The
awesome presence and power of God, filling us with an uneasy sense of our own
unworthiness, yet calling us out to new dimensions of vocation and
service—that’s what’s portrayed in both of this morning’s lessons.
“In
the year that King Uzziah died” a man named Isaiah goes to the Temple in
Jerusalem to worship God, and perhaps also to mourn the death of his beloved
king. There Isaiah experiences more
than he had anticipated. There,
amidst the dense and mysterious billowing smoke
of incense and of the burning coals of sacrificial fires, Isaiah feels
the ground moving and sees the pivots of the doorways shaking.
There he glimpses, through the smoke, a vision of the living God,
enthroned above and attended by heavenly seraphs calling forth to each other,
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God’s
glory.”
Overwhelmed
by this experience of divine majesty, Isaiah can but confess his own
unworthiness, his own moral frailty. Yet
there then comes over Isaiah both the strong sense that he has been touched by
cleansing fire and forgiven by this awesome God and the strong sense that the
purpose of this vision has been not to dazzle him into submissiveness but to
call him forth into prophetic service. The
voice of God cries out, “Whom shall I send?”
And Isaiah murmurs in reply, “Here am I; send me!”
Some
770 years later, a man named Simon, soon to be called Peter, stands on the shore
of the large lake in Galilee, quite a distance to the north of the Temple in
Jerusalem. Simon, alongside his
partners James and John and their workers, is washing his nets after a long
night of fishing—a night’s work with absolutely no catch to show for it.
Professor
Renita Weems, an African-American biblical scholar teaching at Vanderbilt
University, describes the scene in this way (New
Proclamation, Year C, 2000–2001, Advent through Holy Week [Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2000], pp. 118–119).
The
only thing on the mind of Simon and the other fishers is cleaning up, eating,
and going home to catch some sleep. Quite
unexpectedly, a total stranger approaches them, steps into Simon’s boat, and
seeks to hire it to take him out a little way from the shore so that the crowd
of people who’ve come to hear him teach may see and hear him better.
Unaware
of who the stranger is but eager to make some money so the night won’t have
been a complete waste, Simon agrees to the hire.
Later,
when the stranger finishes his teaching and the time arrives
for him to pay for the boat’s use, he urges Simon and his helpers to
head out into the deep water and let down their nets for a catch.
Well,
Simon’s just been out in those waters all night, and he’s not eager to waste
his workers’ time unfurling and setting their heavy nets all over again.
Still, there’s something about this stranger and the way he's been
teaching that communicates authority, so, addressing this man as “Master,”
Simon complains a little but then accedes.
Somethinginside Simon overcomes his common sense.
So
they go out, they fish, and they net a haul so hefty that they have to summon
the boat of James and John to help pull in the fish. And even then each boat becomes so weighted down by the fish
that it threatens to sink. Quite a
catch! Confronted by the
stranger’s power and prophetic knowledge, Simon falls to his knees before him
and exclaims, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke
5:8)
When
confronted by God’s awesome presence and power, Simon, like Isaiah before him,
comes face-to-face with his own unworthiness.
Yet, Simon also, like Isaiah before him, finds himself being called to
new dimensions of vocation and service. For
Jesus says to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching
people.” Quite a catch!
Quite a call! Catching people!
Professor
Weems notes (ibid.,
pp. 113, 119–120) that experiences of
God like the ones had by Isaiah and Simon Peter are rare.
Most encounters with God do not occur on that scale of magnitude.
The truth is that most of our encounters with the divine are less
memorable, occurring amidst the dailyness of mundane, ordinary existence, while
we’re dressing our children, tidying up our office, driving around town,
sitting in an airplane, visiting a parent in a nursing home, or experiencing a
phenomenon of nature. The veil of
God is pulled back for perhaps but a second or two, and we catch just a fleeting
look at the truth, the truth that illumines ourselves, our pasts, our fears, our
hopes, our calls to vocation and service—and then the encounter is over. Nevertheless, however fleetingly, most of us—somehow,
somewhere, sometime—most of us have glimpsed God and have heard at least an
echo of God’s calling. Professor
Weems urges pastors to share with our congregations whatever experiences of
God’s presence and calling we have had so that our congregations can better
identify and recall their own experiences of God, however fleeting.
So
in response to Professor Weems’s prompting, I’m moved this morning to relate
to you one experience I’ve had of God’s coming to me amidst the mundane
reality of ordinary life, one experience of God’s calling me forth into a new
dimension of vocation. I share my
account in the hope that it may spark in each of you a recollection and
recognition of some time, amidst the ordinary reality of your own life, when God
has called you forth into a new dimension of service.
And I would also note that this use both of Professor Weems’ insights
and of my own story should help us fittingly to celebrate Black History Month.
It
happened on Sunday, March 7, 1965, the first Sunday in Lent.
At the time, I was a graduate student in Old Testament at Harvard, and my
wife Margaret was the Director of Christian Education at a Congregational church
in Arlington, Massachusetts.
That
Sunday evening, like every Sunday evening, we’d met with the twenty-or-so
members of the church’s Senior High Youth Group, for which we were the
advisors. And afterwards we’d
gone home to put up our feet and unwind in front of the television set.
Little did I suspect that before the evening was over God would speak to
me through what I saw on that set to call me from being a couch potato to being
an activist, to call me from merely supporting social justice and the rights of
the oppressed in a passive kind of way to becoming actively engaged in the
struggle.
That
night, the news programs showed us footage from Selma, Alabama, where some 500
black marchers had set out from Brown Chapel AME Church to walk the 54 miles to
the state capital, Montgomery—to march in pursuit of gaining the elementary
right to be able to register as a voter. The
marchers, led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis, were shown leaving Selma across
the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
On
the east side of the bridge they met and were stopped short
by a wall of Alabama state troopers and Dallas County possemen.
The marchers held their ground, and the troopers advanced with billy
clubs, gas masks, and tear gas canisters—at first slowly, then on the run,
plowing into the first marchers, in a flying wedge, with flailing billy clubs.
Next, the mounted possemen spurred their horses forward to catch and
further injure the retreating marchers, as troopers fired off tear gas.
Amidst these scenes of bloody police brutality, I somehow heard God
speaking in my heart, God calling on me to deploy my social concern beyond the
walls of my living room out into the streets.
I
went to sleep that night with quite an uneasy sense of my own weakness and
helplessness in the face of what I’d seen on television and what I’d heard
in my heart. I went to sleep
wondering how in the world I could ever begin to do something that might make a
difference.
The
next morning, Monday, March 8th,
I went as usual to my classes at the university. There I learned that the Divinity School student association
had called a meeting for early that afternoon to respond to the public appeal
made by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for supporters from all over the USA to
converge on Selma by the very next morning.
I decided I should at least attend that student meeting.
At
the meeting, the group voted to pass the hat and pay for 6 students to go to
Selma to stand in solidarity with the victims of brutality and to join in
renewing that march from Selma to Montgomery.
A call went out for volunteers who could leave in a few hours, and, to my
surprise, I noticed that my own hand was raised. And even more to my surprise, I was one of those selected.
My life as an activist had begun.
The
six of us took a red-eye special to Atlanta.
There we rented a car, and drove through the night to cover the 230 miles
from the airport to Selma.
Once there we found our way to Brown Chapel AME Church just as dawn was
breaking. It was Tuesday, March 9th,
and hundreds of brand-new activists had arrived to link armswith Dr. King and
the seasoned workers of the SCLC.
That
morning was the first time I saw Dr. King in person. At the rally, he informed us all that Federal Judge Frank
Johnson had issued an injunction against renewing the march to Montgomery.
King said he had never before gone against a federal judge, but the time
had come for us all “to put on our walking shoes.”
So
2000 marchers—both blacks and others—soon left Brown Chapel and marched to
the Pettus Bridge. There a federal
marshal read to Dr. King the judge’s order, but the line marched forward
across the bridge. Some 50 yards
ahead lay the blockade of troopers. King
brought the line of march to a halt. Well-known
clergy stepped to the head of the column to offer prayers and brief sermons.
Next, everyone sang “We Shall Overcome.”
Then,
in order to avoid another bloody confrontation and to await a more opportune
time, when the march to Montgomery might actually be completed, Dr. King and the
whole column of marchers turned around and went back to Selma.
Ours would not be the group to take that 54-mile trek, but twelve days
later, on Sunday, March 21st,
another, even larger group, 3000-strong, would leave Brown Chapel and within
four days reach Montgomery safely.
But
back to our group and to Tuesday, March 9th.
Throughout the balance of the day, we newcomers talked with old timers,
trying to catch the spirit of the movement.
They warned us to be vigilant, for the danger was quite real.
Indeed, that very evening three white ministers, also from Massachusetts,
were attacked by local white toughs. One
of the three, the Reverend James Reeb, was mortally wounded and became the
second fatality in the Alabama Voting Rights Campaign, the first having been a
young black, Jimmy Lee Jackson.
Our
group of six Divinity School students returned to Boston Wednesday afternoon,
shaken by our encounter with an evil that wore faces the color of our own.
Yet we were committed to playing some ongoing role in furthering the work
of Dr. King.
Upon
my return to Boston, I for the first time read some of Dr. King’s
writings—notably, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
And, as a student of the Old Testament, I heard in it the voice of a
contemporary prophet, calling me, in the name of God, to follow.
During
the past 35 years of my life, I have striven to respond to God’s call to me,
heard first in those ghastly television images from Selma—God’s call to me
to embody Dr. King’s commitment to non-violent activism on behalf of the
outcast and marginalized and to help make credible Dr. King's belief in the
church and Dr. King's belief in its prophetic possibilities.
I
pray that each of you sometime, somewhere, somehow—like Isaiah, like Simon
Peter, like Martin Luther King, like even so ordinary and imperfect a person as
your pastor—may be able to identify in your own life an experience of the
presence and voice of God transforming your perspective and calling you out to
new dimensions of vocation and service.
May
each of you hear the voice of God saying, “Whom shall I send?”
And may each of you be moved to reply, “Here am I; send me.”
Let
us pray:
O
God, You have come to us and called us out.
Help us to identify those times and recall those moments, and to hear
afresh Your invitation to serve in Your name.
Like Isaiah and Simon Peter and Martin Luther King, may we answer Your
call to work on behalf of those in need. In
Jesus’s name, we pray. Amen.
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