Prophets, Fishermen, Feminists and the Hound of Heaven


Transcribed from the sermon preached February 7, 2010

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church
2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705
Telephone 510-845-6830    Fax 510-845-6837

Scripture Readings: Isaiah 6:1-13, Luke 5:1-11


In today’s passages, Isaiah, Simon Peter, James and John are caught by God, and commissioned to do God’s work. I have spoken earlier of the context of Isaiah’s call, of what else was going on around the year that King Uzziah died, but today I want to focus on God’s call to us. For it doesn’t matter whether we are in a temple or on a lake, in a traditionally sacred space or in our place of business, God is here and God calls for us. And while Isaiah is a priest, a servant among the elite, Simon Peter, James and John are peasant fishermen. We may think that education and status among the wealthy may disqualify us, or simply make us too rational and cynical for God to want to call us. We have rationalized our compromises, and been spokespersons and blessed those who are less that just, less than peaceful in their accumulation and maintenance of power. And we benefit on the prosperity side of their injustice, and that makes it our injustice too. We have a chariot health care plan, and a chariot too.
Either that or as peasants we may consider our lowly state as a disqualifier. Not only are we mere fishermen, we are fishermen who haven’t been able to catch fish. Why should God care about us? Why should we think God cares about us?
And where, really is God in all this? Couldn’t the privileged carry on pretence for the poor, and the poor for the privileged. Certainly, as the much of the temple priesthood to which Isaiah belonged, the religious institution can carry on using God language, creating reverent looking spaces, and preaching comfort for the status quo, without being much more than a function of the state and culture. It is a role we play, and we would just assume not change, since it takes a while to learn and get established. Yet, whether we admit it or not, we know we fall short of God’s glory and holiness: “Woe is me, says, Isaiah, I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among the people of unclean lips.”
And as workers we may give lip service to institutionalized religion, and on those rare occasions, nodal family or national events, when we run into representatives, to keep out of trouble we do our best to use appropriate reverent sounding language: “What do I call you, Reverend or Father?” or “He is in a better place” or “God Bless America.” But truth be told, we would rather just go fishing.
But even in the comfort of our privileged place, or in the solitude of our job on the water, God comes calling. We are not that comfortable, we are not so alone. There is something about this Jesus and his Gospel, something about the truth of God’s love and justice that calls us forth.
David Scott tells the story of Dorothy Day, journalist, feminist, socialist, and founder of Catholic Worker, and her encounter with the gracious and patient God who chases us, as Francis Thompson put it, like the Hound of Heaven.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years . . .
The words fell out in a dour sigh, all booze and smoke. Long after hours in the back room of a Greenwich Village bar called the Hell Hole, the man who would become America's most celebrated playwright seemed to be straining in a hell all his own. He was reciting from memory "The Hound of Heaven," a long poem about the ways of God and the evasive maneuvers of the human soul:
…I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the mist of tears
…I hid from him
“On that cold winter night in 1917, Eugene O'Neill's audience was a crowd of self-styled freethinkers and artists, free-love bohemians and hangers-on. At his side was Dorothy Day, a 20-something reporter for the nation's largest socialist daily newspaper, The New York Call. Like O'Neill, she was a lonely idealist with a taste for rye whiskey and lover-done-me-wrong songs. They used to walk pressed together on the late-night streets, lost in conversation about the mystic lyrics of Baudelaire and the "God-is-dead" philosophy of Nietzsche. She had never heard this poem before.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet :--
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbčd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat--
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust ;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is ; what is to be ?..
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come !"
Halts by me that footfall :
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly ?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest !

Written in the 1870s by a former opium addict turned Christian named Francis Thompson, "The Hound of Heaven" could have been O'Neill's spiritual autobiography… He professed a morose and anguished atheism, refusing homage to a God who could allow so much suffering in the world.
Dorothy Day parted company with O’Neil not long after that night in the Hell Hole... At first, Day continued along the downward path she and O'Neill had been on. She was wounded in action in the Jazz Age's sexual revolution — impregnated and then abandoned by a hard-drinking journalist. She had an abortion, married a man on the rebound, and lived for a time as an expatriate in Paris and Capri. She thought the abortion had damaged her ability to have children. Her marriage broke up, and while with an anarchist lover who was opposed to marriage and religion she bore a daughter. She considered her daughter Tamar a gracious gift from God.
In December 1927, a decade after that winter with O'Neill, she surrendered to the relentless "Hound of Heaven" and accepted God’s grace. She wrote: "I was traveling and far from home and lonely, and I awoke in the night almost on the verge of weeping with a sense of futility, of being unloved and unwanted. And suddenly the thought came to me of my importance as a daughter of God, daughter of a King, and I felt a sureness of God's love.”
The long days until her death in 1980 were spent not far from the Hell Hole. She lived without income or security, sheltering the homeless, speaking out against injustice and war, and spreading through her writings and her life's witness a radical belief in the merciful kingdom of God. (http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0129.html God, the Hound of Heaven by David Scott)
As with Isaiah, Simon Peter, Francis Thompson and Dorothy Day, God is still here, waiting, calling out to us with love and forgiveness. And when we offer up the excuse of our sinfulness, our past failures, our doubt, doubt in ourselves, doubt in our people, doubt in a Holy God’s desire to be with us, to empower us, to love us, God says, Do not be afraid. I have a message I love you. There is nowhere you can go from my love. I am the Alpha and the Omega, beginning and the end, the first and the last. Come to me all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Knock and the door will be opened. Where can I go from your spirit? If I go up to the heavens you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there, if I settle at the far side of the sea, even there. Ye though I walk through the valley of death, I fear no evil, for thou are with me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.