Sermon 2/6/2022 “Here am I!”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection, Alexandria, Virginia
Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
Day: 5Epiphany, Year C
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Our lesson from Hebrew scripture today is about a prophet named Isaiah and his call to serve God. Isaiah must have been very upset. Uzziah, the king for whom he worked, was dead after a very successful 52-year reign. Isaiah must have worried about his own future, deprived of the patronage of this king—one of Israel’s greatest.
Then Isaiah had a vision of God that set him on a new course in life. Isaiah’s vision made him realize how small he was compared with God. Isaiah saw God in God’s realm—surrounded by seraphim, angels who spend most of their time in God’s presence praising God. Seraphim cover their faces with two of their six wings, so as not to look directly at God. They call “Holy, Holy, Holy” to each other, both in recognition that they are in the presence of the divine but also, perhaps, as a warning to all who approach God. Doesn’t recognizing God’s presence always demand something of us? If not our very life, doesn’t being in the divine presence require a mission of us of some kind?
Think about when YOU might have been overcome with a sense of God’s awesomeness and holiness.
- You parents, when you first saw your newborn child, perhaps you were aware of the splendidness and immensity of the gift of new life and your new role as a parent.
- You who love the great outdoors, perhaps you have been awed and amazed at the grandeur and beauty and abundance of nature, challenging you to be stewards of God’s creation.
- You who love music, when you hear a composition that evokes powerful feelings within you, perhaps then you become overwhelmed by a sense of the holy.
At these and other such moments when we are struck anew by the immensity of all that God has made, we “see” God by recognizing his handiwork. Often such moment invoke a call to action within us.
Isaiah had such an encounter with the presence of God, and the awe he felt at first turned to fear. “What would God want of me?” he must have wondered, and “Is this the time I am to die?” At such a moment, facing God, Isaiah was overcome with a sense that he was not worthy to be in the presence of his creator. Specifically, Isaiah acknowledged that he was not “holy, holy, holy,” but sinful, a person of “unclean lips.”
Think about who Isaiah had been: An official in the King’s court, an agent of the king. We might today think of Isaiah as having been a member of the diplomatic corps or even in the king’s intelligence service. We don’t know his actual function on behalf of King Uzziah, but it wouldn’t be an unreasonable guess to think that Isaiah’s duties would have involved deception of others at times. Unclean lips.
In whatever way Isaiah’s self-perceived sinfulness had manifested itself, in whatever way Isaiah might have kept his sins secret, he knew that God knew all about him.
God must have agreed with Isaiah’s self-assessment of sinful lips. That’s why he sent one of the seraphs to purify Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal, symbolizing his change of character. Today we also experience and recognize what people in Isaiah’s time must have experienced and recognized, as well: God makes able those he calls.
And so, Isaiah would have known that this kind of transformation meant God had something in mind for him to do. And sure enough, Isaiah began to hear God’s question: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
Isaiah’s answer has earned his story’s place in countless ordination services ever since: Isaiah stepped forward in faith, proclaiming, “Here am I!” The word that Isaiah used is the word that Abraham gave when God called him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac; it’s the word the boy Samuel used when God called him in the middle of the night. In a way, Jesus’ mother Mary gave the same response, albeit in different words, “Let it be according to your will.”
When God told Isaiah what he wanted him to do, the task was difficult. We didn’t hear the mission that God entrusted to Isaiah because I want to focus on his call. So let me summarize the difficult mission God gave this new prophet: God wanted Isaiah to tell the people they should listen to God, see God at work in the world, comprehend what God wanted them to do, turn from their false ways, and heal themselves and others. The difficult part is that God told Isaiah that his prophesying would be in vain.
“I have a mission for you,” God was telling Isaiah, “You are going to fail at it, but I want you to do it anyway.” A difficult assignment, indeed!
Jonah had been given this type of mission and his ego kept him from saying “Here am I, send me.” Isaiah, as it turned out, was undaunted in his “Here am I!” He had experienced the awesome presence of God and was ready to do what God asked of him, no matter what.
Our own discerning seems a bit shallow in comparison to Isaiah’s encounter with God. And yet when God calls, we respond as best we are able. And God counts our willingness and faithfulness as righteousness and makes us able to do what God calls us to do.
Today, in our empty culture of death and greed—children being killed in their schools, with people of color and police officers both being killed simply for breathing, and houses that cost millions of dollars while people starve—in THIS culture, who will God call into prophetic action?
Isaiah had his call, and you and I have ours. Grounded and strengthened by the awesome presence of God, don’t we each say, “Here am I” when God calls? And, at Church of the Resurrection, “Here we are, send us.”
