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Maybe you have been wondering lately: Why can’t preachers just know their place? I want to share with you some words from a Scripture commentary I read this week from Working Preacher, written by Professor of New Testament, Abraham Smith. There’s too much fun alliteration in his writing not to share the entire paragraph:
“In 2006, pastor and professor Marvin McMickle examined the sad state and the lamentable landscape of preachers in the United States. He saw preachers who had become parochial promoters of culture wars, passive, acquiescent backers of political parties, performers of vacuous praise and worship demonstrations, and proclaimers of a prosperity gospel (or of what is actually a perversion of the gospel because such proclaimers assume that the cause of poverty lies in personal ineptitude or group pathology, not in structural inequities). So, McMickle raised the question, ‘Where have all the prophets gone?’”[1]
The prophet’s job is scary work. Plenty of ancient prophets heard a call from God to preach words of judgment, and their first response is “No thanks.” Jonah famously received a call from God to go to Nineveh, and he traveled in the opposite direction, got thrown off a boat during a storm, and ended up in the belly of a giant fish.
Today we read the story of Isaiah’s call from God. This story may not have all the comic flair of Jonah’s story, but Isaiah is just as terrified. He saw the Lord and was afraid. To be in the presence of power can be a scary, unsettling feeling, especially when you are disempowered and when you are there to beg for mercy and scariest of all, when you are there to speak truth to power, to hold powerful people accountable.
In last week’s newsletter from the Northern Texas-Northern Louisiana Synod, which is the area where I was born and raised and also ordained and pastored a congregation there, Bishop Erik Gronberg raised a couple of points that stuck with me. He noticed how pastors rarely get in trouble for preaching politics if the preacher doesn’t challenge the worldview of the listener, in other words, as long as people hear what they wanna hear, they don’t get mad about it. And second, Bishop Gronberg wrote:
“While admonishing pastors not to address political issues from the pulpit, the political estate, regardless of partisan ideology, has no restraint in proclaiming their interpretation of scripture and using the bible as justification for their decisions.”[2] (emphasis mine)
Friends, prophets do not risk their lives to proclaim God’s Word so that powerful people can feel better. And Jesus did not die to make you happy and fulfilled. In Jesus’s first sermon in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus goes to his hometown, and while he could’ve preached from anywhere in the town, he purposefully went to the synagogue, to engage the spiritual heart of the place and of the people.
Over and over in this scene in the synagogue, the gospel-writer Luke uses words of perception: their eyes were fixed on Jesus, Scripture is fulfilled in your ears. Maybe you noticed these perception words in our reading today from Isaiah too. Biblical scholar Ched Myers points out that the book of the prophet Isaiah is referenced some 590 times in the New Testament, and 78 times in Luke’s Gospel alone.[3]
And they’re not repeating the same sections of Isaiah, either: the canonical book of Isaiah has 66 chapters, and in the New Testament, there are references from 63 of those 66 chapters. So this ancient prophet is powerfully influential for Jesus, and for the people of his time, and for the early followers of Jesus.[4]
And don’t be misled, Isaiah isn’t just preaching happy, feel-good peace. Reverend William J. Barber II points out the liberating power of Isaiah’s prophetic truth:
“Jesus…deliberately chooses the most powerful, most political bombshell he could have dropped in the middle of Roman domination: the very people that you have used your governmental power to exploit now have the assistance of a higher authority!
[Jesus] says, ‘The Spirit of God is upon me,” and that Spirit chooses people to be dissenters, to bring good news to the poor over against the bad news of domination. Moral dissent, my friends, is not just…the stance of Jesus 2000 years ago…It is still our calling today.”[5]
When Jesus preached in his hometown synagogue by reading aloud from Isaiah, interpreting it by saying these ancient words are fulfilled right in front of you today, and then referencing the ancient prophets Elijah and Elisha, who brought healing to foreigners, benefitting people other than the Israelites, that’s when people got mad! Now Jesus is meddlin’!
In particular, Jesus mentions the story of Elisha healing Naaman, who was not just a foreigner but a foreign military commander who is against Israel. And in that story, Elisha doesn’t lay hands on Naaman, doesn’t even meet him in person, just gives instructions to Naaman to be healed of his skin disease by immersing himself in the Jordan River seven times. Naaman has to swallow his pride to take these orders, but he does it, and he is healed. Ched Myers identifies Elisha’s mission strategy as compassion and resistance, which not incidentally will also be Jesus’s strategy.
So when Jesus brings up this consequential history, he critiques their assumptions that Israel is exclusively entitled to God’s care. Myers points out that for us in the United States, this value of speaking a difficult truth sounds like Martin Luther King’s speech at Riverside Church in 1967, when he critiqued the U.S. involvement in war in Indochina. Myers writes, “Americans who loved the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s ‘quality of character, not color of skin’ eloquence bristled when he…[was] prophetically questioning the nation’s integrity.”[6]
And what happens to prophets who speak truth to power? What happened to Jesus after he preached in his hometown synagogue? Well, in this episode, Jesus almost gets thrown off a cliff, but he manages to escape, and he goes to a lakeside town, where he’s not just gonna preach but he’s gonna get involved with speaking up for workers.
The way Luke tells this story in his gospel, Jesus arrives at the Lake of Gennesaret, which is an older name for the same lake that the gospel-writer Mark calls the Sea of Galilee, and Luke purposefully does not call it by its new name, Sea of Tiberius, renamed to honor Tiberius, who became the Roman Emperor in the time when Jesus would have been a young adult.
So Luke is already making a statement about political power in how he names the body of water, in the same way that we would be making a statement depending how we refer to the body of water directly south of the United States—is it the Gulf of America? Or the Gulf of Mexico? Or since Mexico has been around only a few hundred years and the world is much older than that, it probably had another name by whoever lived there first? Same water, different name.
So at this body of water, the Lake of Gennesaret/Sea of Galilee/Sea of Tiberius, depending who you’re talking to, fishing has become a state-regulated industry, benefitting the Roman urban elite. People who fished were required to obtain a fishing lease, and local toll collectors taxed fish products, which were increasingly processed into salt preserve or fish sauce for export. Overfishing became a problem as more fish were taken from their habitat, and the wealthy people who benefitted from this system looked down on the fishermen, even as they depended upon their labor.
Ched Myers writes, “One ancient papyrus called fishing ‘the most miserable of professions.’ So when Jesus of Nazareth showed up at the lake…he was walking right into a distressed economic landscape…Top-down economic infrastructure development inevitably enriches the few and impoverishes the many, as we still see everywhere in our world.”[7]
So what does Jesus do? He hosts an impromptu teach-in, right there from Peter’s boat. Luke doesn’t record the sermon he gave, but if we know Jesus, we can imagine him speaking against the injustice that runs rampant in the world, and about God’s abundance of grace. Then these fishermen who worked all night long and caught nothing, are willing to trust Jesus enough to drop their nets one more time, bringing in enough fish to nearly sink two boats.
Ched Myers writes, “This mystical yet material moment symbolizes the abundance of creation restored, a glimpse of how their waters used to be before the artificial scarcity wrought by empire…this prophetic sign is a reminder that Creation, rightly shared, can sustain everyone—starting with the poorest.”[8]
This story isn’t just about fish as food but as wealth—if Peter loses his boat, he’ll lose his livelihood, which is unsettling and scary. When he tells Jesus to go away, when Peter calls himself a “sinful man,” is Peter living in the shame of being entangled in a system that traps people in cycles of poverty while also destroying Creation?
Do you know what it’s like to be stuck in a system that you didn’t create? Do you ever feel ashamed that you can’t fix it by yourself? Then there’s good news for you here too, just as there was good news for Peter. Jesus sets these fishermen free by showing them what abundance looks like and assuring them, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.”
In their Hebrew tradition, prophets of the Old Testament refer to fishing as a way of speaking about fishing out injustice.[9] So “catching people” doesn’t mean gathering more people to follow Jesus, it’s about fishing out injustice and setting people free for the sake of abundant life.
The task of prophets is to know their tradition and to know the God who gives life. The task of prophets is to speak truth and to set people free. Yes, sometimes it’s scary, but imagine Peter, exhausted after working all night and catching nothing, then catching more fish than his boat can even hold, and walking away from the whole thing to join Jesus. What incredible freedom.
Jesus shows us that God is not afraid to meet us wherever we are: exhausted, hurting, fearful of the future, trapped in systems that exploit us. Jesus the miracle worker brings a miraculous abundance because there is more than enough creation to sustain all of us. Jesus the prophet says, “Do not be afraid.” Jesus the savior says “From now on…” because he knows there is a future.
The Spirit of God is upon us to preach good news to the poor. We preach through our words as well as our actions of care and solidarity.
I’m looking out here right now, and I’m seeing people who gather food for hungry neighbors. I see people who advocate for immigrants, who serve as clinic escorts for women accessing health care, who advocate for a livable minimum wage, who educate children, people who build relationships with other congregations so that we can do bigger work together. I see people who defend folks exploited by their employers, people who bring healing to human bodies, people who lead others in singing praise to God. The prophets are right here, still fishing out injustice, still preaching God’s good news against the bad news of domination.
We know this good news because we live this good news. Do not be afraid.
Amen.
Pastor Cheryl
[1] Marvin A. McMickle, Where Have All the Prophets Gone?: Reclaiming Prophetic Preaching in America (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), vii. Seen in Working Preacher Commentary on Luke 5:1-11, by Abraham Smith, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-after-epiphany-3/commentary-on-luke-51-11-8
[2] Synod e-newsletter from NT-NL Synod, February 4, 2025.
[3] Ched Myers, Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025, page 67.
[4] Ibid 67.
[5] Ibid 65, Quote from Rev. William J. Barber II, from a sermon preached in 2013.
[6] Ibid 70.
[7] Myers 72
[8] Myers 74
[9] Ched Myers (page 75) notes Jeremiah 16:16, Amos 4:2, Ezekiel 29:3-4, Habakkuk 1:14-17 as references to fishing out injustice.
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