Last week, we our sermon and worship service were focused on God’s call to Jonah. Jonah didn’t want to do what God told him to do – to warn his enemies the Ninevites of their impending doom. So, Jonah hopped into a ship and tried to flee. Jonah didn’t successfully escape – instead, God caused a storm and Jonah was thrown overboard – after three days in the belly of a fish, he was expelled. He finally did as God commanded. Jonah’s call story is kind of a disaster – he didn’t listen to God and took a lot of prodding and miracles to be convinced to do what God wanted.
Today, we are looking at another call story of a prophet of God – Isaiah. Our reading takes place in 740 BCE, in the year King Uzziah died. Isaiah’s call came to him in the midst of a celestial vision – he visited God’s throne room and had a mystical experience. Listen now to the word of God as it is found in the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 6 verses one through eight:
The Scripture Isaiah 6:1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple.
2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying.
3 And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.
7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
The Message God Calls Isaiah
People respond in different ways when God calls upon them to do work for God. Sometimes, they are ready to jump right in, feet first, and do exactly as God tells them. Other people have the opposite reaction—they try to come up with every excuse in the book as to why they can’t serve God.
The people in our scriptures are a mixed bag. Last week, we focused on the story of Jonah trying to run away from God and run away from God’s call upon him. When God called David to become the king and military leader of Israel, David agreed even though King Saul then targeted him and raised up armies against him. God called Abraham and Sarah to leave the land of their birth and travel to the Holy Land and birth countless people – they followed God’s instructions even though they had trouble believing God’s promises to them about the babies. When God called upon Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt, he threw out several excuses before he finally acquiesced: he thought the Hebrew people wouldn’t follow him, he thought he couldn’t speak well, he thought the Pharoah wouldn’t receive him.....but, finally Moses did as God commanded, and the Hebrew people were indeed freed from bondage.
This morning, we focus on the Prophet Isaiah’s call. Isaiah had a holy vision – he saw the throne room of God.....he was inside of the throne room of God. When Isaiah realized where he was, he was horrified.... he believed he wasn’t worthy of being in God’s presence because of the sins he had committed in his past. A seraph took a live coal – a burning coal – and touched it to Isaiah’s lips. The seraph then proclaimed that Isaiah’s sins were forgiven. And, then God asked the question - “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” Isaiah, no longer guilty and no longer afraid, responded, “Here I am. Send me.”
It is sometimes difficult for us to bravely respond to God’s call in our lives. When we choose to be Christians, we must choose to live differently than our non-Chrisitan friends and neighbors. We choose to follow Jesus’s commandments – to love God with our heart and soul and mind and strength and to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. When we love God with our whole heart, we choose to make our relationship with God central in our lives -- so God takes priority over our families, over our jobs, over money, over our phones, over our friends. Our relationship with God is work for us – we must cultivate our prayer life, read the Bible, spend time with like-minded Christians, and learn about theology. When we chose to become a Christian, or recommit to the Christian faith, God becomes a priority for us.
When we follow God’s call in our lives, we chose to live our faith – to put our faith into action. So, we must resist the ways of the world. We are God’s workers here on earth and are called to tasks of service to others on behalf of God. We must work to care for people who are hurting and vulnerable – phone new widows, check on elderly neighbors, bring soup to a friend who is undergoing cancer treatment. We are called to be attentive to our neighbors who live next to us and our neighbors who live across the world from us. We are called to be other-focused – other-focused when our brains and our bodies were created to be selfish....so every day, we make choices about whether or not to go with our selfish and self-centered tendencies or to take on challenges that help other people more than they help us.
Sometimes we feel like Isaiah – we think that because of our past sins and wrongdoing, we are not worthy to serve God. We feel shame or guilt about what we have thought or done in the past and we allow that feeling to paralyze us – we fear we are not good enough and therefore shouldn’t serve God.
The Bible is a book full of stories about broken, messed up people who served God. Our religious leaders, our role-models in the faith, were not always good guys – David was a murderer, Rahab was a prostitute, Jonah was a coward, Paul encouraged the murder of Christians, Noah was a drunk, Jacob schemed and tricked his brother out of his inheritance, Mary Magdalene may have had an unsavory past. Every week, when we focus on stories of our faith as we worship, we hear about broken people stepping forward and doing work on behalf of God despite their brokenness.
We must remember that we are followers of the God of love. God loves us even though we are broken. God loves us even when we make mistakes. God knows we will fail – some days we really mess up - -but every day we get at “do-over.” God uses broken people, people with unsavory pasts, sinners, to do work on God’s behalf. The only person who walked the earth who was perfect was Jesus – the rest of us are perfectly imperfect.
So, my friends, when God calls upon us to take risks for our faith, to step up, to step out, and to be brave, we must shake off our doubts and channel Isaiah and say, “Here I am, send me.”
Let us do so today and all days. Amen.