Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11
Rev. Kenneth M. Locke
Interim Pastor; Orchard Park Presbyterian Church; Carmel, IN
February 9, 2025; Fifth Sunday After Epiphany
I imagine we’ve all had something like this happen. Say it’s your first day in a new school or new job, and the building is so confusing you get lost. You wander around forever until you finally get where you’re going. You slink in, mumbling apologies, and you feel like a dork.
Or it’s a first date and somehow one of you got the directions wrong or the time wrong and when you finally get where you’re going everything’s closed and there’s nothing to do but turn around and go home. And the person you’re trying to impress never wants to see you again.
Or maybe you’re taking that last sip of coffee before going into an important job interview and someone jostles your elbow. Now you have coffee all down your front, no time to do anything about it, all you can do is smile and apologize and realize you look stupid interviewing for this very important position with a huge wet stain on your stomach.
Pretty inauspicious beginning, hmm? Nothing you can do about it. All you can do is accept it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You can’t hide it. You can’t lessen it. It’s just a bad beginning. A very inauspicious, bad beginning.
If you think those beginnings are bad, look at our three scripture lessons. These fellows all have horribly inauspicious beginnings. Isaiah has unclean lips, which means he’s sinful. Paul is a persecutor of the church. Peter is a confessedly sinful man. Not a good way to begin a relationship with God, is it? Not how you want to start a loving relationship with your Lord and Savior.
What I like about these stories is the men don’t try to hide who they are. They don’t try to sugarcoat or lesson their sinfulness. All three admit straight-up. ‘I am a fallen, evil, sinful creature.’
And that’s the turning point. That’s when things start changing. In Presbyterian speak, when they accept their full depravity is when their lives begin changing. It’s when they accept their full sinfulness, they begin becoming different people.
That would be a hard sell today. You would have a hard time getting anyone to say, ‘I am depraved, I am sinful, I am unclean.’ We live in a culture where no one’s really bad. We’re all OK. You’re alright. Jesus is our friend and friends support each other. We want Jesus to walk beside us, not to keep us on the straight and narrow but to whisper in our ear, ‘Don’t be sad. You’re not that bad.’
As Presbyterians, we know that’s wrong. As Presbyterians we know Jesus didn’t die for our sins because we’re not that bad. We don’t have a cross in our sanctuary because we’re really OK. We don’t have a prayer of confession every time we worship because we’re just a little sinful. As Presbyterians, we know we are all fallen, sinful creatures.
If you’re not real familiar with Christianity, if you were taught all people are good at heart or evil is just a social construct, I can see how all this talk about sin and depravity could be a little off-putting. Maybe the cross makes you anxious. More than one person has told me they don’t like the prayer of confession because it makes them feel bad. They don’t want to feel bad. It’s an inauspicious beginning to what should be a time of joyful worship.
Hey, I get it. I don’t want to feel bad. I want to feel good, too.
But let’s suppose for a moment Isaiah had said, ‘I’m an OK guy. I’m not that bad. I’ll go.’ Would God have sent him?
If Paul had said, ‘It’s not my fault, I thought I was doing the right thing,’ would he have become an apostle?
If Peter had said, ‘Wow, buddy, thanks for all the fish!’, would Jesus have made him fish for people?
I gotta say, I doubt it. In fact, I’m pretty sure not.
It’s when they accept who they are their lives change. It’s when they fully realize and recognize their sinfulness their lives turn around.
And so it is for us. So it is for us.
Beloved, it’s tempting to shy away from the truth. Pretend we’re not so bad. We’re just a little evil.
But when we acknowledge the fullness of our sinfulness, our depravity, our innate evil, that’s when we experience the fullness of God’s forgiveness, God’s love, God’s peace. When we acknowledge our most secret, most locked-away shortcomings, that’s when we realize God’s power to change. And then, like Isaiah, Paul, and Peter, we can begin living lives of meaning and purpose, lives that make a difference. Amen.