Delivered Sunday, May 27, 2018 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Arlington, Virginia
Texts: Isaiah 6:1-13, Romans 8:12-25, John 3:1-17
Audio
Today, according to the Ecclesial Calendar, is Trinity Sunday. I’m a big fan of the rhythm of the church year, marked, as it is, with periods of preparation and anticipation, as in Advent and Lent, celebration in Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and, at least in the Protestant tradition, a long slog beginning next Sunday in which we simply count off the Sundays, either as Sundays after Pentecost, or as “Ordinary Time.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It is important, or so I am frequently told, to live in the moment. So here we are, a Sunday dedicated to one of the greatest acts of mental gymnastics in Christian Theology: the notion that God is, somehow, simultaneously three and one. I stand by my statement last month that the question of precisely when in the Easter Story the relationship between God and humanity changed has received the most ink over the generations of Christian theologians, but it was Trinitarian questions that led to the bulk of the early church councils. After the question was “settled” sometime around the fourth century theologians, by and large, let the doctrine be. (I can’t resist one side note: if ever a word deserved an asterisk, it’s my use of “settled” just now, and rather than burrow down this rabbit hole, I’ll just point to the Unitarians and stop.)
As is increasingly often the case, a great example of this lives on the internet: a video called “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” by Lutheran Satire. In the video, St. Patrick attempts to explain the Trinity to a pair of Irish twins using analogies, only for the twins to promptly point out that each analogy is, in fact, part of some ancient church heresy.
For those who were paying attention during the Children’s moment, the analogy I used is, technically, a heresy called “Modalism” or “Sabellianism” and Sabellius, one of its main proponents, was excommunicated for teaching it in the year 220. So, I hope the Session will forgive me for leading your children astray…and for joining the chorus of theologians who simply prefer to walk away from this topic, and to focus on something other than the triple repetition of “Holy” or the change from singular to plural in “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us” in our text from Isaiah.
Yes, 300 words on the Trinity is my limit. I recognize there is some irony in that number.
Instead, I want to talk about Calling and Sending.
The passage we read from Isaiah this morning is sometimes referred to as “The Calling of Isaiah” because it describes the origin of his service to God as a Prophet. It is similar to several other Calling texts, including the calling of Moses, Gideon, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Beyond these 5, there are other many other call stories throughout scripture—it’s a genre in itself.
It is such a strong theme that Presbyterian congregations, as well as congregations of some other denominations, do not hire Pastors. They call them. Pastors don’t have employment contracts, they have “Terms of Call.” This is not just true for Pastors: many other church staff also use language of call. It goes even beyond staff. I know I’ve talked to church members here at Trinity and elsewhere who have used call language to describe their involvement with particular-ministries.
I know there are cynics who would say that this is all just the adoption of in-group jargon, meant to signal belonging, but I do think it has significance beyond simple signaling. I know many people, and not just people serving in church-related vocations, who describe powerful feelings of call, even compulsion into particular ways to serve God and humanity, and a strong sense that said service brings them into closer relationship with God.
It’s not uncommon for these stories of calling to follow a similar pattern to the one described by Isaiah.
The feeling of terror Isaiah must have felt as the temple shook and filled with smoke from the voices of the fiery Seraphs (In Hebrew, Seraph shares a root with the verb “to burn”) is not uncommon, especially among those for whom accepting that call means significant change to career, location, or even just the departure from a preconceived idea about what one’s future will look like. Everyone remembers Jonah ending up in the whale, but we should also remember that he ended up there because he literally tried to run away from God…the whale was sent to bring him back.
Neither is it uncommon for that fear to come from a feeling of unworthiness: Isaiah says, “I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” This feeling of not being good enough is incredibly common. It recurs throughout scripture, it was a central driver of Luther’s program of church reform that launched the Reformation, and recently it is sometimes dubbed “Imposter Syndrome.”
But we are also reminded throughout Scripture that our flaws do not solely define us. Adam and Eve were only given one rule. Moses encounter with the burning bush occurred while he was fugitive for murder. David’s flaws are too numerous, and perhaps too salacious to list, yet he was called by God to be King. The disciples of Jesus? As Ben reminded us recently, that was a group that included people advocating for armed rebellion against Rome as well as a Roman tax collector, and when they aren’t bickering amongst themselves over their own greatness are often wildly missing the point. Paul was literally on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians when he was called by God.
This is the one of the core messages of the Gospel: God does not only call, or even save, the worthy. And, fortunately, it’s very rare, possibly even unique to Isaiah, for the removal of guilt and atonement of sin to require kissing a burning coal. That was what Isaiah needed to gain the confidence to respond to God’s call. God meets each of us where we are and offers up whatever it is we need to have the confidence to respond, as Isaiah ultimately does, with “Here I am, Lord. Send me.”
And, even after accepting that call, it’s not at all uncommon for us to express our doubts. At one point, God asks Jonah how he’s doing, and Jonah responds that he is “angry enough to die.” Jesus laments on the Cross. Isaiah hears that his job is not to save the people, but to “make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes.” Because “otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed,” and he responds with “How long, O Lord?” which I assume sounded something more like “Oh God, how long do I have to do this?”
I doubt Isaiah was particularly pleased with God’s answer, a promise of ruin and exile, and sometimes this is true of us as well. Responding to God’s call does not guarantee an easy path. One of my best friends is a pediatrician for the Army. I know she feels that work is where God is calling her to be, in part because not only did she tell me that, but she said that to the interview panel when she was applying to her residency. I also know that, for all the joy she gets from helping children feel better, from going into the hospital nursery to just sit and hold babies, there are days when treatments don’t work, or aren’t possible, days when the options are limited, and she feels like all she gets to do is deliver bad news.
This too, is sometimes part of being called, but it is important to remember that even in the midst of our worst days, God is still with us, and we still have the promise of something better to come.
I fully expect that many of you can, and do relate to all of much of what I’ve just said. There is a reason call language resonates so strongly both within and outside of the Church.
Sometimes it resonates so strongly that we that we apply it even to stories where it doesn’t quite fit.
Stories that don’t even contain the word “call”
Stories like Chapter 6 of Isaiah.
God does not call Isaiah. God sends him.
In our text from John today, a text containing perhaps the most famous line from the New Testament, often described as the one sentence summary of the Gospel” For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The next sentence continues, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Send language.
In writing this sermon, I poked around Google a bit to see what kinds of distinctions others had made between “call” and “send” language in the Church. One pattern that emerged is that many consider “call” to be either more general, or an initial step, while “send” is a more specific, often later step.
For example, Paul’s encounter with the Ascended Jesus on the Damascus Road was his calling into ministry, but it wasn’t until later that he was “sent” to his specific ministry to the Gentiles. In the same sense, a person might decide to go to Medical School because they are called to be a doctor, but it isn’t until they have graduated and are properly licensed that they are “sent” to practice medicine.
I see value to this distinction, but I it misses something that I think is key.
Call is inward language.
Send is outward language.
We are called into community with each other and with God. This is true whether the community we are called into is a small office, or the entirety of humanity.
We are sent out to participate in change.
Often, we begin worship each Sunday with a Call to Worship. We end it with a Charge and Benediction, or a “sending.”
Call and Send language are constantly intermingling.
If we use only the language of call, we run the risk of turning our focus too sharply inward.
If we use only the language of send, we risk remaining outsiders, sent to achieve a task or accomplish a goal, but we can’t truly be sent into community: Becoming part of a community, whether an old one nearby, or a new one far away requires that community to call us in. Paul may have been sent to preach the Word to the Gentiles, but we know from his letters that, as he travelled, communities responded to his ministry by calling him in.
God is constantly both calling us into deeper relationship with God and sending us to be agents of God in the world. When we respond to that sending as Isaiah did, with “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” We are being simultaneously sent out by God from one place and called into another.
Within this duality of send and call there is no tension or competition. In that way, it’s much like the Trinity.
So, perhaps you are, like me, so deeply Presbyterian in outlook that “send” language at first felt, or even still feels alien. Perhaps you have come to us from another tradition which focuses on “sending” and still feel a little confused by all this “calling” we talk about here. Perhaps you’ve never thought about this before. All of that is fine. I’m not trying to take anything away, but rather to give you another tool, because each of us will, at some point in our lives, feel that God is either calling or sending us somewhere, and whatever language we use to describe it, what matters is that our response begins with “Here I am, Lord.”