Brief synopsis of the readings: Today we return to the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. After the death of King Uzziah, Isaiah is overwhelmed by seeing the Lord of Hosts and proclaims that he is doomed because of his unclean lips. But then an angel removes his sin and Isaiah, when asked “Whom shall I send,” replied “Here I am. Send me!” Luke’s Gospel describes Jesus teaching a crowd at the side of a lake. Nearby fishermen, including Simon Peter, came ashore and began washing their nets. Jesus tells them to go back onto the lake and put out their nets; Simon Peter protests by telling Jesus that they have been fishing all night with no results. But he obeys Jesus and they go back out. This time they catch so much fish that there is fear that their nets will tear, and once aboard, the volume of fish may sing the boat. Overwhelmed, Simon Peter tells Jesus: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” Jesus responds by telling him that from now on he will be catching men [and presumably women]. Then the left everything and followed Jesus.

The prophet Isaiah holds an important place in the Old Testament. I’ve spoken about this before, but this book had at least 2 and possibly 3 authors (known as “1st Isaiah, 2nd Isaiah, and 3rd Isaiah”). Today’s reading comes from 1st Isaiah, near the beginning of the book and it’s a puzzling reading.

The idea of being a prophet may sound good to us today but it’s only good through the comfortable distance of hundreds of years of history. A prophet’s role is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That’s not my line, I learned it in seminary and have always found it valuable. But the comfortable never want to feel afflicted and the life of a prophet is never easy.

Many of us like the idea of comforting the afflicted but the afflicted have little power to improve our lives. On the other hand the comfortable have nearly limitless abilities to attack us and make our lives miserable. Ask any whistleblower.

And yet after Isaiah encounters an angel who convinces him that his sins do not prevent him from being chosen, he embraces his role as a prophet and asks God to “[s]end me!”

So why did he volunteer? Didn’t he know that this would greatly complicate his life? He probably did, but the encounter with the angel also likely gave him focus. I suspect that Isaiah eagerly embraced his role because he understood who he was and what gifts he was given and this gave him direction in his life.

I find this informative for all of us in our lives. We are all given gifts, we all live with things we are good at and things we are not good at. We spent much of our childhood, and let’s face it: much of our adulthood, coming to an understanding of who we are and what we are good at. When I was in high school I couldn’t get enough of history and I couldn’t understand why anyone liked science. My wife is just the opposite: she loved to explore how elements related to each other in chemistry and couldn’t understand why anyone was interested in stuff that happened a long time ago. Because of this I chose theology and she chose medicine.

Unfortunately we all have times when we try to be someone we’re not, and it rarely goes well. Maybe it’s because we want a gift we weren’t given. In the 12th Chapter of First Corinthians, Paul clearly states that there are different gifts but the same Spirit. And while God doesn’t rank gifts, we clearly do. In our current society we pay scary amounts of money to people who are gifted at picking stocks, and much less to those who are gifted at teaching our children.

When I was a seminarian I met Fr. Alvin Illig who was ordained seven years before I was born. He was both bright and ambitious and he had a clear idea of what he wanted when he was ordained: he wanted to be appointed to the New York City mission team. The order we belonged to (the Paulist Fathers) provided several ministries: parishes, college campus ministries, evangelization, teaching, and many others. But if you were a priest in the 1950s one assignment was reserved for the best. These priests were based in Manhattan and travelled to parishes in New England and the Mid Atlantic States giving parish missions. Their gifts were seen as better than other gifts and Fr. Alvin set his sights there.

Much to his disappointment he did not get that assignment. He eventually made his way to the world of Catholic publishing and he did incredible work. In the 1960s Catholic churches in the United States opened Catholic schools at a phenomenal rate and Fr. Alvin understood that they needed school libraries. He packaged the books a school would need and marketed them to these newly opened Catholic schools. It was genius: hundreds of Catholic schools were able to purchase a viable library and the publishing house found an income stream that allowed them to thrive.

When Fr. Alvin told me that story 30 years later there was still part of him that regretted not being part of the New York City mission team. But he was also aware that his gifts served him, his community, and the Kingdom of God better in the publishing world. While he and his peers valued the mission band better than publishing, he understood that he ended up where he needed to be.

And in discussing these gifts we need to give awareness to the strength of these gifts. In the Gospel we see exhausted and empty handed fishermen: they spent the entire night fishing with nothing to show for it. But when Jesus suggests they go back out, they did so mostly to humor them. The result so overwhelmed them that they grew afraid. Now, I’ve never heard this from the perspective of the fish, but it really wasn’t about the fish at all. These poor fishermen would, in the course of time, grow into the first generation of the teachers of this new church. They were the first to grasp the baton of faith, and had they stumbled, none of us would know the name of Jesus.

Perhaps the message of these readings is twofold: we should not rank gifts according to our desires, and we should stand in awe of what we are capable of doing if we celebrate and use the gifs we are given.