This Time It Is All About You
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11
I began this sermon in fits and starts, writing and rewriting its beginning. I discarded one draft and posted it on my blog in the middle of last week.
I’m not sure why this was a struggle. These texts – from Isaiah and Luke – are among my favorites, and they focus on what I understand as the two central questions of our age. Not just the central Christian questions or, more generally, the central theological questions of our age, but the central paired questions of the age: who are you and what is your purpose? Who are you, and why are you here?
The great and fundamental spiritual crisis of our time is a crisis of meaning, and it is captured in the titles of the past century’s great philosophical texts from Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul to Heidegger’s Being and Time on to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
It emerges from the laments of our poets. From Dylan Thomas’ “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” to Ginsberg’s
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz
To our troubadours who sing about being “born to run,” and who, despite international celebrity and acclaim can sing, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
The best of the singular 20th-century art form, film, give us images like “that guy in the Seventh Seal watching the newly dead dance across the sky while the eye of God blazes at us like the sun.”[1]
Our time. Our age. Our central questions. But also, clearly, questions that have troubled every age and pressed in upon people in different ways in every time.
Perhaps the power of the Isaiah text lies in speaking so personally about such timeless questions. While his vision of seraphs may fall strangely on our modern ears, his experience of call transcends time in it crystal clarity: “whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
“Here I am; send me.”
Against the madness of an age of exile, among a people of unclean lips, this simple declaration: “here I am; send me.”
Against the dying of the light, when the best minds of a generation are destroyed by the madness of the age, is it possible still to utter such a simple declaration? Who can, this day, say so simply, yet with such power and conviction: “here I am; send me”?
Is it you?
Is it me?
A decade ago, when I was struggling mightily with my own sense of call, I can recall sitting in the pews at Maxwell Street Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Ky., and listening to Dana Jones preach about call. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only person in the sanctuary, and that God was speaking through him directly to you. It got your attention.
I don’t know how to do that, but I wish I could this morning, because this is about you. It’s your life that is at stake.
Now I don’t mean your immortal soul; God has that well in hand. But I do mean your salvation – your wholeness in the here and now, to be worked out day by day in fear and trembling. After all, the way you spend your time is the way you spend your life.
Are you doing what you are most clearly called to do? Are you using the gifts that you have been given to be a light in the darkness, to fish for people who are adrift in a sea of despair?
Why should I care about this? I mean, beyond a certain professional obligation and some curiosity, why should I care about your salvation – your wholeness, your communion with God, your place in the commonwealth of the beloved?
Why? Because your salvation is intimately tied to mine; your wholeness is bound up with my wholeness; your hopes shape and are shaped by my hopes. Your laughter and my laughter resound together to echo deep joy; your tears and my tears flow together in rivers of sadness.
We are woven together from many threads into a single strand that binds us to a common destiny.
Salvation may be personal, but it is never private, for we are called not only to live transformed lives but also to be agents of transformation in the life of the world.
Are you doing what you are most clearly called to at that point where your thread joins the larger strand?
If you can sit here this morning and say, “yes,” with clarity and conviction, then thanks be to God.
I wish I could join you in such affirmation. Yet I know that I am not living fully into my own calling because so many others are not living into theirs. If my wholeness is tied up with that of every other one, then in a world of such deep and abiding brokenness I can never be at ease about living into my own calling.
What stands in the way of living into my calling more fully and completely? Well, for one thing, I am, I hope, in the middle of my life. Our callings, announced in our baptism, are not complete until death. It’s a journey that continues in a wondrous array of expressions throughout our days. But, for another, I am often afraid of living fully into my calling, because I am often called to places of risk where I’d rather not go. My own need for comfort and security gets in the way, as does a too-easy cynicism that seems to come with our postmodern age and to which I too often succumb. Cynicism is far easier than love. The escape into clever conversation sometimes masks the call to kindness and generosity. The dreams of consumerism are more tempting than waking up to lives of service.
Nevertheless, we are always called to lives of loving service. That is, ultimately, the Christian response to the questions of our age. Who are you and why are you here? Well, let me pose that question again: who are you?
I am a child of God.
To be child of God means that we are loved, and that we are called to love all those others who are, equally, children of God. So long as our sisters and brothers suffer, we are called to ministry. To various callings, yes, according to our gifts and the world’s deep needs, but we are each and every one of us called to ministry.
Where there is war, we are called to make peace. Where there is sickness, we are called to heal. Where there is loneliness, we are called to comfort. Where there are sisters and brothers wondering lost in a culture of despair and meaninglessness, we are called to bring hope and meaning.
Isaiah heard the voice calling, “whom shall I send and who shall go?
“Here I am, send me.”
Are you doing what God is calling you to? Are you living your calling out in the world? Whom shall I send, and who shall go?
Here I am, send me.
Amen.
[1] Singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn captured the image from Bergman’s film with this line.
I began this sermon in fits and starts, writing and rewriting its beginning. I discarded one draft and posted it on my blog in the middle of last week.
I’m not sure why this was a struggle. These texts – from Isaiah and Luke – are among my favorites, and they focus on what I understand as the two central questions of our age. Not just the central Christian questions or, more generally, the central theological questions of our age, but the central paired questions of the age: who are you and what is your purpose? Who are you, and why are you here?
The great and fundamental spiritual crisis of our time is a crisis of meaning, and it is captured in the titles of the past century’s great philosophical texts from Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul to Heidegger’s Being and Time on to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
It emerges from the laments of our poets. From Dylan Thomas’ “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” to Ginsberg’s
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz
To our troubadours who sing about being “born to run,” and who, despite international celebrity and acclaim can sing, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
The best of the singular 20th-century art form, film, give us images like “that guy in the Seventh Seal watching the newly dead dance across the sky while the eye of God blazes at us like the sun.”[1]
Our time. Our age. Our central questions. But also, clearly, questions that have troubled every age and pressed in upon people in different ways in every time.
Perhaps the power of the Isaiah text lies in speaking so personally about such timeless questions. While his vision of seraphs may fall strangely on our modern ears, his experience of call transcends time in it crystal clarity: “whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
“Here I am; send me.”
Against the madness of an age of exile, among a people of unclean lips, this simple declaration: “here I am; send me.”
Against the dying of the light, when the best minds of a generation are destroyed by the madness of the age, is it possible still to utter such a simple declaration? Who can, this day, say so simply, yet with such power and conviction: “here I am; send me”?
Is it you?
Is it me?
A decade ago, when I was struggling mightily with my own sense of call, I can recall sitting in the pews at Maxwell Street Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Ky., and listening to Dana Jones preach about call. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only person in the sanctuary, and that God was speaking through him directly to you. It got your attention.
I don’t know how to do that, but I wish I could this morning, because this is about you. It’s your life that is at stake.
Now I don’t mean your immortal soul; God has that well in hand. But I do mean your salvation – your wholeness in the here and now, to be worked out day by day in fear and trembling. After all, the way you spend your time is the way you spend your life.
Are you doing what you are most clearly called to do? Are you using the gifts that you have been given to be a light in the darkness, to fish for people who are adrift in a sea of despair?
Why should I care about this? I mean, beyond a certain professional obligation and some curiosity, why should I care about your salvation – your wholeness, your communion with God, your place in the commonwealth of the beloved?
Why? Because your salvation is intimately tied to mine; your wholeness is bound up with my wholeness; your hopes shape and are shaped by my hopes. Your laughter and my laughter resound together to echo deep joy; your tears and my tears flow together in rivers of sadness.
We are woven together from many threads into a single strand that binds us to a common destiny.
Salvation may be personal, but it is never private, for we are called not only to live transformed lives but also to be agents of transformation in the life of the world.
Are you doing what you are most clearly called to at that point where your thread joins the larger strand?
If you can sit here this morning and say, “yes,” with clarity and conviction, then thanks be to God.
I wish I could join you in such affirmation. Yet I know that I am not living fully into my own calling because so many others are not living into theirs. If my wholeness is tied up with that of every other one, then in a world of such deep and abiding brokenness I can never be at ease about living into my own calling.
What stands in the way of living into my calling more fully and completely? Well, for one thing, I am, I hope, in the middle of my life. Our callings, announced in our baptism, are not complete until death. It’s a journey that continues in a wondrous array of expressions throughout our days. But, for another, I am often afraid of living fully into my calling, because I am often called to places of risk where I’d rather not go. My own need for comfort and security gets in the way, as does a too-easy cynicism that seems to come with our postmodern age and to which I too often succumb. Cynicism is far easier than love. The escape into clever conversation sometimes masks the call to kindness and generosity. The dreams of consumerism are more tempting than waking up to lives of service.
Nevertheless, we are always called to lives of loving service. That is, ultimately, the Christian response to the questions of our age. Who are you and why are you here? Well, let me pose that question again: who are you?
I am a child of God.
To be child of God means that we are loved, and that we are called to love all those others who are, equally, children of God. So long as our sisters and brothers suffer, we are called to ministry. To various callings, yes, according to our gifts and the world’s deep needs, but we are each and every one of us called to ministry.
Where there is war, we are called to make peace. Where there is sickness, we are called to heal. Where there is loneliness, we are called to comfort. Where there are sisters and brothers wondering lost in a culture of despair and meaninglessness, we are called to bring hope and meaning.
Isaiah heard the voice calling, “whom shall I send and who shall go?
“Here I am, send me.”
Are you doing what God is calling you to? Are you living your calling out in the world? Whom shall I send, and who shall go?
Here I am, send me.
Amen.
[1] Singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn captured the image from Bergman’s film with this line.
posted by David Ensign at
6:51 AM
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