The call from God's Word

Isaiah 57:15-59:21

Philippians 1:1-26

Psalm 71:1-24

Proverbs 24:9-10

 6 “No, this is the kind of fasting I want:

   Free those who are wrongly imprisoned;

      lighten the burden of those who work for you.

   Let the oppressed go free,

      and remove the chains that bind people.

 7 Share your food with the hungry,

      and give shelter to the homeless.

   Give clothes to those who need them,

      and do not hide from relatives who need your help.

Many of the clergy I know have a passage of scripture that God has used to call them in to ministry or to confirm in their vocation. A friend of mine who is a Roman Catholic priest received a message from God through the Old Testament book of Chronicles that strongly affirmed him in his calling and others I know have been called through passages in Romans, the Gospels, etc.

The passage God used to call me to this work is found here in Isaiah. I have seen that with other people the passage that God has given them has set the tone for virtually their whole ministry and that is the case with this Isaiah passage for me.

In the UK in the early nineties there was a movement called March for Jesus. This involved churches joining together across denominations to walk through towns and cities in carnival style processions shouting and singing a liturgy that proclaimed in a joyous way God's love and Christ's Lordship. I took part in the Belfast version of this as the bass player in one or the bands and every week in the run up to it our local churches in Monkstown met to practice on Sunday evenings.

Before one of these practices I felt something that I had never experienced before which was God calling me to speak to the people gathered there on Isaiah 58. I asked my minister if I could do this and he very graciously said yes. I had never read Isaiah 58 and so had no idea what God was calling me to do.

As you can see from the section above, Isaiah 58 is a call from God away from false, loud, demonstrative worship that is hollow and meaningless and a call for God's people to get involved in social justice to show they were truly worshipping God. I read this and panicked! This was going to sound like a direct criticism of the whole project, or at the very least people's motivation for being involved in it.

Sunday came round and with 3 churches gathered there I stood up to bring the the Word of God. I spoke for about 30 seconds on something rambling and apologetic (in the sorry sense, not the robust defence sense of the word) and then froze.  I couldn't think of a single thing to say for about 1 minute (it felt more like an hour!) and then finally God gave me the words to say. What they lacked in finesse they made up for in sincerity and people were moved by this call to act for social justice from Isaiah through the mouth of this stuttering and unsure 16 year old.

This was the start of my calling to what we Presbyterians call the ministry of word and sacrament. That initial call through the words of Isaiah has more than left its mark and even now my preaching  and ministry is tinted with a strong sense of God's call to social justice and his love for the poor.