Call of God: General and Particular

 5 Epiphany C February 6, 2022
Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13] Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Luke 5:1-11

 Lectionary Link

Sanctus is the Latin word for "holy."  Sanctus is also the short name for the part of the Eucharist prayer, when we sing, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts or Lord God of power and might..."  And for trivia, the little bells that are rung during the Mass are called "Sanctus" bells, because they are first rung during the Sanctus.  And why?  When lay reception of communion was but once a year and when the Mass was said by the priest in Latin on behalf of the lay people, the way that lay people participated in the Mass was by being spectators.  Their attendance was required when the celebrant said the words of consecration over the bread and then elevated the bread as a moment of blessing for the lay people who would not generally receive communion.  So, lay people would be on the streets and how would they know to get into the church in time for the elevation of the Eucharistic host by the celebrant?  The church bells would ring at the Sanctus, that that was the signal to people on the street that the elevation of the Eucharist Bread was about to happen so they best get themselves into the church.  And in Eucharistic piety, we've kept the little bells around for aesthetic effect, even while their original purpose is no longer relevant, since lay people fully participate in Holy Eucharist in common language and receiving the sacrament.

And I am not against Sanctus Bells even if their purposes are obsolete;  in fact what we are trying to do in a liturgy in sacred space is to simulate the event of the Call of God in Christ to us.  We may not be able to get the six winged Seraphs to appear but we can have smells, bells, colors, chant, iconography; not because we think they replace God and the holy, but because we believe that in our gathering there are festive ways of acknowledging what we value the most, namely, the presence of Christ and the call of Christ to us.

And there are people who say that we don't need sacred space for worship of Christ.  There are people who think church buildings should be multi-purpose space and instead of paying money for iconography and appearance, we should spend any extra money on Outreach.  They are both correct and wrong; since it does not need to be either/or, it can be both/and.  Beauty as response to the holy can truly inspire generosity.

Isaiah had quite a call from God, wouldn't you say?  His experience with God as the Holy Other, coupled with the heavenly lips singing the holy, holy, holy song, left him feeling rather impure.  "God, after hearing that lovely heavenly singing, I feel like I have a potty mouth, and the people I live with have potty mouths too."  We are fortunate that at ordinations today we don't brand the lips of preachers with hot coals, even if would make them shut up for awhile during the healing process.  Yes our speech needs to heated up and sanctified by the Holy Spirit so that it can become a telling message for the people who need to hear what God is trying to tell them.  It is good that God's calls potty mouthed people and gives them a message because it is an indication that God and the message is what makes things worthy, not the very limited personal perfection of the people who deliver the message.

The Epiphany season topic for this day is the Call of God.  And we are given descriptions of the calls of Isaiah, Paul and Peter and the disciples.

I would offer this in a discussion regarding the call of God.  The Call of God is very general and to everyone, but the call of God is very particular, specific, intermittent, even serendipitous because it occurs in individual ways, at specific times, to individual persons in very specific contexts.

The call of God is general and to all.  Why do I believe that?  Because Christ is presented as the Eternal Word.  And everyone is born into the entire linguistic universe.  The essence of Word is communication and communication is about call and answer.  And because Word as language is inside of everyone, everyone has a call to that Eternal Word.  But we don't perceive this significance.  We get our worded lives in a tangle and we act out in harmful ways and we speak in unedifying ways.  In short, we don't understand the great call of the Eternal Word, because we use the words and the body language deeds of our lives wrongly.

The events of Epiphany and theophany are given to us to bring about a script rewrite and correction in how we are living our scripted lives on the stage of life.  Isaiah's life was interrupted by a profound experience of the holy which changed his direction, his speech and give him a new script to live out.  The same thing happened to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.  He had his life interrupted by a blinding epiphany of the Risen Christ.  And his life script was changed forever and St. Paul became the architect of Gentile Christianity.

The call of Christ can come in many ways, in dramatic ways but also in very ordinary ways as well.  Some of the disciples were ordinary fishermen, and Jesus of Nazareth interrupted their fishing vocations in a rather impressive way.  And what did Jesus say their new calling would do?  It would transform their "fishing knowledge" into people knowledge so that they might become those who would deliver good and hopeful news to people and build communities of people to be a repository where the call of God in Christ could happen, over and over again.

An that is still our purpose today; to be welcoming people and a gathering where the call of God in Christ can continually happen for us and where it can happen for others  through us.  Amen.