Here am I, send me.
7 February 2010
You may know the tale of the Anglican friar who boards a London Underground train in his full habit, whereupon he attracts the attention of a ne’er-do-well sat further down the carriage. After a few stops, as the crowd thins out, the latter moves along the carriage and sits down next to the friar. In a not altogether friendly way, he enquires of the friar, “What are you supposed to be?” The reply comes back, “I’m supposed to be polite. What are you supposed to be?”
“What (or rather, who) are you supposed to be?” runs like a golden thread through the readings we have just heard, since in different ways each one of them is a reflection on Vocation.
Vocation is often thought to be a word that relates solely to clergy, but more generally, the word vocation simply means call, and so to live out one’s vocation is simply to follow one’s calling. What better example of this could we have than the life of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth, the anniversary of whose accession was yesterday, and was no doubt commemorated throughout Oxford, as I know it was in this House, by the reading of that prime piece of patrimony, the Accession Service. Her Majesty has dedicated her life to the living out of her calling as our monarch and Governor. More commonly, we may also hear of teachers and nurses and a host of other professions being referred to as a vocation.
Nonetheless, in our context, whilst acknowledging that many people are called to whatever it is they happen to be doing, we must also note that there is something distinctive about the Christian vocation; the Christian call is holy, as St Paul says in the first chapter of his second letter to Timothy. Once again, this is not limited to clergy: everybody is called by God to be the person He would have them be, and to live the life that He would have them live. To say this is not to open the door to an “anything-goes” type of Christianity: quite the reverse, since nothing which damages or limits our own humanity or that of others can possibly be authentically of God. Selfish, careless actions which isolate us from God and from our fellow human beings – Sin – also inevitably alienate us from our true selves. On the other hand, to follow God’s call invariably involves growth, and as Ken Leech has written, “growth involves pain and anguish of spirit … It is not an easy path, it is the way of the Cross. It involves a confrontation with self, a stripping away of the false self, a purifying of the personality.”
But the fact remains that our fundamental calling is to be the person God created us to be. There is a paradox here, in that whilst this call is shared by everyone of us, the way of living it out will be different for us all, since we are all uniquely called by God. The Book of Revelation speaks of the one who conquers being given a white stone, “with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.” In other words: nobody except me can fulfil the calling to be me. Nobody except you can fulfil the calling to be you. My stone is different from your stone, though they are both hewn from the same rock.
What more then can we say about the calling to live as followers of Christ, and specifically, how can we stop the uniqueness of our call from turning into an isolated individualism which is the very antithesis of the Christian life? First, we can say that each one of us is called to be ourselves within the Body of Christ, which is the Church. We can only be ourselves in relation to God and to other people, and through baptism we become brothers and sisters, members together of Christ’s body called to continue the work of proclaiming the Good News to the world. Isaiah’s words to the Lord, “Here am I, send me,” are a personal acceptance of his vocation, but they are also the words of the Church, and of its faithful members, throughout the ages. If we are faithful to that call, then we may dare to hope that we will make the Gospel attractive to those around us by the quality of our lives, and in so doing become Fishers of Men.
If we are to make sense of our call then there are two things which we must recognise and to which this morning’s readings also point: sin, and holiness: our sin and God’s holiness.
St Paul spent his entire life living out his call from God; though admittedly his perception of the nature of this call changed rather dramatically on the Damascus Road. Like all of us, Paul was a man with many failings (unlike most of us, he transcended them at times with extraordinary results), but an undue sense of modesty was not one of them. And so when he describes himself as the “least of the apostles” because of his pre-conversion way of living, we would do well to sit up and take note. Peter also, as we heard in the Gospel this morning, was not above throwing himself at the Lord’s feet and acknowledging his own sinfulness. Only after that does he receive his commission: to be first among the Fishers of Men. And similarly, Isaiah proclaims himself to be a man of unclean lips, to be in need of mercy and forgiveness, before he is ready to live out his vocation.
It is clear, then, that repenting of and confessing our sins is the first step on the path to living out our vocation. As Bishop Michael Marshall once wrote, “The test of catholic Christianity is not so much whether or not it can make good men better, but whether or not it can make bad men holy.” Or as the Canadian singer, songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen observed, “there’s a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in.”
This is a profound truth in our Christian pilgrimage: it is often when we are at our most vulnerable, or wretched, or humiliated, that we find God speaking to us and through us most powerfully. We are called by God not because we are perfect, but because he longs for us to be the people he has made us to be; and because deep down inside we long to be holy, as He is holy. While it is true – praise God - that sometimes we find Him in moments of great joy and happiness, it is also true that it is very often in broken-ness, when other helpers fail and comforts flee, that we remember our longing for holiness. This is why you should make your confession: doing so presents us with our own weakness and longing, but also with God’s holiness, utterly forgiving.
God’s holiness is that which Isaiah heard the seraphs proclaiming: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” This is the holiness which Peter suddenly realised burst forth from the stranger on his boat with such power that he had no choice but to fall down on his knees before him. This is the holiness which St Paul speaks of as Grace, the grace which is poured into our hearts and which turned the heart of even the most vigorous persecutor of the Church towards God. We are able to grasp at this holiness through grace: we are renewed and invigorated in this holiness through encounter with God in the liturgy and the sacraments: we grow in this holiness by giving our lives to the service of Christ, by striving to follow his Call, our vocation, to the best of our ability. One of the Sisters of the Love of God says this about living such a life; she is speaking specifically about the life of professed Religious, but what she says applies to any and every vocation:
“A vocation is given to us, but it is not done for us. It is our choice to respond to God’s call. We freely reach out our hands to receive God’s gift, and in order to grasp the wholeness of what we are offered, our ‘hands’ need to be empty … In making vows we are making an outward sign of an inward movement of response, a response initiated by an encounter with love.”
What happens when we make that response is that we are playing some part in the awesome holiness which is God’s. We who are made in God’s image receive a share of his holiness – a share which does not reduce God’s holiness like taking money from a bank account; but which like Love pours forth between and from the Trinity in an unstoppable flood, the manner of which is beyond our vocabulary to describe. However, if there is to be room for the holiness of God to reside in us, then we must make the effort to empty ourselves of all that would compete with and try to choke that holiness. Listen again to Sister Stephanie Therese SLG:
“It is one of the paradoxes of the religious life – the simultaneous … emptying of self and indwelling of God … The religious life is a journey, and it is the journey that changes you. Our outreach and ministry along the way is the overspill of the indwelling Spirit … The more we empty, the more we overflow, the more we serve!”
In other words, it is by emptying ourselves, by stripping away the false self as Ken Leech put it, by acknowledging our sin and God’s holiness, that we can begin to fulfil our vocation, whatever specific ways of life that vocation leads us to embrace: priesthood, religious life, teacher, doctor, parent; and so on. And engaging in this process isn’t the end, but it may be the end of the beginning. It is from this point that we too can become fishers of men, proclaiming the Good News in word and deed to all whom we meet.
As Dr Pusey preached: ‘“The windows of Heaven are open; close we up our hearts no more. Empty we our hearts before Him, and He will cleanse them anew with His Spirit, and fill them with the Wine of His love.” When this happens, when our humble and empty hearts are filled with the Wine of God’s love, then perhaps we will be ready to live up to our holy calling, for then we can stand before God with the Prophet Isaiah, and with one voice say to the Lord, “Here am I, send me.”
Mr Ian McCormack Ordinand, College of the Resurrection, Mirfield