Rev Frank’s June 28, 2014 sermon

“HERE I AM”
Genesis 22: 1,7&11
June 28, 2014
Westmount Park United Church

“After these things God tested Abraham. God said to him, ‘Abraham!’ And Abraham said, ‘Here I am.'” [Genesis 22:1] “Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And Abraham said, ‘Here I am, my son.'” [Genesis 22:7] “The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And Abraham said, ‘Here I am.'” [Genesis 22:11] When Moses was out tending his father-in-law’s flock, and he turned aside to see the bush which was burning but was not consumed, God called out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” and Moses said, “Here I am.” [Exodus 3:4] When the boy Samuel was growing up in the house of Eli the high priest, God called to him, “Samuel! Samuel!” and Samuel said, “Here I am!” [I Samuel 3:4] In the year that King Uzziah died when Isaiah had his overwhelming experience of the awesome presence of God in the temple, the call of God to Isaiah was, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and Isaiah’s response was, “Here I am; send me!” [Isaiah 6:8]
That three word phrase, “Here I am,” is just one word in Hebrew. The word is HINENI. HINE means “behold” and when you add the suffix NI it becomes “behold me.” Abraham says “Here I am” or “Behold me” three times in our Old Testament reading. First is in answer to God’s dreadful summons to sacrifice his son, second is in answer to his son Isaac’s bewilderment that there is no animal to sacrifice, and third is in answer to the angel’s call to spare his son and sacrifice the ram caught in the thicket. Each moment, each call to Abraham, cuts to the core of his being. When he realizes that he must not waver in his obedience to his God no matter what, his response to God is, “Here I am.” When Isaac calls to him and he realizes how poignant it is that his son loves and trusts him even at this dreadful moment, his response to Isaac is, “Here I am.” And when he is overwhelmed with relief because his unswerving trust in God is vindicated, his response to the angel of the Lord is, “Here I am.”
“Here I am” is the sharp awareness which comes at those defining moments in our lives when we realize some important truth about ourselves, or about what we must do, or about what is really important in our lives and in the lives of those around us. “Here I am” times are critical self authenticating moments which focus our thoughts and feelings on the present moment and on our personal involvement in this present time and place. Most of the time we are not centred on who we are right here, right now. We are planning for the future or reminiscing about the past, we are living vicariously through others, or being entertained or distracted by movies and television and computer games. Instead of being focused on being me, right here, right now, I am a spectator observing a virtual reality. But sometimes we are shaken out of our complacency or lethargy or selfish indulgence or boredom or whatever else keeps us from being truly alive to ourselves and to others and to God. “Here I am” times can be moments when we come to grips with reality and stop living in a dream world or a might have been world. It can often be crisis times, like when we face sickness or even death, which bring about these moments of penetrating, awesome, self realization. Or it can be times of great joy, like getting married or having a baby, which thrust us into the realization that life is happening here, not somewhere else, that it’s now, not some other time, that it’s me, not somebody else. Here I am at this critical, defining moment in my life.
In Jesus’ parable, when the Prodigal Son has wasted all his inheritance and been forced to work in the fields feeding pigs and getting less to eat than the animals he’s feeding, he finally comes to his senses and says to himself, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” [Luke 15:17] Up to that moment life had just been a game to him, no being called to account, no need to plan for tomorrow, nor sense of responsibility for oneself or anyone else, until he finally hit bottom and realized: Here I am, I’m face to face with the grim reality of my life, now is the moment in which I must make the fundamental decisions that can turn my life around.
The Prodigal Son had to take the decision to reverse his course, to seize that self defining moment in his life and turn back home. The need to seize the moment rather than letting it slip by is often expressed with the Latin saying “carpe diem.” That phrase comes from a poem by Horace in which the whole line in translation reads thus: “Seize now and here the hour that is, nor trust some later day!” Here I am, right now, at this critical point in my life when I must seize the moment.
In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” it is Brutus who utters that well known line, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in misery.” [Julius Caesar, Act IV scene iii] That is the sort of urgent necessity there is about “here I am” times. It is possible that the call of God which comes in the crisis moment, or the compelling moment, or the perilous moment, or the awe inspiring moment, will not be responded to with the sort of personal risk and commitment that goes along with saying from the depth of one’s being, “Here I am.” If the answer does not come at the moment when it is most urgently needed then the flood tide passes and life languishes in the shallows of uncommitted living.
The way the Bible often describes those moments of dramatic realization and self authentication and awesome discovery, is by saying something like, “God said to him, ‘Abraham’ and Abraham said, ‘Here I am.'” Here I am, HINENI, Behold! Me! Right here and right now the very essence, the core of who I am is on the line. “Here I am” is said at a deep level of our being when we realize that right here and right now I am the one for the job, people are counting on me, God wants me.”
In our reading from Romans Paul describes making fundamental decisions about who or what is truly in charge of one’s life. He says to the Christians in Rome, “You must not surrender any part of yourselves to sin to be used for wicked purposes. Instead, give yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life, and surrender your whole being to God to be used for righteous purposes.” [Romans 6:13] Those sorts of soul defining decisions that we must make about our lives, decisions about whether we are dedicated to serving God’s will or our own selfish desires, are really just abstract concepts until the critical moments come when we have the urgent real life opportunity to say “yes” to God. The critical moments when we need to make fundamental choices about our lives are, in fact, the very sorts of times in which God called Abraham and Moses and Samuel and Isaiah.
Our faithfulness and obedience to God is not something which can be carefully programmed and anticipated, for there will come moments which cut to the depths of our souls, moments when we realize we are not in control of our lives, moments when we must respond from the deepest level of our being and place ourselves fully into God’s hands by saying, “Here I am.”