The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 9, 2025

December 23, 2024 | by Paul Nancarrow

Reading 1 Reading 2 Reading 3 Reading 4 Reading 1 Alt Reading 2 Alt
Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13] Psalm 138 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Luke 5:1-11

Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” Luke 5:10b

I have a mild obsession with nouns and verbs. I think the way we speak influences the way we perceive – not just the formal thoughts we think, but the ways we synthesize the raw data of sensations into the flowing fabric of experience. I think it makes a difference to the quality of experience whether we look around us and construe our worlds as objects moving around each other in space, or as processes relating to each other in becoming. I think it makes a difference whether we narrate our inner world as nouns or verbs.

Outside my window I can see a tree moving in the wind. If I take a moment and really pay attention to it, how do I direct my focus? Do I consider it mainly in terms of its treeness, its solidity and identity as a tree-object, rooted in the earth, being tossed in the breeze, standing out from its background as an individual thing, a given fact? Or do I consider it in terms of its treeing, seeing its branches as transferring energy from the moving wind, imagining its roots reaching deep into the soil, exchanging water and nutrients and oxygen with its environment, harboring biochemical reactions which even now, even in its winter dormancy, constitute a complex and beautiful process of life? Do I regard it as a snapshot or a story? a blip in time or an ongoing reality? an object or a process? a noun or a verb?

The answer, of course, is both. The tree-object is a single state of an ongoing tree-activity; the tree-activity is a succession of linked tree-states. Treeness is the product of treeing, and treeing is the process of treeness. Nouns and verbs need each other: there is no entity without activity, and no activity can happen without some entity to enact it. In metaphysics as in grammar, nouns and verbs are not an either/or.

But it can make a difference to our own entity and our own activity, as feeling and thinking human beings striving to live the best we can and to interrelate with the world around us in the best way possible, whether we focus most on nouns or verbs, objects or activities, products or processes.

Outside my window I can see a tree. Further up the hill I can see a whole stand of trees, reaching up and over the hill and beyond my sight. How do I construe that forest? Do I see it primarily as a product, an object that might be exploited for my own purposes, so many board-feet of lumber, say, just waiting to be harvested? Or do I see it primarily as a process, a locus of active growth, an interwoven eco-community of plants and animals and insects and microbes and God knows what else, all interacting to produce a life and value of their own? Do I see the forest mostly as a collection of nouns or an operation of verbs?

I go to the store and the checker comes across as bored and rude. How do I construe that presence? Do I see them primarily as an object, an unpleasant external facial expression standing over against how I would prefer to experience goodwill and cheerfulness? Or do I see them primarily as an active person, someone who is going through an emotional process, with causes and concerns I can only guess at, but with an affective effect that I can recognize and respond to and, at my best, feel compassion for? Do I see the checker mostly as a noun separate from myself, or as a verb with whom I might interact, even for just a moment, with some positive influence?

It makes a difference whether we construe our experiential worlds primarily as nouns or verbs, primarily as objects spread out at a distance around us or as processes with which we receive and offer mutual influence in our own life-process. This is one of the reasons I embrace a process theology.

When Jesus called Simon Peter, along with Andrew and James and John, to discipleship, he called them to a new verb: “from now on you will be catching people.”

Jesus did not call them to a new noun. He did not say “You will be my disciples” or “You will be my followers” or even “You will be my apostles.” Those nouns did come later, and they were not without significance. But the call started with a verb. The call started with empowerment for a new process, the call started with the activation of a new activity.

Following Jesus is not simply a matter of gaining a new title, a certain designation, a defining social label. It’s not about calling yourself “Christian” or “Episcopalian” or “believer” or any other identifier. It’s not the conferral of a status or the acquisition of an attribute or an intellectual content or a psychological trait or an emotional feeling. Discipleship is not a thing you can possess or accomplish or claim as your own.

Instead, following Jesus is doing as Jesus does. It is practicing the kind of love that Jesus practices. It is receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude, with God and with fellow creatures, in the same manner that Jesus receives and offers in his living, teaching, healing, praying, dying, and rising as narrated in the Gospels. It is living out a life-giving relationship with God through Jesus in the Holy Spirit in a way that shapes how you relate to others and to yourself, to people and to your environment, enacting divine possibilities for goodness, truth, and beauty in all your moments of becoming. It is recognizing when you’ve failed to love creatively, when you have taken and kept instead of received and offered, and letting the Spirit activate you to try again. Discipleship is an act you do in co-action with God.

Of course, in discipleship, as in grammar, there is no either/or between noun and verb, between entity and activity. Identity as a disciple is a single state of an ongoing disciple-activity; disciple-activity is a succession of linked disciple-states. Disciplehood is the product of discipling, and discipling is the process of disciplehood. They are synchronic and diachronic views of the same Jesus-related reality.

But it can make a difference whether we focus most on the noun or the verb, the identity or the activity.

Churches and faith communities are full of people who call themselves Christians, who identify as believers, who are quick to repeat the standard phrases and slogans and soundbites that serve as faith-signaling – and who do not act at all in the ways Jesus acts in the Gospels, who do not actively love God and neighbor with the love that Jesus reveals and shares.

Churches and faith communities are full of people who fear they are not living up to Christian ideals, who have internalized certain static images of piety or saintliness or radical justice, and who know all too well they do not themselves fulfill those images, and who often become immobilized in agonizing over the adequacy of their souls and selves and lives.

Churches and faith communities are full of people who construe discipleship in terms of nouns, gifts and attributes and qualities they quote or possess or lack in themselves.

But Jesus in this Gospel invites us to focus instead on the verbs of faith.

Do we catch people? – does our active practice of receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude reach out and draw others into creative and liberative and life-giving relationship?

Do we love deeply? – does our way of receiving others openly and honestly, without judgment and without reproach, as they truly are and as they truly hope to be, allow them to be open and honest themselves, offering what is in their deepest heart, and co-creating with us an abundance of love every bit as miraculous as Simon’s deep-water haul of fish?

Do we perceive generously? – does our spiritual imagining expand our experience, so that we see and feel and know the immediate facts of our lives in their larger context of God’s purposes and aims and love? The vision of Isaiah, described in the first reading for this Sunday, expanded to set ordinary Temple furniture – the altar of incense, the curtain of the Holy of Holies, the flame and smoke and sparks from the incense-fire – in the larger context of divine reality – throne and robe and fire-angels and a burning truth that purified his lips. In that expanded perception Isaiah received his call and offered himself to be an actor of God’s will. Do we engage our spiritual imagining to expand our daily experience into opportunities to perceive God’s creativity and speak God’s blessing and offer God’s compassion and share God’s love with the people and creatures around us?

Do we do the verbs of faith? Whatever nouns or labels or identifiers we may claim – or that may be thrown at us – do we do as Jesus does? It is enacting the process of loving that makes disciples.

Jesus in the Gospel invites us to focus on the verbs of faith. And in a culture saturated with nouns, with things and objects and possessions, with identities and markers and designations, focusing on verbs and activities and energies can seem idealistic, or irrelevant, or even risky. Creating relationship on the basis of common action rather than defining ideology can seem out-of-step with our current social moment. Generous perception and deep love can feel at odds with the reductionism and dismissiveness inherent in so much of the identity-politics groupthink that fuels our present public discourse.

But Jesus says “Do not be afraid.” The important thing is to engage the action. The important thing is to draw others into relationships of receiving and offering in freedom and gratitude. Whether we are labeled progressive or conservative, whether we name our accomplishments as successes or failures, whether our churches are called growing or declining, whether we feel fear of divine activity because we are aware of our too-flawed human nature – all of these are momentary states, passing currents within a larger stream of co-creativity, snapshots taken from the ongoing story of God’s work in us. These states will be followed by other states, and those by other states still; and it is the succession of states taken together, the process of becoming in co-creation with God, that matters.

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says, because “from now on you will be catching people.”

What verbs of faith can you do today?


Paul Nancarrow

The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and blogs on “Transfigurations” at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.