"Here We Are, Send Us"
Rev. Dr. Bruce Epperly, Westmoreland United Church of Christ
Feb. 9, 2025
Every moment of history and our lives calls us to make decisions, small and large, consequential and inconsequential. Every moment and every life matters, and the large and small choices we make move the moral and spiritual arcs of history forward or backward in our personal, communal, congregational, national, and global lives. Although we may not be involved in the centers of political and economic power, what we do and who we are matters, our words and commitments matter, to the fate of the nation and the fate of the planet and the fate of our congregation.
And we challenged by God’s question to us: in our day to day, and apparently unimportant daily actions, will we choose life and love or death and hate? Will we add beauty or ugliness to the world? Or stand on the sidelines, making excuses, like the mythical Adam and Eve, blaming others or the snake for what happens in history and in our lives? Or we be agents of our destiny, working for God’s vision in the world?
It was a time of national turmoil when the future of the Southern Kingdom, Judea, was in doubt with the death of King Uzziah who had led the nation for four decades. Living in Jerusalem some 2700 years ago, Isaiah was among the elite and literate, but the recent events of Uzziah’s death and the growing threat from the Babylonian Empire, had left him confused and uncertain of the path he and his nation should take.
As he enters the Jerusalem Temple, Isaiah is looking for peace and consolation, an escape from Jerusalem’s breaking news, an hour without the local newsfeed or gossip or handwringing about the future. To his amazement, what he encounters is the Living God in all God’s grandeur and intimacy.
The Divine One fills the Temple, the building shakes, the veil between time and eternity, and local and universal are pulled aside and the doors of perception are opened and unexpectedly Isaiah, sees the world for what it is - infinite. Angelic messengers sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and give Isaiah a glimpse of a God-filled world in which every moment of the universe declares the wisdom, glory, and love of God.
Isaiah is gob smacked, or shall we say God-smacked, speechless, and terrified, and stammers words with which we can identify, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” Before the God of two trillion galaxies, he experiences his insignificance. Illuminated by God’s Energy of Love, the Energy that births both babies and universes, Isaiah experiences his own righteousness – and he is a righteous and God-loving person – as filthy rags, the distance between his vision and God’s is a great as that of the Earth and the farthest known star.
As Isaiah makes his confession, he realizes that it’s not about his nation Judah or him: it’s about something more - the universe, the good Earth, and God’s embrace of all the Earth’s peoples. The Holy God, the inspiration of angelic choirs and revolving planets, is also the Holy Here and Now, as near as Isaiah’s next breath. The global and universal God is present in Jerusalem and in Isaiah’s local and finite life. As unimportant as Isaiah and Jerusalem may be in the grandeur of the universe, he – and his nation – matters to God. Matters enough that God addresses him by name at a particular moment of his life and his nation’s history.
In his fear and trembling, Isaiah is touched by God, and when God comes into our lives, our lives change. God touches his lips and he is transformed, energized, empowered, and liberated from the past. Mysticism inspires mission. When you encounter God, Isaiah discovers, you receive a call, and the opportunity to do something large or small to bring God’s vision to life.
“Whom shall I send? Who with go for us?” The Divine One, in all God’s majesty, needs inconsequential and fallible Isaiah to be God’s messenger. God can’t change the world without Isaiah’s help, God can’t heal the soul of the nation without Isaiah’s commitment, and with all his anxiety and guilt, Isaiah says “Here I am, send me.”
Saying yes to God means saying yes to God’s mission and God’s mission includes all of us. The voiceless Isaiah becomes the voice of God to an uncertain people, whose destiny is in doubt. As the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila counsels,
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
When you encounter God, when God becomes more than a word to you, when you experience the glory of God in the heavens or in the birth of a child or grandchild, you discover that your finite and mortal life matters. God is the circle whose center is everywhere: in all the universe, no one has your spiritual and moral DNA and you can be a catalyst for the emergence of healing or destruction. The circumference of God’s love is nowhere: God loves embraces all of us as if there is only one of us, and as scientists note, every act even the smallest radiates across the universe. Your life – this congregation’s life – can be like that butterfly flapping their wings in Pacific Grove, California, whose impact over time creates a thunderstorm on the Florida Coast or snow in Washington DC!
Our relationship to God is always political as well as personal. In a time of national crisis, James Russell Lowell penned the words that became the basis of the hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation” to protest the Mexican American War of 1845. Words that can be adapted to each moment of history, to our present crisis. Words that remind us that we are not waiting for a Second Coming to settle everything, defeat the opponent, and put an end to history as we know it, but God’s Millisecond Coming, God’s inspiration, comes with each moment’s birth and is new every morning.
Once to everyone and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause,
God's new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.
The choice goes forever – moment by moment - between life and death, love and hate, healing and sickness, generosity and greed, hospitality and enmity, reconciliation and retribution, prayer and prevarication. Isaiah discovered in the Temple that he mattered: that the God of the universe needed him to put forward the moral and spiritual arcs of his nation’s history.
Today, we have choice, a truly countercultural choice – to be healers and prophets, to forsake dishonesty and proclaim truth in the body politic, to speak for justice and challenge those who want a world as small as their souls, to welcome all people (even as we recognize our nation’s laws) as God’s beloved children, while yet seeing the divine in those we oppose.
During the height of apartheid, many South African pastors were the object of state terrorism. Just preaching the gospel can get you in trouble. Loving your enemy and welcoming immigrants can put your life at risk. Proclaiming the wondrous diversity and equality of all God’s children, and working for an inclusively diverse and equitable world, can put you in danger. Congregants gathered in front of their pastor’s house and walked their pastor to church, singing Siyahamba, “We are marching in the light, we are marching in the light of God.”
You may not see a vision today, but as we march forward to bring healing to this Good Earth, we may like Abraham Joshua Heschel exclaim as he marched with Martin Luther King, “I felt like my legs were praying,” with a song in your heart to lighten the darkest night.
We are marching in the light of God…we are marching in the light of God…we are marching in the light of God…we are marching in the light of God…we are marching, we are marching…ooo…we are marching in the light of God, we marching, we marching, ooo, we are marching in the light of God.
Thank you Jesus for the voice of God still speaking, and light that defeats darkness and love that defeats hate. May we be part of your more perfect union. May we be apostles of the world to come and a nation in which all – without exception – are welcome within our bordersvand peace and joy and the sound of children playing resounds on every street. Here we are, send us! Thank you Jesus. Amen.
