Sermon for Sunday June 7th

Here I Is!
Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
Rev. Dr. John E. Manzo
June 7, 2009

When I was a child when of my favorite things to watch on television were the old Little Rascals shows. I grew up watching Spanky, Alfafa, Buckwheat, Darla, and their dog Petey. In one episode they were playing Romeo and Juliet and the response to “Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” turned out to be “Here I is.”

For a while I didn’t get that this was funny. I hadn’t realized that “Here I is,” was an improper use of the infinitive ‘to be’ and that the correct response would have been, ‘Here I am.”

All of which makes you wonder what this has to do with these lines from Isaiah speaking of the call of Isaiah in the year King Uzziah died. King Uzziah, one of the kings of Judah, died about 750 years before the birth of Jesus and the first of three prophets named Isaiah speaks of his call.

The call of Isaiah is fascinating, dramatic, and very atypical of most call narratives in the Bible. It’s a ‘here I is’ narrative in terms of the fact that Isaiah does something no one else does. He says, “Here I am, send me.”

Most call narratives, be it Moses, Peter, second Isaiah, or Jeremiah, generally have the person called not wanting to be called. Jeremiah’s call was, ‘I am too young; get someone else. Moses proclaimed that he was too inarticulate----get someone else.

But here is Isaiah, ‘Send me!!!’

This issue of saying, “Here I am,” accepting God’s call is a big deal. There are things that go along with this.

First, God calls everyone to something. We often make a mistake in church in relegating God’s call only to clergy. Everyone is called to serve God in some way.

In St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians , Chapter 12, he writes that there are a variety of gifts that are given by the Holy Spirit to people within the church. Different people have different gifts but no one is exempt from God’s gifts.

Last Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, a day we celebrated the coming of God’s Holy Spirit into the Christian Church. With the coming of the Holy Spirit, however, there comes gifts that people have. And everyone has them.

In my second church we had a man, the Sexton or custodian or building engineer of the church, whatever you wanted to call him. He was more than any of these things; he was the resident miracle worker. There was more than one Sunday we had Worship not because I was there, or because the choir was there, or the organist was there, but because he got the furnace going or the lights on or something with the plumbing fixed.

One Sunday he performed a particular miracle getting the furnace going. He was the one and only reason we were able to have Worship that Sunday.

I recall looking out at the congregation that morning and he was sitting next to his wife and his children and grandchildren were around him and he was quietly praying with his eyes closed and his head down. It struck me that he was just a quiet, humble man who served God by caring for the building.

I was still young and cocky enough to take myself very seriously, but he struck a chord that day. Everyone is called and everyone has gifts.

Secondly, people ought to listen to God’s call with great humility.

The author, Phillip Yancey once visited an Amish home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and had dinner with them. He learned how it is the Amish call a pastor.

Now this is a different universe than the one we live in. The Amish, customarily only attend school until the 8th grade and so one who pastors in an Amish community has more than an 8th grade education, and has no college and no formal theological training.

They also do not seek outside of their own community or circle. It is always going to be someone from their own congregation----and it’s literally a congregation of people because they Worship in each other’s home. They do not have church buildings.

The Amish gather and each person votes for a man, in their tradition it is only men, and then all the men who get at least three votes are invited to sit at a table.

Hymn books are passed out randomly to the men and inside one of those hymn books is a card telling that person that he is now the pastor.

Yancey asked, “What if the person selected doesn’t feel qualified?”

The Amish man simply said, “If he did feel qualified, we would not want him.”

There is a marvelous theological premise that says that God does not call the qualified; but qualifies the called. God does not choose people to serve because they earned that right; God calls people and challenges people to live up to that calling.

Moses, when he stood in God’s presence, was told to remove his sandals because he was on holy ground. Indeed. We all need to serve God with that kind of humility.

Lastly, we serve not knowing what life brings us.

Yesterday was the 65th Anniversary of D-Day when the Allies invaded France to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis.

I watched a program, recently, where two men were interviewed. They were elderly men and both survived that day. One was an American soldier who came ashore, and one was a German machine gunner.

They both had a lot in common. They were both loyal to their countries and were fighting for their countries and felt called to do so. They were both devout Christians. And they were both terrified.

Both men recounted the horror of the day and both men said that they did two things while firing their weapons. They prayed constantly and could not stop crying.

Two men. Faithful Christians and loyal to their country and both terrified for where they found themselves.

Being called is not unlike this. When we put our lives in God’s hands, when we listen to a call and try to live it out, we never know where we are going to end up and what situations we will find ourselves in.

God calls and we are invited, like Isaiah, to say, “Here I am.” But remember, it might even be better to be a little incorrect and say, ‘Here I is,” because we never quite know where it is we are going to go.