How will we respond to the call of the Lord?
Between Isaiah and Luke, we can learn much about the possibilities. In Luke, Jesus calls on Simon, James, and John to follow him. They leave their fishing nets to do so.
I wonder why the Lord provides them with this miraculous catch of fish, only to have them immediately leave it all behind. Maybe that was what it took for someone like Simon—to suddenly have everything he ever wanted, only to realize that it couldn’t truly satisfy him. Dropping the nets in this scene is a moment of conversion. These men were going in one direction, and Jesus invites them to turn around, to change.
Isaiah’s calling is different. First, it happens in a vision. But though we think of it as a call, the story doesn’t exactly have God saying to Isaiah, Hey, you, I want you to be my prophet. Rather, Isaiah is first cleansed, then an opportunity is presented, and he volunteers: Here I am, send me!
Both of these stories provide apt descriptions of the Christian life. All of us are called to conversion. And true conversion requires a change of direction—it requires a dropping of the nets to follow Jesus. This doesn’t mean, for most people, that you have to suddenly quit your job the moment you decide to take faith seriously, but it does mean a willingness to put all other things, even good things, like family, safety, comfort—in order, behind our primary purpose.
We can overemphasize this story of call. Sometimes, to be honest, Catholics can be downright weird about this. We treat discipleship as some kind of magical puzzle in which we have to decode all the hints that tell us exactly what God is calling us to do, and it leads to a sort of spiritual paralysis and constant sense of anxiety. Yes, sometimes God will call you by name and tell you what to do. But many other times his fundamental calling on us is to be who we are—to use our reason and our will to seek him and do good where we are.
This is one way of reading Isaiah’s vision. I have met a lot of nervous Catholic young people who, when faced with God’s question “Whom shall I send?”, will immediately think the question is some kind of test—one where they have to find the right answer. But the question is a real one, and one that has to be answered in freedom. God’s goodness and grace work in and through our freedom, not in competition with it.
In this Sunday’s collect, we pray, “Keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion.” This struck me as an interesting way of thinking about these Scripture passages on calling and mission and conversion. Many Christians—including, unfortunately, some Catholics—have accepted the modern world’s redefinition of “religion” as the man-made, institutional side to spirituality and faith. So you get these bizarre claims out there about how people are leaving religion but keeping Jesus. Religion is all about rules, they say, but Jesus is all about relationship.
The errors in this view are probably too messy to untangle in a single homily, but let me put it like this: Relationships, if they are good relationships, always need rules. A spirituality without concrete, incarnate form is a sub-human spirituality, because human beings live in bodies in time and space.
This prayer for the maintenance of true religion is a prayer for the proper conditions of conversion and mission and call. Being faithful to the disciplines of the Church is not some irrelevant, external thing that we can take or leave; it is the ground and the context in which the Lord meets us. How can we hear the divine commission if we never enter the court of heaven?
Isaiah’s story is very much like ours. We enter the temple, but we have to be made clean—washed in the waters of baptism and consecrated by the Holy Spirit. In other words, we have been given what we need to participate in God’s mission. We don’t need to wait for an email from heaven with precise instructions on how to order our day. We have that order; it’s called “religion.” But that’s just the starting point. He is waiting for us to step up and serve him. He is waiting for us to drop our nets and follow him.