Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today’s Invitation
Today we invite you to explore transformation and forgiveness in this week’s readings, in light of ecological crisis and collapse in our time; engage our own guilt and despair as we confront injustice, with the help of Óscar Romero; and embody these ideas with the help of the Ignatian Solidarity Network’s “Ecological Examen” and the Catholic Climate Covenant.
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reading 1
In the year of the death of Uzziah, ruler of Judah, I saw YHWH seated on a high and lofty judgment seat, in a robe whose train filled the Temple. Seraphs were stationed above; each of them had six wings: with two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. They would cry out to one another, “Holy! Holy! Holy is YHWH Omnipotent! All the earth is filled with YHWH’s glory.”
The doorposts and thresholds quaked at the sound of their shouting, and the Temple kept filling with smoke. Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed! I have unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips! And my eyes have seen the Ruler, YHWH Omnipotent.” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding an ember, which it had taken with tongs from the fire. The seraph touched my mouth with the ember. “See,” it said, “now that this has touched your lips, your corruption is removed, and your sin pardoned.” Then I heard the voice of the Holy One saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” “Here I am,” I said, “send me!”
Responsorial Psalm
Response: In the sight of angels, I will sing Your praises, O God.
I thank You, Adonai, with all my heart;
I sing praise to You before the gods;
I bow down in front of Your Holy Temple and praise Your Name.
R: In the sight of angels, I will sing Your praises, O God.
Because of Your constant love and faithfulness
Because You have shown that You and Your commands are supreme.
You answered me when I called to You; / with Your strength You strengthened me.
R: In the sight of angels, I will sing Your praises, O God.
All the rulers of the earth will praise You, / Adonai, because they have heard Your promises.
They will sing about what You have done / and about Your great glory.
R: In the sight of angels, I will sing Your praises, O God.
Save me by Your power. / You will do everything You have promised me; Adonai, Your love is
constant forever. / Complete the work that You have begun.
R: In the sight of angels, I will sing Your praises, O God.
Reading 2
Sisters and brothers, I want to remind you of the Gospel I preached to you, which you received and in which you stand firm. You are being saved by it at this very moment, if you hold fast to it as I preached it to you. Otherwise you have believed in vain. I handed on to you, first of all, what I myself received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried and, in accordance with the scriptures, rose on the third day; that he was seen by Peter, then by the Twelve. After that, more than five hundred sisters and brothers, most of whom are still alive, although some have fallen asleep, saw him at once.
Next he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Last of all he was seen by me, as one yanked from the womb. I am the least of the apostles; in fact, because I persecuted the church of God, I do not even deserve the name. But by God’s favor I am what I am. This favor that God has given to me has not proved fruitless. Indeed, I have worked harder than all the others, not on my own but through the grace of God. In any case, whether it be I or they, this is what we preach and this is what you believed.
Gospel
One day Jesus was standing by Lake Gennesaret, and the crowd pressed in on him to hear the word of God. He saw two boats moored by the side of the lake; the fishers had disembarked and were washing their nets. Jesus stepped into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to pull out a short distance from the shore; then, remaining seated, he continued to teach the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Pull out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Rabbi, we have been working hard all night long and have caught nothing; but if you say so, I will lower the nets.”
Upon doing so, they caught such a great number of fish that their nets were at the breaking point. They signaled to their mates in the other boat to come and help them, and together they filled the two boats until they both nearly sank. After Simon saw what happened, he was filled with awe and fell down before Jesus, saying, “Leave me, Rabbi, for I am a sinner.” For Simon and his shipmates were astonished at the size of the catch they had made, as were James and John, Zebedee’s
sons, who were Simon’s partners. Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will fish among humankind.” And when they brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
The Inclusive Lectionary © 2022 FutureChurch. All rights reserved.
The inclusive language psalms:
Leach, Maureen, O.S.F. and Schreck, Nancy, O.S.F., Psalms Anew: A Non-sexist Edition
(Dubuque, IA: The Sisters of St. Francis, 1984).
Used with permission.
Explore
Peace and Justice
As an aspiring ethicist, I have come to know a lot about the burden of guilt. Whenever I tell people what I do for a living, two reactions inevitably follow. First, my conversation partner will offer some version of the obligatory queries “what do you study?” or “what’s your dissertation about?” After I tell them that I study Catholic environmental ethics and spend a minute or two answering follow-up questions about what that means, I often perceive a subtle shift in the other person’s demeanor. They might look down at their feet, drop their shoulders, or let out a beleaguered sigh – all signs that an impromptu confession is coming my way:
“God, I think about global warming all the time, it really worries me. It’s awful what our generation has done to yours.”
“I wish I had a better sense of which things were sustainable and which ones weren’t, you know? It seems like everything has some unethical dimension…Like, if we just have bad and slightly less-bad choices, what’s the point?”
“I really oughta recycle more…”
Time and again, friends and strangers alike have told me about the profound feelings of responsibility, powerlessness, and shame they experience when thinking about climate change and ecological degradation. Though I generally try my best to offer these folks some words of encouragement or advice, it can be hard to know what to say; after all, I share many of their feelings. The overlapping crises of climate change, pollution, and ecosystemic destruction are unlike any other moral challenge humankind has had to face in the past. It’s a truly global problem, too big for any one person or community to tackle alone. At the same time, we in so-called “developed” nations all share varying degrees of responsibility for the crisis – our patterns of consumption and civic participation have a significant part to play in how our environmental future unfolds. Given the scale of this challenge, it can be tempting to give in to despair and write ourselves off as a lost cause, incapable of change and unworthy of redemption.
Today’s readings present us with several figures facing this kind of moral challenge, grappling with overwhelming feelings of guilt and powerlessness in the face of something bigger than themselves. In the first reading we encounter Isaiah in the moment before he receives his calling to serve as God’s prophet. He is struck by a vision of YHWH seated “high and lofty,” surrounded by heavenly powers singing God’s praises with such power as to shake the Earth. In the face of such a sight, Isaiah cries out against his own limitations and failures – he calls himself “doomed,” a sinful member of an immoral society, unworthy to behold the grandeur of God. In response, one of the angels present cleanses Isaiah’s mouth (the part associated with his failure) and tells him that he has been forgiven.
In the second reading, St. Paul tells a similar story of forgiveness and renewal. Before his famous conversion experience described in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul (known then as Saul) committed acts of harm and violence against the nascent Christian community; as he confesses in this passage, he “persecuted the Church of God.” Though he calls himself the least of the apostles on this account, Paul testifies to the redeeming power of God’s grace. Not only was Paul forgiven, he was given a new life, a new community, and a new purpose. As he attests, the forgiveness he received from God and his neighbors was “not fruitless” – transformed in body and soul, Paul took up a new way of being and lived for the good of his community.
The Gospel presents us with a final image of transformative forgiveness, this time for the Apostle Peter. Like the prophet Isaiah, here Peter (called Simon in this passage) and his fellow disciples are confronted by something much larger than themselves: proof of Jesus’s prescience and his power to perform miracles. In this story, the vastness of God’s glory and grace is represented by the abundance of God’s creation when the disciples catch an impossibly large number of fish at Jesus’s direction. Upon seeing this miracle unfold, we are told that Peter is struck with a sense of wonder, which prompts him to announce his own smallness and fallibility. In reply, Jesus tells him not to be afraid, for he is to be given a new life and new purpose – where he and his friends once lived as hunters of actual fish, they now will “fish among humankind” in their capacity as apostles.

Commentary by Katherine Tarrant
Engage Catholic Social Teaching
In each of these readings, we bear witness to a transformation, a radical shift in our subjects’ way of life and way of seeing. Though Isaiah, Paul, and Peter each experience a moment of paralyzing awe at the glory of God and intense guilt for their past sins, they are not permitted to wallow in their shame for long. Forgiven of their sins, each of these men are consoled by God and placed on a new path of action.
When confronted with a moral challenge as deep and complex as the global environmental crisis that faces us today, it can be difficult to move beyond our initial feelings of powerlessness. Indeed, the average individual has good reason to feel like problems such as heightened greenhouse gas emissions or the industrial contamination of ecosystems is beyond their control; case in point, some recent research suggests that 80 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions can be traced to just 57 corporations (Reuters). Nevertheless, many of us still experience a strong sense of culpability when we think about our own consumption habits, the waste we produce, or our particular community’s inattention to the ecological harms suffered by others.
What do we do with these feelings of guilt and disenfranchisement that come with life inside a structurally sinful society? On this matter we can turn to guidance from the recently canonized Óscar Romero, a Salvadoran liberation theologian who wrote extensively on the spiritual relationship between the Poor, the land, and their mutual oppressors. In a journal entry featured in the collected work The Scandal of Redemption: When God Liberates the Poor, Saves Sinners, and Heals Nations, Romero wrote “the land contains much of God, and therefore it groans when the unjust monopolize it,” identifying the use and distribution of the Earth’s bounty as a matter of theological importance (21). That said, in his reflections on social or structural sin more broadly, Romero did not suggest that the mere illumination or denunciation of injustice was enough. Instead, he insisted that “true conversion expresses itself in deeds…it is not enough to say that one repents of a sin; it is also necessary to repair the harm that was done” (59). Put another way, dwelling in a sense of guilt for our participation in injustices isn’t a sufficient act of moral restoration – we must find ways to move forward in the active pursuit of justice.
In each of today’s readings, God does not simply forgive these men and then leave them to their own devices. Forgiveness and consolation are just first steps – the conversion isn’t complete until each individual accepts God’s calling to a new way of life, a new way of being. In Paul’s case this looks like the rectification of wrongs, the restoration and nurturing of the Christian community he once sought to destroy. In our case, this transformation might begin with a sincere assessment of our moral failures, conducted in the spirit of hope rather than despair and shame. Many of us have unnecessarily consumed, disposed, and despoiled the gifts of the Earth in unjust ways; in doing so, we have harmed the human and nonhuman Poor alike. It need not always be so – a path of moral conversion always awaits us.
A Contemplative Exercise
When setting out on a new path, it helps to have a clear and accurate sense of your terrain. I find that the Ignatian Examen – a contemplative exercise involving prayer, reflection, and resolution – is an excellent way to take stock of our interior and social landscapes in times of moral challenge. A new form of this exercise was recently developed by the Society of Jesus in coordination with the Ignatian Solidarity Network dubbed “the Ecological Examen.” Here is a full version of this exercise.
The basic steps are as follows:
- I give thanks to God for creation and for being wonderfully made. Where did I feel God’s presence in creation today?
- I ask for the grace to see creation as God does – in all its splendor and suffering. Do I see the beauty of creation and hear the cries of the earth and the poor?
- I ask for the grace to look closely to see how my life choices impact creation and the poor and vulnerable. What challenges or joys do I experience as I recall my care for creation? How can I turn away from a throwaway culture and instead stand in solidarity with creation and the poor?
- I ask for the grace of conversion toward ecological justice and reconciliation. Where have I fallen short in caring for creation and my brothers and sisters? How do I ask for a conversion of heart?
- I ask for the grace to reconcile my relationship with God, creation and humanity, and to stand in solidarity through my actions. How can I repair my relationship with creation and make choices consistent with my desire for reconciliation with creation?
6. I offer a closing prayer for the earth and the vulnerable in our society.
A Community
The Catholic Climate Covenant is a US-based nonprofit organization that works to inspire, organize, and mobilize the Catholic community to “care for creation and achieve climate justice through the lens of integral ecology.” In addition to coordinating political advocacy campaigns in support of pro-environmental legislation and international agreements, the CCC’s Catholic Energies program helps Catholic organizations switch over to renewable energy technologies and implement energy efficiency solutions. They also provide organizational support to almost 300 “Creation Care Teams” working to address local environmental challenges and take tangible action in the form of educational initiatives, planting events, trash cleanup and more. You can learn more about the organization’s work in your area here.