It is in book two when Harry meets Fawkes for the first time in a rather strange encounter. He’s waiting in the headmaster’s office watching this very sickly looking bird when all of a sudden it catches fire. "Professor," Harry gasped. He says, "Your bird - I couldn’t do anything - he just caught fire." Then to Harry’s astonishment, Dumbledore smiled. "About time, too," he said, "He’s been looking dreadful for days. I’ve been telling him to get a move on." (Chamber of Secrets, Chapter 12)

According to the lore of Harry Potter, this particular Phoenix can rejuvenate after being killed, but he also has his "burning days." These are days that it’s simply his time to go. He’s reached that point at which he must return to the dust. Therefore, he bursts into flames and is reborn as a new chick with all the same potential as before.

This story ought to have some ring of familiarity even if books about mythical creatures do not top your list of favorite reading. In the Christian narrative resurrection is the way in which we talk about what it’s like to rise up out of the ashes. The problem is that we tend to pin this theme only on Jesus. We look at his resurrection as something truly unique; therefore, it’s tough for us to think about the ways we are called to live the resurrection life. It’s as though it really doesn’t apply to us, and yet somehow I think it’s the point if we truly want to be followers of the way of Jesus.

The resurrection life has two parts to it - the absolute certainty of death and the hope of the abundance of life - the fire and the rebirth. In our typical ways of thinking, it kind of surprises me that the two lectionary texts read by Seth and Pierce this morning are even put on the same Sunday. The Old Testament reading is the call to Isaiah, and if you read all the verses, the call is made clear that Isaiah is supposed to announce to the chosen people that God doesn’t even want them listening anymore if they’re just going to continue doing what they’ve been doing. This call has also been set to music in the hymn we love that talks about answering the same question God asks Isaiah, "Whom shall I send?" But the answer has a much different ring in this text. When we sing “Here I Am Lord” we hear that God will break their hearts of stone, but in this passage of scripture, Isaiah is sent to do that by proclaiming the chasm of God’s utter absence. God asks Isaiah to tell the people to shut down all their senses - eyes, ears, mouth, everything so that they might be healed. They need to die in order to live. "How long will this take place?" the people wonder. Until cities lie waste, until houses have no people in them, until everyone is sent far away, and it will be burned over and over and over again until less than a tenth of the inhabitants remain.

We are reluctant to face this part of our story. We wave festive branches on Palm Sunday and we return for Easter’s grand celebration of life, but very few will gather for Jesus’ last meal, even fewer will pass through that long Friday when Jesus suffered, died, and was laid in a tomb - dead. We don’t like the parts of our narrative that let us know that God sometimes has plans for us that we would never choose for ourselves, plans to tear down the parts of our lives that keep us from new growth, to burn us up in the holy flame of renewal. The ecologists among us know that forest fires are good for the forest, but we have a hard time applying that principle to ourselves. The last word of Isaiah 6 is this, "The holy seed is its stump." The grand tree of faith finds hope in being cut down from time to time so new seed can take root from the stump that remains.

The question for us is, "What does this look like for us now?" We could simply bypass the uncomfortable verses about God giving us the cold shoulder again, but we would miss part of our own story. You can’t know the rising of the Phoenix, or really the rising of the Son without knowing the more gruesome parts of the story. Otherwise, our story becomes just another fantasy rather than a story that bears divine truth.

We can learn from Isaiah’s time that we have to leave some things in the ashes, cut down trees, leave cities barren, in order to experience the other side of call that happens in the Luke with the call of the disciples. A few guys are bringing their two boats back to shore when they see someone standing there with a rather large crowd of people around him. This stranger actually approaches them while they are washing their nets after what seems to be a mediocre day at best. Then Jesus gets into Simon’s boat and somehow convinces them to go out again and put out their nets. They humor him by doing so. They haven’t caught a thing all night, so they’re not expecting much. After they did this, they’re nets were full to breaking. They had so many fish that they called their friends in order to get them all into the boats. Simon in particular didn’t know how to respond to this. He was used to scratching out a living. This was too much for him to bear. He immediately says, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!”

The resurrection life promises abundance, and like Simon we don’t know how to take it. Exponential growth scares us – maybe even more than death scares us. There always seems to be a catch when things go “too well.” The Son rises from the grave and we call it the “good news of the gospel” but we don’t expect that to happen again. We pay good lip service to our understanding of life after death – but the idea that we could live the resurrection life right now because Jesus gave that to us as a gift, I’m not sure we’re buying it.

But the story goes that these fishermen were so shocked and astonished that they gave up everything to follow Jesus around just to hear him talk, and see him perform healings, and perhaps even to watch him as he slept. Something transformed in them so that the life of being fishermen was no longer something they could do. They were possessed with this idea that they were part of this new plan to catch bigger fish – for God’s sake.

We live in a time when both types of call are happening all around us, the call to die to the things that keep us separated from God and to be filled with hope for that which seems impossible. Both calls are frightening because they ask us to do something hard – to be open to how God will change us. The Bible is all about the times that God intervenes in human lives. That intervention can be felt as the wrath that burns us up or as the rebirth that gives us hope for the future. Most of the time, we’d rather not be messed with. The stories of the Bible recognize that God is always in control either in tearing us down or building us back up again. Brennan Manning acknowledges that Jesus is the lion who can rip us to shreds, but it also the lamb that will tenderly stay with us as we heal from our wounds.

So perhaps we should take heed to Dumbledore’s observation, maybe we too should “get a move on.” We can sit here and cough and wheeze and hang on to that which is familiar or we can be reborn by allowing God to purify us with the holy fire of renewal. It’s not easy to let go. We don’t always even know where to start the process. But the good news is that it isn’t about us - what scripture teaches is that it’s all about God. It’s about what God is already doing in us and through us. Even if Isaiah was too chicken to say what God was doing, it wouldn’t have changed things. Even if the fishermen had remained fishermen, Jesus would have found the right ones to carry on the story. We can’t stop God’s plan. We can only develop our capacities to see the story happening to us. It is then when the resurrection begins to make sense and becomes a compelling model for how we see our lives.