Here I Am, Lord!

I spent the summer of 2007 working at the Phoebe Needles Center, which is the camp and conference center for the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia.  As of my ordination process I was encouraged to work at the camp as a counselor and coordinator of our nightly devotions.  At the end of each week we would gather around a camp fire and have something of an extended worship, and each week we sang the song Here I Am, Lord.  I had never heard that song before that summer, but every single time I heard the words I would get choked up.  “Whom shall I send?  Here I am, Lord.  Is it I, Lord?  I have heard you calling in the night.  I will go, Lord, if you lead me.  I will hold your people in my heart.”  That song is a big reason why I am a priest today.

There are two feelings that get stirred in me whenever I hear or sing that song:  a feeling of incredible awe, and a feeling of terrible inadequacy.  The song takes me back to the moment when I was called by God on Thanksgiving of 2006, and I am once more in awe that God would make God’s presence known to me. Now, as then, I also cannot help but also feel that I am the least qualified person to do the work of a priest:  to proclaim the Gospel, to administer the Sacraments, and to walk with and heal the people of God.  What a comfort it has been to realize that every clergy person I know—at least the good ones, that is—has felt the same way. 

I’ll tell you who else felt the same way:  Isaiah, Peter, and Paul.  Those same two feelings that get stirred in me—awe and inadequacy—are also the two themes that run through each of our Scriptures this week. 

The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: "Woe is me! 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!"

--Isaiah 6: 4-8   

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.

--I Corinthians 15: 8-11

Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch." Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets." When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people." When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

--Luke 5: 3-11

In the year King Uzziah of Judah died—roughly 742 BC—a young man named Isaiah was visited by God and called to be a prophet to the people of Judah.  He describes in great detail what that experience was like, and it sounds pretty terrifying.  When confronted with God’s glory he responds:  “Woe is me!  I am lost!”  Some seven centuries later a fisherman named Simon was in the boat with his rabbi, who somehow made it possible for enough fish to be caught in the nets of Simon and his friends that the boats started sinking.  Seeing this play out causes Simon to fall at his rabbi’s feet and declare:  “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  About a decade after that event, in a letter to a troubled church community in Corinth, a man named Paul described himself as “The least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle."

For Isaiah, Peter, and Paul, their initial reactions to encountering the majesty and power of God was their own self-deprecation.  I suppose we might call it humility, but what we see here are three individuals who were utterly petrified upon meeting God because they had long been taught that they were unworthy of such an encounter.  Yet remarkably God does not dismiss them, nor pass judgment on them, but God takes their feelings of inadequacy and transforms them for the purposes of transforming God’s people.  Isaiah is forgiven, emboldened, and given a word to deliver after the seraph—which literally means ‘burning one’—singes his lips with a hot coal, and God issues the call.  Peter is told not to fear and is assured that henceforth he will be catching people, bringing the marginalized to know the love and mercy of God.  And Paul, by God’s grace, becomes a powerful proclaimer of God’s love to the Gentiles.  You see, God encounters human beings, not to condemn and terrify, but to transform and call! 

Brothers and sisters, what we do each week, gathering together, breaking bread and sharing in the Scriptures, is not just some act of remembrance.  The love of God proclaimed in those Scriptures is more than some awesome and awful story.  It is a transformative power!  Look what it did to Isaiah, Peter, and Paul!  Imagine what it will do for you! We often shudder in fear, echoing their words.  We are lost.  We are sinful.  We are the least.  We are not worthy to bear the responsibility of proclaiming God’s redemptive love to the world; we are not even worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under God’s table, to borrow the words from the Prayer of Humble Access.  Well, if it were solely up to us, no, we could not do it; we certainly would not be up to the task. And if it were about our worthiness, well compared to the glory and majesty of God, sure we come up way, way short in that department. Yet as the Body of Christ, assembled together and nourished by Christ’s own body and blood, empowered by the Holy Spirit proclaimed in the Gospel, we are drawn into the circle of God’s grace, made new creatures by that grace, and given the power to share that grace with a hurting world. 

We may not feel like we are worthy.  We may not feel like we can do it.  The awe may seem too overwhelming, the feelings of inadequacy too crippling because our imperfections are too great.  But as Dr. Brene Brown says in her book The Gifts of Imperfection, “imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we are all in this together.”  Broken and wounded, vulnerable, and imperfect, yet forgiven, loved, and called.  Together.  We do not walk the way of love alone.  We do not face the perils of this world by ourselves.  We go together, we go and God leads us by God’s grace, and it is that grace that allows us, like Isaiah, Peter, and Paul, to hold God’s people in our hearts, to proclaim the goodness and love of God, and to transform the world, even as we ourselves are being transformed. Whom shall God send?  Here we are, Lord!  Send us!"