Preacher's Post: Federal Budgets and Fish

The Word

Isaiah 6:1-13 and Luke 5:1-11

More call stories: Isaiah gets his call and Jesus calls some fishers

Quotable Words

From Jan Richardson's The Painted Prayerbook:

"In this week, Luke’s fish tale and the feast of St. Brigid have me wondering, what do I really believe about the ways that God works in this world? Have I grown fixed in my expectations about what God is up to? Do I have eyes to see the surprising ways in which God moves in the midst of situations whose outcome I think I already know? Is there deep water I need to put my net into—beyond what I can see, beyond what I know, beyond my familiar limits—to bring up an abundance that God has in store? What am I willing to leave behind in order to participate in such a miracle and to pass it along to others? What habits of wildest bounty might God be inviting me to practice?"

Headline Words

A Federal Budget Gets Proposed

Preachable Words:

Heading toward Sunday, how might the Headlines and the Word intersect?

In Luke's outrageous fish story, the fishers haul in nets bursting with a record catch--another one of those gospel stories of crazy abundance that we get in this season of Epiphany, where all the stories, like the Magi's star, point to God's way in the world. God's way is never what we expect: it's water-into-wine, it's the local boy Jesus' declaring "I'm it" to the good religious folks at Nazareth, it's not-your-everyday catch of fish.

Just when it looks like all is lost, when the wine runs out and the fish won't bite, God shows up--not with an other-worldly miracle, but with that unmistakable Presence in the midst of the ordinary, water jugs and fishing nets and fears about running-on-empty.

So the questions for the preacher this week might be: "where does God show up in the new federal budget? Where can we find abundance in yet another symbol of scarcity? Are there habits of bounty I might practice?"