Sermon - The Call of God
Isaiah 6:1-8 and Luke 5:1-11 (Actual text given at the end.)
A sermon preached by John Hull on February 4th 2007 in the Chapel of the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham, to mark the end of a residential course on the Mission of the Church in Britain.
Our theme this afternoon as we have heard from the two readings is the call of God.
I have heard it said that the call of God is a bit like the call of the sea. It may not be very specific. It may not be a call to this ocean or that ocean, or to this particular port or that one; it is more like a restless, yearning, which can only be satisfied by going to sea.
So it is with the call of God, but never the less, we become aware of the call in the particularity of our actual lives and circumstances. I want to point out the different ways the call of God may come to us, and I will begin with an account of how I myself had a very vivid experience of the call.
Some years ago, I got interested in the theology being written by people in Asia. It was while I was reading this that I came upon the Minjung theology of South Korea. This is a distinctive, indigenous understanding of Christian faith and its mission as perceived by the ordinary people, the Minjung, for this means ‘the people’, and not only the people, but the oppressed people, the poor people, who are kept in a state of more or less bondage by the social and economic system.
Then I received an invitation to lecture in Seoul at the celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of the Minjung Educational Institute. While I was there, I tried to discover how the Minjung theology had begun. I knew it was a response to the history of colonisation and oppression experienced by Koreans at the hand of their powerful neighbours, and also by the military governments of the country itself since the end of the Korean war. But I did not know the details.
One of the leading Minjung Christian educators took me out to lunch, and I asked him how it all began. He explained that it was a response to the suffering of the ordinary people at the hands of the repressive dictators. ‘Yes’, I asked, ‘but that had been happening right through the sixties and seventies; but the Minjung theology did not emerge before about 1978, so why was it so late?’
My friend explained that in 1978 the government had swooped down on the protest movements. Hundreds of journalists, broadcasters, artists, poets, and trade union leaders had been arrested, and among them were also many priests and ministers. ‘I was one of them, and we were all thrown into prison. I myself spent six months in prison’.
‘Why was that important for the change in your theology?’
‘Well, you see, up to that point, we had been writing our theology in the comfort of our studies and libraries. Now we were thrown in with the very people about whom we had been writing: the persecuted, poor.’
My friend went on to tell me that he had been confined to his cell for 23 and a half hours a day, only permitted a 15 minutes exercise break in the morning and another one in the afternoon. During one of these breaks, he became aware that there was a noise coming from a cell on the far side of the exercise yard. It was a young man of about 19 or 20, and he was banging on the bars of the cell door and crying out ‘Mother, mother of mine, why did you give me birth into such a world as this!’
‘When I was taken back to my cell, these words continued to ring in my mind. I knew about this young man. He had been arrested for stealing a loaf of bread from a street vendor. Now he would spend a long time in prison, and would probably disappear.
The only book they allowed us to have in prison was the Bible. I began to read the Bible again, this time with the cry of that young man ringing in my ears. I realised that that cry had been sounding out for many years, for centuries, and no one had heard it. I then began to realise that the Bible is the story of this cry, and of the reply of God. That was how the Minjung theology was born’.
If we turn now to the two passages read to us, one from Isaiah and the other from the Gospel of Luke, we see both similarities and differences in the way the call of God was experienced. Isaiah was called in the temple, Peter and the other disciples in the midst of their ordinary work; Isaiah was called during a time of political upheaval and uncertainty, when the king had died, whereas Peter was called from the routine of a working day. Isaiah was called through an experience of death, the death of King Uzziah, and from my knowledge of the lives of men and women here in the Foundation, I know that there are some who have been called into ministry through a sad experience of death, the death of a loved one.
One striking feature of these stories of call is the reaction of those who were called. They all reacted with a sense of worthlessness. Isaiah realises that he is someone with impure lips, Peter that he is a sinful man; Moses responded by saying that he could not speak because he had a stammer, and Jeremiah protested that he was only a child!
We must be careful not to read these stories as if people in the ancient world had the same kind of internal, highly individualised consciousness that many of us have today. There is no indication that Isaiah or Peter were thinking of personal wrong-doing committed in their earlier lives, or that they were repenting of past sins. They do not appear to have felt guilty in the modern sense. Isaiah realises that his speech, his language, is contaminated, and that this is true of the speech of his fellow citizens. ‘I am someone with impure speech, and I live in the midst of a people of impure speech’. He has a kind of linguistic awakening. It is not that he had used what we would call ‘bad language’. It seems to be a deeper sense of the superficiality and falsity of speech as a whole.
What happens then is that one of the angels takes a live coal from the fire before the altar, and holding it with a pair of tongs, brings it to Isaiah and places it on his lips. It is horrifying to imagine what a hot coal would do if held against the lips, and I have often wondered what was this place where language on the lips experienced a sort of meltdown. I believe that the name of that burning coal is Hiroshima, its name is Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Baghdad, the places of horror, where human speech is torn, and one can only respond by sensing the silence of horror, beyond the power of words to express.
In the case of Peter, it is different again. Peter cries out that he is a sinful man, but it is noticeable that he does not ask for forgiveness, nor does Jesus offer it. Peter is not seeking forgiveness; he wants separation! He says ‘Depart from me’!’
This rings bells with me. Have there been times in your life when infuriated at the stubborn stupidity of someone, frustrated at the ultimate breakdown of a relationship, you have shouted ‘ Get out of my life! Just go away! For God’s sake, just get out!’
Well, that was how Peter felt. Depart from me! Get out of my life! And the remarkable thing is that Jesus ignores this appeal. Jesus does not respond. He ignores the cry for separation, and simply says, ‘Get up and follow me’.
Now these beautiful passages of scripture mean different things to different people. What this passage says to me may not be what it says to you, and what it says to you may not be the same as what it says to the person sitting next to you. But what it says to me is:
Stop being so pre-occupied with your own unworthiness! Get up on your feet and follow your Lord!
John M Hull is Honorary Professor of Practical Theology
at The Queen's Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham.
Isaiah 6:1-8
1. In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3. And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!"
4. And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. 5. And I said: "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
6. Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7. And he touched my mouth and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for." 8. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here am I! Send me."
Luke 5:1-11
1. On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2. and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat.
4. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch." 5. And Simon answered, "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." 6. And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7. They signalled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink.
8. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." 9. For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10. and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men." 11. And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.