This sermon was preached for Trinity Sunday, May 27, 2018 at St. Paul's, Mount Lebanon, PA. The readings for this sermon were: Isaiah 6:1-8, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17, and Psalm 29.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
Every year, the night before the first day of school, my father would enact the same little ritual with each of his three girls at bedtime. Dad would come and sit on the end of our beds and ask my sisters and me the same three questions every year.
“What’s your job?” he’d ask.
“To learn,” we’d answer.
“What’s your teacher’s job?”
“To teach.”
“How can you make you and your teacher’s jobs easier?”
“Ask questions!” we’d all say, sometimes too excited to let our father finish his sentence.
And ask questions we did. At my father’s encouragement, we knew that asking questions didn’t mean we were slow or left behind. It wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. It was simply doing our job and helping someone else do theirs.
I’d been thinking a lot about my father and his questions as I prepared to start my time here at St. Paul’s. I have a lot of questions, and a lot to learn. And the staff here’s been quick and gracious to remind me that there is no such thing as a stupid question.
But...but...There’s something about these passages from the Prophet Isaiah and the Gospel of John, and something about the contrast between them, that makes me think that questions that truly change us, transform us, require something more than curiosity or willingness to look dumb.
And considering Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the middle of the night, it’s quite possible he was afraid of looking dumb. Nicodemus does come to Jesus with a question, the big one, the one that lies at the heart of all the Gospels: Who is Jesus?
But he doesn’t ask Jesus a question, does he, not at first. Nicodemus starts from what he knows, and from his position of power as a Jewish leader. “We know,” Nicodemus says to Jesus. “We know you are a teacher that has come from God.” Nicodemus doesn’t ask a question, but Jesus, Jesus, hears it anyway.
And you’ll notice that when Nicodemus actually gets around to asking a question, he’s still doing it from what he knows. “How can these things be?” he asks. Given what I know about the world, and how it works, how can all this you’re saying be true?
Have you ever been in a classroom, or maybe a city council meeting or public talk, when they open up the floor for questions? And someone stands up with a question, that’s really not a question, it’s actually just a mini-lecture, or a refutation of what was said, or maybe if it is a question is a sort of twisting and squeezing what was said into their own worldview? Nicodemus reminds me of that. And of myself. How often do I ask questions, not with any openness to the question, but instead to show off how much I already know, or to solidify what I already understand about the world. How often do I, like Nicodemus, stand from my position of power and knowledge and seminary training trying to fit the most incomprehensible of all—the Gospel, God, the Trinity—into a framework I’ve already made?
See, then there’s Isaiah. Isaiah, the prophet—this passage is his call story, really. All of a sudden, he’s blasted with a great and terrifying vision of the holy of holies. Fantastic, flying beasts, singing and crying, a huge, billowing robe, a great, big throne, and the Lord of hosts on a throne in front of him. And if that’s not enough, the foundations of the place begin to shake, the room fills with smoke. It’s awesome, awful, overwhelming, and confronted with God’s glory, all Isaiah can do is say, “Woe is me!” All he can see is his own unworthiness in the face of the Lord.
But then, through a fiery coal held by a winged seraph, all that holds Isaiah back, the identity he clings to in the face of God, his uncleanliness and sinfulness, is stripped away.
It is then that he hears the question, the very voice of God, saying, Whom shall I send?
Isaiah cannot help but respond, has nothing left but the response: Here am I. Here am I, send me.
How often have I been so focused on asking questions of God that I forget to listen for the question God’s been asking me, quietly, persistently? How often, as my Christian Education professor would say, are we so focused on knowing about God that we forget to know God? Or even with each other, how often do we ask questions because we are curious to know about someone, rather than the deep questions, the openness, the silence and the listening required to actually know one another?
You know, there’s a theory that faith is simply the seeking of answers to life’s deepest, most persistent questions. What if, though, what if faith is the question itself?
Who will go for God?
Who will go for God into the places that cannot feel God’s presence? Into the long, lonely nights and the forgotten people that huddle within them. Stepping into the unknowing, reaching for the unknown.
Like Isaiah and the coal, we, too, are stripped down by the waters of baptism, by the great, fiery flames of the Holy Spirit. We stand before God, naked and dripping, with all our previous identities and hangups and unworthiness, everything we thought we knew, stripped away. And faith, faith in the moment of baptism, comes to us as a series of questions. Do you…? Will you…? And at the heart of those questions, behind those questions, is one big one.
Who will go for God?
I will, with your help.
Here, am I. Send me.
Once, in a job interview, at the end of a long series of stressful questions, and after attempting to squeeze myself into the answers I thought my interviewers wanted to hear, the tension in the room released a bit and I was asked what I knew to be the final question. Smiling, my interviewer looked at me and said, so, what question did you wish we had asked but didn’t? Initially, of course, this question sounded like another stressful probe, a final hurdle to clear, maybe even a trick, but I slowly realized it was a opportunity, a gift. I could feel, in that moment, that I was being given a chance to be who I was, to say what I had been hoping to say--and that I would be heard and know. It was a moment to entertain the possibility, that maybe, just maybe, there’s a question out there for which I am the answer.
So, in the end, I have same question for you, each you. Today, this morning, these next two months, I want to know:
What’s the question you've been longing to be asked? What’s the question beyond, how’s it going? or Where are you from? are you hoping I might ask you?
Think about it and get back to me--for real. And for all of us, for this church, I wonder, too:
What’s the question God has already been asking we are the answer for?
Because here, here are we.
Amen.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
Every year, the night before the first day of school, my father would enact the same little ritual with each of his three girls at bedtime. Dad would come and sit on the end of our beds and ask my sisters and me the same three questions every year.
“What’s your job?” he’d ask.
“To learn,” we’d answer.
“What’s your teacher’s job?”
“To teach.”
“How can you make you and your teacher’s jobs easier?”
“Ask questions!” we’d all say, sometimes too excited to let our father finish his sentence.
And ask questions we did. At my father’s encouragement, we knew that asking questions didn’t mean we were slow or left behind. It wasn’t anything to be embarrassed about. It was simply doing our job and helping someone else do theirs.
I’d been thinking a lot about my father and his questions as I prepared to start my time here at St. Paul’s. I have a lot of questions, and a lot to learn. And the staff here’s been quick and gracious to remind me that there is no such thing as a stupid question.
But...but...There’s something about these passages from the Prophet Isaiah and the Gospel of John, and something about the contrast between them, that makes me think that questions that truly change us, transform us, require something more than curiosity or willingness to look dumb.
And considering Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the middle of the night, it’s quite possible he was afraid of looking dumb. Nicodemus does come to Jesus with a question, the big one, the one that lies at the heart of all the Gospels: Who is Jesus?
But he doesn’t ask Jesus a question, does he, not at first. Nicodemus starts from what he knows, and from his position of power as a Jewish leader. “We know,” Nicodemus says to Jesus. “We know you are a teacher that has come from God.” Nicodemus doesn’t ask a question, but Jesus, Jesus, hears it anyway.
And you’ll notice that when Nicodemus actually gets around to asking a question, he’s still doing it from what he knows. “How can these things be?” he asks. Given what I know about the world, and how it works, how can all this you’re saying be true?
Have you ever been in a classroom, or maybe a city council meeting or public talk, when they open up the floor for questions? And someone stands up with a question, that’s really not a question, it’s actually just a mini-lecture, or a refutation of what was said, or maybe if it is a question is a sort of twisting and squeezing what was said into their own worldview? Nicodemus reminds me of that. And of myself. How often do I ask questions, not with any openness to the question, but instead to show off how much I already know, or to solidify what I already understand about the world. How often do I, like Nicodemus, stand from my position of power and knowledge and seminary training trying to fit the most incomprehensible of all—the Gospel, God, the Trinity—into a framework I’ve already made?
See, then there’s Isaiah. Isaiah, the prophet—this passage is his call story, really. All of a sudden, he’s blasted with a great and terrifying vision of the holy of holies. Fantastic, flying beasts, singing and crying, a huge, billowing robe, a great, big throne, and the Lord of hosts on a throne in front of him. And if that’s not enough, the foundations of the place begin to shake, the room fills with smoke. It’s awesome, awful, overwhelming, and confronted with God’s glory, all Isaiah can do is say, “Woe is me!” All he can see is his own unworthiness in the face of the Lord.
But then, through a fiery coal held by a winged seraph, all that holds Isaiah back, the identity he clings to in the face of God, his uncleanliness and sinfulness, is stripped away.
It is then that he hears the question, the very voice of God, saying, Whom shall I send?
Isaiah cannot help but respond, has nothing left but the response: Here am I. Here am I, send me.
How often have I been so focused on asking questions of God that I forget to listen for the question God’s been asking me, quietly, persistently? How often, as my Christian Education professor would say, are we so focused on knowing about God that we forget to know God? Or even with each other, how often do we ask questions because we are curious to know about someone, rather than the deep questions, the openness, the silence and the listening required to actually know one another?
You know, there’s a theory that faith is simply the seeking of answers to life’s deepest, most persistent questions. What if, though, what if faith is the question itself?
Who will go for God?
Who will go for God into the places that cannot feel God’s presence? Into the long, lonely nights and the forgotten people that huddle within them. Stepping into the unknowing, reaching for the unknown.
Like Isaiah and the coal, we, too, are stripped down by the waters of baptism, by the great, fiery flames of the Holy Spirit. We stand before God, naked and dripping, with all our previous identities and hangups and unworthiness, everything we thought we knew, stripped away. And faith, faith in the moment of baptism, comes to us as a series of questions. Do you…? Will you…? And at the heart of those questions, behind those questions, is one big one.
Who will go for God?
I will, with your help.
Here, am I. Send me.
Once, in a job interview, at the end of a long series of stressful questions, and after attempting to squeeze myself into the answers I thought my interviewers wanted to hear, the tension in the room released a bit and I was asked what I knew to be the final question. Smiling, my interviewer looked at me and said, so, what question did you wish we had asked but didn’t? Initially, of course, this question sounded like another stressful probe, a final hurdle to clear, maybe even a trick, but I slowly realized it was a opportunity, a gift. I could feel, in that moment, that I was being given a chance to be who I was, to say what I had been hoping to say--and that I would be heard and know. It was a moment to entertain the possibility, that maybe, just maybe, there’s a question out there for which I am the answer.
So, in the end, I have same question for you, each you. Today, this morning, these next two months, I want to know:
What’s the question you've been longing to be asked? What’s the question beyond, how’s it going? or Where are you from? are you hoping I might ask you?
Think about it and get back to me--for real. And for all of us, for this church, I wonder, too:
What’s the question God has already been asking we are the answer for?
Because here, here are we.
Amen.
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