Find Your Calcutta

5/27/18 (Trinity Sunday Year B)
Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17

Find Your Calcutta

“Here Am I, Send Me.”  These are the words we hear Isaiah proclaim so strongly before the throne of God as he responds to God’s question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”  It’s a story whose theme is reflected so strongly and beautifully in the hymn, “Here I Am, Lord,” which is one of many reasons we enjoy singing it so much in our tradition for ordination services, commissioning services, and other important moments in our Christian lives.  That idea of selfless devotion to service, of willingness to be sent out, no matter what the journey may require of you, to be able to boldly and truthfully say “Here I am, Lord, send me…” it’s an admirable trait, and one we often strive to cultivate in ourselves.  And we lift up so many of those in our faith and history who have done just that - from so many figures in the Bible, including Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Daniel, Ruth, and Mary, to the church fathers and various other saints and great figures in the church, like St. Francis, Martin Luther, and Mother Teresa, to the volunteers who step forward time and time again even in our own congregations and communities.

The trouble is, we tend to romanticize these call stories and those moments of “Here I Am, Send Me.”  We make it out to be such an easy thing to do, so much so that it should be second nature to us to have this response at the ready.  And in doing so, we end up forgetting that almost none of the call stories we hear occur without some amount of objection, some hesitations or doubts that end up being expressed at the first - Moses shies away from the burning bush, citing his speech impediment; Samuel sets out to anoint the wrong son of Jesse as king, at first; Mary questions the angel as to how it’s even possible for her to carry the son of God; Isaiah protests that he is from a people of unclean lips.  And how many times have you heard or found yourself responding to a request to volunteer or to head something up with “Well, I guess I can do it if nobody else wants to sign up first…”

Answering that calling is a difficult thing to do - it’s a lot harder than they made it out to be in Sunday School, and it brings its own challenges with it.  God initially sends Isaiah out with an incredibly disruptive mission - to “make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes . . . until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.”  Mother Teresa was called to leave her home and family in Albania and to go serve amongst the poorest of the poor, the lepers and HIV/AIDS victims in Calcutta, India.  Martin Luther stood against the entire church, risking excommunication and even the loss of his own life to proclaim his conviction that the church had gone astray and the message that God was calling the church to reformation.

And as we consider all these things, it’s hard not to pause, to wonder… would you be able to go if God called you to Calcutta?  Would you be so willing to say “Here I am, send me” if God told you to sell the family farm, to quit your job, to pack up your car and to just… go somewhere else?  Would you have a few questions, yourself, before you were willing to say yes?

And then there’s the other side of the question, too - one that I think we ask just as much, even if it makes us feel guilt in the asking: what if we’re not called to go to Calcutta?  After all, we can’t all be called to the leper colonies, can we?  Does it make us lesser people if we do not hear the siren song that calls us to a distant land, the trumpeting shofar that moves us to take up a holy cause, the voice from the burning bush, the vision of God’s throne room and the call of “Whom shall I send?”

There were a good number of people who were inspired by Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta, and whether through our own romanticization of it or through a genuine sense of calling to the area, these people often tried to get in touch with her, to make arrangements and offer to come and work alongside her.  Shane Claiborne shares his own experience of doing just this in his book The Irresistible Revolution, of how he was able to speak to Mother Teresa, to work alongside her, to worship and pray with her, and what difference it made in his own life and his own experience of Christianity - but the most profound thing that he shares that he realized during his time in Calcutta was that he was not called to stay in Calcutta.  Shane Claiborne writes, and many others who met with Mother Teresa confirm, that she would quite frequently tell people who would ask about coming out to serve alongside her to “Stay where you are. Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering, and the lonely right there where you are — in your own homes and in your own families, in your workplaces and in your schools. You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see. Everywhere, wherever you go, you find people who are unwanted, unloved, uncared for, just rejected by society — completely forgotten, completely left alone.”

So… what if we’re not being called to go to Calcutta, then?  That’s fine - as long as we recognize that there are Calcuttas in our own backyards, that there are people who struggle every day in our neighborhoods to whom God may be calling us to bring a message and mission of hope and relief.  So long as we still remember how to see the face of Jesus in the faces of our neighbors… I believe we will have eyes to find our own Calcuttas, as well.

The call to love our neighbors, to stretch outside our comfort zones and to go out in service, isn’t necessarily easier to follow in our back yards than it is in Calcutta… but I believe that God calls us to these places all the same, and that God most definitely equips us to follow faithfully.  Paul writes about how we are made joint heirs to God in and through Christ, saying that “you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.”  When we pray “Our Father,” and ask God to give us each day our daily bread, we should also keep in mind those times when we have an extra loaf, and remember that there are others for whom daily bread is a luxury, and see in them a Calcutta.

As we commission Ruth and Beth for their mission trip to Peru shortly, I want to encourage each of us gathered here today to think on where God is calling us, as well - where are the Calcuttas to which God may be calling you in Vandalia?  Where are the places that make you fearful to step out, to say “this is a place where there is a need” and to know that God is calling you to that place?  How is God giving you a spirit of adoption this day to drown out that spirit of fear?


May we have eyes to see our own Calcuttas, and may we have hearts ever willing to say “Here I am, Send me.”  To God be the Glory.  Amen.

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