Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” Isaiah 6:8

Etched in my memory  of President Kennedy’s assassination, is my childhood home burning months later.  During the tumultuous time surrounding King Uzziah’s death, Isaiah encountered the living God.

Isaiah records his encounter with God in imagery of a mystical, smoke  filled temple and flying six winged seraphs, while God is seated on a throne, asking “Who will go for us.” Most of us will never receive such a vivid picture, of God asking us to respond to the world’s needs.

Ours is more likely to be a gentle prod, the nudge that doesn’t go away, a persistence sense that we are called to something more than what we are doing. We awake from a dream and hear the distinctive voice of God speaking to our heart.

Isaiah is not promised success. Even before he begins his years of prophesying, he is warned most people will not listen. They will hear but they won’t understand, resisting the truth of his words.

I, and I suspect most of my clergy friends, would prefer to have the success of a megachurch pastor, or at least know our words are reaching thousands instead of fifty, on a Sunday morning. Yet, the promise of success, has never been part of God’s call. Rather, the call is to love God and God’s people, to preach the gospel and speak its truth.

Centuries later, Jesus, quoted the words of Isaiah’s call, when he said of those that came to see him, “They listened but they did not hear, they saw but they could not see.”

“For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes,
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.” Matthew 13:13-15

It was Jesus’ frustration to know that his words we’re being ignored, misunderstood, and misappropriated. 

Today we live in a world of alternative facts, where some of us listen to one set of media, and others an entirely different one. It’s not simply that our perspective on the world is different, but the facts we base our perspectives on are not the same. Truth becomes elusive, yet we must keep searching for it, by asking ourselves what our favorite news media is leaving out of the story.  What truths are we missing to form a judgement?  How does our knowledge or lack of it,  impact our Christian witness? Are falsehoods standing in the way of our following Jesus?

Only the truth will give us the vision, wisdom and  knowledge we need, to meet challenges facing our world, and to do so with compassion, justice and Jesus’ kind of love.

God still calls, asking,  “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”  Isaiah responded by saying, “Here am I, Send me.”