Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Almost every time we gather together we pray the “Our Father” with one voice, addressing the God of Jesus Christ and asking that God’s name “may become holy in and among us” (The Small Catechism).

Hallowed be your name.

How often we repeat these words without the slight hint of the terrified astonishment that the prophets sensed and communicated. We seem to have little consciousness of the holy force that knocked Saul from his horse and left him physically blind. “Hallowed be your name.” But we seldom shudder within our bones at the events of this life that continually insist that there is, in fact, the holy. Even in our daily routine we live with little expectation that the horrible, terrifying, awesome reality of the holy might break through.

The forces around us give witness to something far beyond our human dimension. These forces can arise within nature: devastating earthquakes, overwhelming hurricanes, blinding lightning, deafening thunder and frightening storms. But they also can arise in awesome beauty of a quiet moment above Holy Ghost Canyon high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. One experiences the “other side” in the vast horizon of the Great Plains where God stretches out the sky like a tent of the lightest, translucent silk.

In fact, it is that great canopy of aqua marine that induced my first conscious shiver at the infinite universe and my fear at not mattering. It happened one day as my brother and I were on the front porch. Tommy had a shovel in his hands trying to sod a patch of ground that lacked for water. In the thirty percent humidity of the Panhandle, the trees took all the water that was available, leaving none for the grass. I was six years old and Tommy was ten, making him my source of knowledge and wisdom.

I was stretched out on the porch, peering out into the sky. Suddenly my uncomfortable wonder at illimitable space caused me to try and add dimension to it as if to contain it someway. Looking at that grand ocean of blue, I asked Tommy, “How far is it to the end of the sky?” Tommy in his sage demeanor replied, “There is no end, Dummy. It goes on forever and ever.” Well, he knew, and I believed him.

It was at that moment that the child began to do with his physical body what cannot be done. I tried to see infinity. My eyes pierced the sky and shot through the heavens with the words of my brother still ringing, “There is no end . . . It goes on forever and ever.” Suddenly my body shuddered. I quietly pulled up my knees, holding myself together in childish wonder. What could it mean to know the finitude of human life and still know that there is infinity? For me, that is holy.

But the holy keeps asserting itself into human existence. Just ask the survivors of the terrible events of human history when civilization seems to have vanished, and only the terror of existence makes people aware that they are alive. Talk to those who survived the destruction of Germany and the aftermath of famine and fatherless families. Hear the voices of those who survived the death camps: such voices as Elie Wiesel who recounts the most ghastly experience of the holy. Witnessing the hanging of an innocent youngster by the SS guards, he heard one prisoner murmur, “Where is God,” to which another prisoner responded, “God is hanging on that gallows.”

The readings today are similar. The prophet has a vision of God high and lifted up with a chorus singing,

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory." (Isaiah 6:3)

But Isaiah knows only trouble. The king is dead. The army of the enemy approaches. The violence and injustice of his own people have left them stubbornly stuck in their own mess in life. “Isaiah,” nevertheless, “in a vision did of old the Lord of hosts enthroned on high behold.” His response to the vision is his awareness of his own mortality and his shared guilt with his own people.

Saul thought he was working for holiness as he set about arresting and executing the earliest Christians. Their own experience of the holy resided in the gospel proclaiming that God had raised Jesus Christ from the dead. It was the example of the earliest disciples that led Saul from blindness to sight as he recognized his own sin in contrast to the faithful’s clinging to the righteousness of Christ. Paul writes of his calling to the ministry of the gospel.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them — though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. (I Corinthians 15:8-10)

St. Peter himself is overwhelmed by the holy even as he is exhausted from a night of work without any success. When bade by Jesus to cast his nets one more time out into the deep, Peter obediently does so. The result is a terrifying astonishment, not only at the catch of fish, but at the one teaching the word of God. Peter like Isaiah and Saul is frighten by the events and made aware of his sin before the holiness manifest in the words and deeds of Jesus from Nazareth.

Dear congregation, we should take heart from the biblical witnesses that God’s business is exactly that for which we pray every day. “Hallowed be your name.”

It is true that God's name is holy in itself, but we ask in this prayer that it may also become holy in and among us. (Luther’s Small Catechism)

God’s presence in and among us is the power that connects us with the holy. We are not holy in and of ourselves, nor should we pretend to be. But we are made holy, that is, we are made saints in so far as we are commissioned and sent by God to follow Jesus. The disciples at the Sea of Galilee were not called because they were already holy. They were called to follow Jesus to recognize the holy at work in him and the message concerning him.

Just so, we are called to be the body of Christ, God’s hands, legs, eyes and tongues in this world. We may face opposition at home, in the workplace, in school and in society. It is the holiness of God whose promise is proclaimed through word and sacrament and gives us hope and courage. The God present in the cross and resurrection is the same God present in the holy supper. For this reason we may eat the bread and drink the cup, overwhelmingly awed by God’s holiness in nature, in history, in life, and in bread and in wine. There is no end. . . It goes on forever and ever.

Amen.