Lectionary Notes: Feb 9, 2025

tl;dr: This week includes themes of feelings of unworthiness and God calling us anyway.

I've joined a group spanning a few churches to share reactions to the lectionary text for the week. Here are my notes going into February 9, 2025, the fifth Sunday after Epiphany.

The Texts

Here are the texts.

Isaiah 6:1-13

For the second week in a row, we get a prophetic call story. This time it is Isaiah and it is more poetic, but the key points are the same: God is holy, the prophet is unworthy, God offers some kind of healing or purification that convinces the prophet to proclaim coming destruction. Even though Isaiah, unlike Jeremiah, is mostly seen as a very hopeful text, that isn't as obvious in this call narrative.

Psalm 138

This is also similar to last week's Psalm in some of its themes: God is mighty but has special care for those judged to be lowly in human culture, protecting them from their enemies.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

"Christ died for our sins" definitely has some potential to go down the atonement theory rabbit. Those who believe in penal substitutionary atonement may see this as a prooftext, but it doesn't actually anything about God's wrath or justice needing to be satisfied. Even the "for our sins" may be a questionable preposition translation, if I am remembering correctly. I don't have a good source for that handy, but I believe that is just as easily translated to "because of our sins" which is a simpler cause and effect, not necessarily implying that our sins were placed on Jesus as a scapegoat in order to absorb our penalty.

The other prooftext rabbit hole it is easy to go down here is apologetics. It cites more than five hundred who witnessed the risen Jesus. That's not really an airtight apologetics argument since it's not like we have any way of verifying that those five hundred people really did encounter the risen Jesus and told everyone about it. But that's not really a focus in this text either.

More to the point of this text is in line with the prophetic call narratives of these past two weeks and the psalms of the past two weeks. Paul is emphasizing that he is not that significant, the last to see the risen Christ, the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, etc. But because of God's grace toward those who are not worthy, he now is preaching that grace to others.

Luke 5:1-11

This is one of those Jesus stories that seem a little silly at first. They've been fishing all night, not catching much, and Jesus comes along and tells them to put their nets a few feet away on the other side of the boat. Seriously, why would moving the net that small distance go from catching nothing to being completely full immediately, enough that the boat starts to sink. And that's how Simon (Peter), James and John were recruited to become disciples.

It carries some of the themes from the other texts: they aren't particularly worthy. They can't even catch fish on their own, which is their whole job. Simon Peter declares that he is too sinful to be worthy of joining Jesus. Jesus reassures them to not be afraid and to join him despite their "unworthiness." Then they left everything - all those fish that they had just worked all day trying to catch - in order to take Jesus up on his offer.