Getting the Summons
Text: Isaiah 6:1-8 and Luke 5:1-11
As some of you already know, shortly after Christmas, I received a letter in the mail. It’s one of those letters that everybody gets at least once in their life, and for whatever reason, we’ve come to dread it. No… it wasn’t a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency seeking to audit me… it was a summons to jury duty. This was a first for me. Never having been involved in the court system at all, I really didn’t know what to expect. It felt like such an inconvenience, as it could occupy a fair bit of my professional time… and not only that, I had an obligation to it. If I didn’t show up on a given date at a given time, I could actually run afoul of the courts themselves. Think of it this way, if I didn’t do anything, I could actually be in some pretty serious trouble.
So I went.
I found myself reflecting on the summons to jury duty in a similar way to God’s call to us. It was in the back of my mind, especially as people in the jury panel were called forward. Many of them provided reasons or excuses to the judge as to why they would not be able to serve. In most cases, the judge did excuse them from service in this jury, but quickly added that it didn’t excuse them from serving on another jury in the near future. While I was tempted to provide a reason as to why I could not serve, I really couldn’t think of a reason why this would impose excessive hardship on myself… plus I was actually really curious as to how the whole thing would pan out… and how could I talk about God’s call as a summons if I had tried to get out of it. As it happened, my name was drawn from the jury panel, and I did step forward… but the defense likely thought that having a minister on the jury wouldn’t be in the best interest of the defendant… So my jury duty ended with the word “challenge.”
As we make our way through the season of Epiphany, the stories are about God revealed in our midst… yet as we get closer to Lent, these epiphany stories begin to sound more and more like God’s call to us… a summons. In the midst of me ranting last week about 1st Corinthians, there was this subtle little story of Jeremiah’s call… we closed the worship with “Here I am Lord” as a way to anticipate what we would hear today. Last week it was Jeremiah, this week it’s both Peter and Isaiah, who come face to face with a summons from God.
These days, especially when we get a court summons, our first instinct is to get out of it, to find a reason an excuse as to why we cannot serve. It’s an inconvenience… it takes away from our “real” jobs… an annoyance. On the other hand, we don’t really feel that we’re up to it… let someone else do it. It’s not surprising that we often have the same reaction when God calls us. From this morning’s two stories, one from Isaiah, one from Luke, the one who comes face-to-face with God’s call have that same initial reaction. They don’t feel worthy… Isaiah is literally scared for his life… Peter says to Jesus “Get away from me for I am a sinful man!”
I think that both Peter and Isaiah react to their own summons from the starting point that somehow God is out to “get” them. There is this long held notion that no one can stand in the presence of God and live. Yet in both cases, both Isaiah and Peter not only live, but they come away changed… having learned something about God in the process. We hold these two as great leaders in the faith… but when we encounter them in these stories they’re nobodies… they haven’t done anything yet… Isaiah is simply Joe Average who happens to be visiting the temple as Israel mourns the death of their King… Peter is a humble fisherman trying to eke out a humble existence on the shores of a small obscure lake. Neither of them saw themselves as great, or worthy of God’s attention… but both of them found themselves called, or better yet, summoned to something greater.
More often than not we talk about God’s call as something that happens to other people. More often than not it seems that we limit it to people who wear funny gowns and climb into the pulpit Sunday after Sunday. There are many congregations out there that are dying a slow, painful death, because somehow we’ve gotten into this mindset that it’s somebody else’s job. It’s their job, it’s their task… we say. For the rest of us, we try to eke out our own existence wherever we are, paying our bills, doing taxes, working on building up our RRSP for retirement. It’s how we’ve come to set our priorities. Let someone else do it… let someone else lead youth group, let someone else help teach our children about faith, let someone else go help feed the hungry, clothe the poor. After all, isn’t that we pay someone else to do for us?
It’s not surprising really. Our society has long since become a professional society, in which we usually pay someone else for their services… to do the work for us… Whether it’s gathering food, manufacturing goods, or providing some sort of service, our expectation is that it IS somebody else’s job. After all, that’s what we pay them for, and we expect value for our money! Yet in this midst of this whole cultural mindset, those of us in the church wonder why we often have a hard time finding people to do the work of ministry. That professional mindset that we have here in North America finds its way right into our own pews.
Yet each week, we hear story after story from scripture of something different. As much as we would like to think it’s the stories of great people who lived way back then, it’s not! The Bible is rife with stories of very ordinary people like you and me suddenly realize they have come face-to-face with the living God. In this encounter that they realize that God is calling them, by name, to do something. It’s no wonder that their reaction is what it is. I think we can probably relate far better to that than we realize.
I think the scariest part about faith isn’t the worry that our lives are meaningless… I think the scariest part, really, is that our lives actually do mean something… that we actually matter to God, and that God really does care who we are. There is no such thing as a “nobody” in God’s eyes. All of us matter to God… and getting the summons, getting the call really is a part of being a disciple. In the same way that a summons to jury duty is part of being a Canadian citizen, God’s call is a part of being a citizen of the kingdom of God. All of us are citizens of the kingdom of God. We may only get a summons once in our life, but God’s call is something that is constantly there… calling us forward with a sense of passion and hope. Sometimes it isn’t as clear as the vision that Isaiah had… or as obvious as Peter’s experience.
More often God’s call is much more subtle than that… Sometimes it is recognizing a need and moving to respond to it. Sometimes it’s feeling so passionately about something that we’re motivated to do something about it. Most often it feels more that we’re being dragged into a role kicking and screaming… because others recognize God’s call in us. Once we’re there, we discover that this is truly where we belong… doing what we’re really supposed to be doing. That I know from personal experience. It’s scary because it matters.
Yet it is very hard to overcome our own cultural programming. We expect to be able to go on with our own life, with our own plans, trying to make it all fit our own expectations. If it’s outside of those limits that we place, we expect that it to be someone else’s job. Yet as Peter and Isaiah remind us, we’re not the only ones in the equation. To quote from a song of John Lennon’s “Life is just what happens to you, while your busy making other plans…” God’s call is what happens to us when we’re busy making other plans. Maybe we need to realize that when we see or feel a need, we’re not supposed to wait for someone else to do it. Maybe it means that this is what we’re supposed to do. As Peter and Isaiah found out, it can be a very scary experience… and yet in the end, an experience whose rewards is far more than we can ever imagine.
As some of you already know, shortly after Christmas, I received a letter in the mail. It’s one of those letters that everybody gets at least once in their life, and for whatever reason, we’ve come to dread it. No… it wasn’t a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency seeking to audit me… it was a summons to jury duty. This was a first for me. Never having been involved in the court system at all, I really didn’t know what to expect. It felt like such an inconvenience, as it could occupy a fair bit of my professional time… and not only that, I had an obligation to it. If I didn’t show up on a given date at a given time, I could actually run afoul of the courts themselves. Think of it this way, if I didn’t do anything, I could actually be in some pretty serious trouble.
So I went.
I found myself reflecting on the summons to jury duty in a similar way to God’s call to us. It was in the back of my mind, especially as people in the jury panel were called forward. Many of them provided reasons or excuses to the judge as to why they would not be able to serve. In most cases, the judge did excuse them from service in this jury, but quickly added that it didn’t excuse them from serving on another jury in the near future. While I was tempted to provide a reason as to why I could not serve, I really couldn’t think of a reason why this would impose excessive hardship on myself… plus I was actually really curious as to how the whole thing would pan out… and how could I talk about God’s call as a summons if I had tried to get out of it. As it happened, my name was drawn from the jury panel, and I did step forward… but the defense likely thought that having a minister on the jury wouldn’t be in the best interest of the defendant… So my jury duty ended with the word “challenge.”
As we make our way through the season of Epiphany, the stories are about God revealed in our midst… yet as we get closer to Lent, these epiphany stories begin to sound more and more like God’s call to us… a summons. In the midst of me ranting last week about 1st Corinthians, there was this subtle little story of Jeremiah’s call… we closed the worship with “Here I am Lord” as a way to anticipate what we would hear today. Last week it was Jeremiah, this week it’s both Peter and Isaiah, who come face to face with a summons from God.
These days, especially when we get a court summons, our first instinct is to get out of it, to find a reason an excuse as to why we cannot serve. It’s an inconvenience… it takes away from our “real” jobs… an annoyance. On the other hand, we don’t really feel that we’re up to it… let someone else do it. It’s not surprising that we often have the same reaction when God calls us. From this morning’s two stories, one from Isaiah, one from Luke, the one who comes face-to-face with God’s call have that same initial reaction. They don’t feel worthy… Isaiah is literally scared for his life… Peter says to Jesus “Get away from me for I am a sinful man!”
I think that both Peter and Isaiah react to their own summons from the starting point that somehow God is out to “get” them. There is this long held notion that no one can stand in the presence of God and live. Yet in both cases, both Isaiah and Peter not only live, but they come away changed… having learned something about God in the process. We hold these two as great leaders in the faith… but when we encounter them in these stories they’re nobodies… they haven’t done anything yet… Isaiah is simply Joe Average who happens to be visiting the temple as Israel mourns the death of their King… Peter is a humble fisherman trying to eke out a humble existence on the shores of a small obscure lake. Neither of them saw themselves as great, or worthy of God’s attention… but both of them found themselves called, or better yet, summoned to something greater.
More often than not we talk about God’s call as something that happens to other people. More often than not it seems that we limit it to people who wear funny gowns and climb into the pulpit Sunday after Sunday. There are many congregations out there that are dying a slow, painful death, because somehow we’ve gotten into this mindset that it’s somebody else’s job. It’s their job, it’s their task… we say. For the rest of us, we try to eke out our own existence wherever we are, paying our bills, doing taxes, working on building up our RRSP for retirement. It’s how we’ve come to set our priorities. Let someone else do it… let someone else lead youth group, let someone else help teach our children about faith, let someone else go help feed the hungry, clothe the poor. After all, isn’t that we pay someone else to do for us?
It’s not surprising really. Our society has long since become a professional society, in which we usually pay someone else for their services… to do the work for us… Whether it’s gathering food, manufacturing goods, or providing some sort of service, our expectation is that it IS somebody else’s job. After all, that’s what we pay them for, and we expect value for our money! Yet in this midst of this whole cultural mindset, those of us in the church wonder why we often have a hard time finding people to do the work of ministry. That professional mindset that we have here in North America finds its way right into our own pews.
Yet each week, we hear story after story from scripture of something different. As much as we would like to think it’s the stories of great people who lived way back then, it’s not! The Bible is rife with stories of very ordinary people like you and me suddenly realize they have come face-to-face with the living God. In this encounter that they realize that God is calling them, by name, to do something. It’s no wonder that their reaction is what it is. I think we can probably relate far better to that than we realize.
I think the scariest part about faith isn’t the worry that our lives are meaningless… I think the scariest part, really, is that our lives actually do mean something… that we actually matter to God, and that God really does care who we are. There is no such thing as a “nobody” in God’s eyes. All of us matter to God… and getting the summons, getting the call really is a part of being a disciple. In the same way that a summons to jury duty is part of being a Canadian citizen, God’s call is a part of being a citizen of the kingdom of God. All of us are citizens of the kingdom of God. We may only get a summons once in our life, but God’s call is something that is constantly there… calling us forward with a sense of passion and hope. Sometimes it isn’t as clear as the vision that Isaiah had… or as obvious as Peter’s experience.
More often God’s call is much more subtle than that… Sometimes it is recognizing a need and moving to respond to it. Sometimes it’s feeling so passionately about something that we’re motivated to do something about it. Most often it feels more that we’re being dragged into a role kicking and screaming… because others recognize God’s call in us. Once we’re there, we discover that this is truly where we belong… doing what we’re really supposed to be doing. That I know from personal experience. It’s scary because it matters.
Yet it is very hard to overcome our own cultural programming. We expect to be able to go on with our own life, with our own plans, trying to make it all fit our own expectations. If it’s outside of those limits that we place, we expect that it to be someone else’s job. Yet as Peter and Isaiah remind us, we’re not the only ones in the equation. To quote from a song of John Lennon’s “Life is just what happens to you, while your busy making other plans…” God’s call is what happens to us when we’re busy making other plans. Maybe we need to realize that when we see or feel a need, we’re not supposed to wait for someone else to do it. Maybe it means that this is what we’re supposed to do. As Peter and Isaiah found out, it can be a very scary experience… and yet in the end, an experience whose rewards is far more than we can ever imagine.
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