Sunday, November 17, 2024
Spirit of Hope Lutheran Church, Lincoln, NE
Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
(narrative lectionary)
watch this service online (reading starts around 23:32; children’s sermon starts around 25:38; sermon starts around 34:47)
Reading: Isaiah 6:1-8
For the children’s sermon this morning, we talked about awe in all its forms – from awww to awful to awesome to amazing to overwhelming and terrifying. I asked the kids about times in their lives when they have felt some kind of awe. We talked about how Isaiah must have felt seeing this truly awesome vision. I asked them if they thought they would have responded in the same way Isaiah did, crying out “Here I am, Lord, send me!” And we remembered that God does call us to carry God’s word to the world, even though our call is usually a lot less flashy than Isaiah’s. And while that can still be kind of a scary call, it’s also pretty awesome that we get to share God’s word of love and grace.
Before I went to seminary, I worked for a few years teaching English and basic job skills down at Lincoln Literacy. To this day, other than being a pastor, it is my favorite job I’ve ever had. I loved working there. My coworkers were all really fun people, and I got to work with students from all over the world – refugees, migrant workers, university students, people who had found their way to Lincoln for all kinds of different reasons. And it was really rewarding and satisfying to watch them learning together, gaining confidence in their skills, and building these wonderful new friendships with people from different cultures. Plus, you’d better believe that the class potlucks we had were absolutely epic.
I was fresh off of four years as a Peace Corps Volunteer when I started working at Lincoln Literacy. And it actually ended up being a really great place for me to land after that experience. It’s really weird coming back to your own country after you’ve spent years living somewhere else. You expect home to feel the same, but you don’t realize how much you yourself change during that time. In fact, for that reason, the Peace Corps actually requires that every Volunteer go through Close of Service training – specifically to prepare them for the unexpected culture shock of coming home.
In my case, I remember struggling with things like talking too loud or standing too close to people or accidentally slipping into Spanglish in conversation. In church, during the passing of the peace, it took every ounce of restraint I had to keep myself from going in for the besito on the cheek when shaking hands with people. I just constantly felt a little out of place wherever I went.
The great thing about working at Lincoln Literacy was that everyone was in that same awkward boat. Everyone there felt a little out of place. We were all people living between two different cultures, all of us with a foot on either side – belonging to both and neither at the same time. We were all living in this tension of being between different worlds. And it was nice to know that at least we weren’t living in that tension alone.
I see some of that same kind of tension in our scripture reading for today. We read the dramatic story of the prophet Isaiah’s call to ministry – he has this awesome vision of God’s glory in the temple, full of smoke and thunder and fire. He sees these wild-looking angels flying around God’s throne and singing praises. He even hears the very voice of God speaking to him.
And there’s just no way that kind of experience doesn’t change a person. I can’t imagine Isaiah just casually stepping back into his ordinary life after witnessing something like that. So now he’s caught in that tension between those two worlds – the tension between this glorious vision of God and God’s kingdom, and the reality of the world as it actually is.
And the call he receives from God only pulls him further into this tension. Our reading for today cuts off before we actually hear what God is calling Isaiah to do – and it ain’t easy. Isaiah is called to carry a message to God’s people; and that message is that God is not happy with how they’ve been acting. They’ve had king after king after king, each one worse than the last. The people keep turning away from God and neglecting their neighbors and chasing after other gods.
Isaiah warns the people that they are heading for their own destruction. And he’s not wrong. The kingdom of Israel is about to be conquered by the Assyrians – and then not long after that, the Babylonians will march into Jerusalem itself and burn the city to the ground, temple and all.
Now, I do want to note here that Isaiah is not actually predicting the future, despite how it may sound. I think oftentimes when we talk about prophets and prophecy, we get hung up thinking of stuff like fortune-telling and divination. But there is actually a whole lot more to being prophetic than that. A prophet is someone who proclaims God’s word – especially when that word challenges the ways of the world. A prophet speaks truth to power. And prophets aren’t necessarily able to predict the future, per se – they often warn people that their actions, or their failure to act, will have consequences – but mainly they’re people who know how to read the writing on the wall.
To be a prophet is to live in the tension that exists between God’s kingdom and the kingdoms of this world – not to shy away from it or to ignore it, but to name it. It is to hold a kind of dual citizenship, to live with a foot on both sides of the border between the world that is and the world that God is calling into being. Prophets don’t necessarily always have wild visions like Isaiah; they are simply people who tell the truth about the brokenness of this world, while also proclaiming the hope of the world that God envisions.
So as you might imagine from all this, being a prophet or being prophetic isn’t something that’s reserved for people who lived thousands of years ago. It’s part of our call too. In fact, it’s a call woven into our very baptism, in the promises we remembered just last Sunday: to proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.
And it’s a call that’s more urgent than ever in these days – especially following this incredibly contentious election. For us, being prophetic is going to look like continuing to embody love in the face of division, resisting the temptation to dehumanize the people who disagree with us, and working toward reconciliation.
But it’s also going to mean living into that tension. In the coming years, we are going to be called on to stand firm and resist a lot of things. We will be called push back against policies that demonize our immigrant siblings, to defend the rights and dignity of our trans siblings, to defend the bodily autonomy of women, to organize against policies and practices that endanger the health of our planet, to push back against cuts to programs that provide food and housing and access to healthcare.
And all this we will be called to do without letting our own hearts become hardened in the process, with apathy or hate.
To say it’s a daunting road ahead is putting it mildly. I know I am already feeling exhausted, and I imagine you are too, no matter what your hopes were for this election. But we gather here again and again to remind ourselves that none of us is in this place of tension alone. We are all in this together. And most important of all, God is with us in this work.
So I urge you to let yourself be encouraged by this glorious vision from Isaiah – this vision of a God whose thunderous voice speaks of love and justice, a God who is eternally praised by heavenly creatures, a God who has such fabulous fashion sense that their hem alone is enough to fill a room. We are ambassadors and agents of this kingdom that God is bringing into being, witnessing to God’s vision of a world of peace and bearing God’s redeeming love to the world in all we say and do.
The prophetic call that Isaiah received is a call that we inherit. And I pray that we may also find that same courage within ourselves – courage to cry out, “Here we are, Lord; send us.”
This is the Day 
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