a petition for God not to abandon us or the world, the “works of your hands” as the Psalmist puts it.

We return to 1^st Corinthians for the Epistle this week.  Paul is in full exhortation mode telling the church at Corinth to hold the line of faith and understanding he has passed on to them.  I like the idea of the handoff that Paul describes in the beginning.  It was given to me, but I didn’t keep it to myself, I gave it to you, I proclaimed it to you, and I pray that you hold on to it so that you too will be saved.  I have always liked this section of Scripture because Paul gives detail of who saw Jesus following the resurrection, though he leaves out a very important one in Mary Magdalene.  As I look at this for the first time (again) I’m thinking about the parable of the talents as Paul is talking about the grace given to him and that he has worked to ensure that the grace wasn’t given in vain.  Back to the beginning where Paul did not just hoard the good news for himself but instead shared it with abandon.

The Gospel pushes us a little deeper into Luke and we get a classic Sunday School story, the fishers of men if you will.  Something that caught my attention this time around was the brief conversation between Jesus and Peter.  After being asked to fish, Peter says that they had been at it all night.  These men had been working, and I imagine tired from their efforts, as fruitless as they were.  Despite the tiredness and the thought process that it was simply a lost day or not their day to catch anything, Peter agrees to do it because Jesus has said to do it.  It is in these early moments with the disciples that I try to imagine what type of charisma Jesus must have had.  Think about someone you just met asking you to walk back into the office after you’ve just put in your eight hours, working through just a miserable day.  I can’t type the words that most of us might be thinking to ourselves.  What type of person would we look at and say, “sure, if you say so?”  Perhaps a bit off topic, but it is something that I think about in stories like these.  I’m obviously missing the point the lectionary wants me to think about, which appears to be missions and sharing the good news.

You can tell; I have a lot of studying to do this week.  I encourage you to spend some time with these readings along with me and when we get together on Sunday we’ll see if what we were thinking matches up and see what God was speaking to us through these passages.