Today’s author is Naomi Sveholm a missionary with Central Europe Teachers teaching English at a bilingual Lutheran high school in Bratislava, Slovakia with her spouse and two children.
I was an adult when I realized just how different the cupids or putti I had always called cherubs were from biblical cherubim. The celestial beings of the bible are also not beautiful blonde men who happen to have large wings and maybe a halo and/or a sword. Sometime around the Renaissance there seems to have been a taming, a reduction of the sheer number of faces and eyes and wings and fire of the cherubim and seraphim, not to mention the ophanim. The cherubim and seraphim of the bible look and sound like they actually do need to begin conversations with, “do not be afraid,” or we humble humans will panic.
I recently finished reading one of my favorite books with my 9 year old, “A Wrinkle in Time.” We are now reading the next book in the series, “A Wind in the Door,” and have just arrived at the first glimpses of the cherubim, initially called a dragon, who features prominently throughout. When their author Madeleine L’Engle was asked if the cherubim was deliberately written to be similar to those of the bible, she replied, “Yes, of course. Cherubim, seraphim, all the angelic host as they are described in Scripture, have a wild and radiant power. They are not always gentle. They bar the entrance to Eden so that we may never return home…They are winds. They are flames of fire…When the angel smote him on the thigh, Jacob limped forever after. Daniel, who had braved lions, trembled and fainted at the appearance of the Lord’s angel.”
In this week’s text, Isaiah witnesses the thunder and smoke of the seraphim and is struck by his own unworthiness in comparison. He is ruined, unclean, and part of an unclean world. And yet, he still responds to God’s call with the words, “Here I am. Send me.” In another chapter of “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art,” L’Engle writes, “In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own.”
Much of today’s literature and film is full of superheroes. Even when they aren’t called superheroes, they somehow have exactly the right overpowered capabilities to stop the villain and end evil once and for all, at least until the next episode or sequel. While those stories are hopeful and uplifting, they are also unrelatable in many ways because they don’t reflect the world we live in. One reason I think “A Wrinkle in Time” resonates with so many is that Meg Murry is intensely human. In fact, it is her faults—her anger, impatience, and incapability to fit in—that cause problems in her everyday life, but somehow help her resist the evil that forces residents of Camazotz to conform to a mold. It is love for her brother, even as Meg recognizes she is incapable of extending love to the evil IT, that saves only the one who is closest to her, her brother. Meg, in the end, does not actually defeat the evil IT. She doesn’t save the planet Camazotz. Just her brother. She is not a superhero, but merely working in her sphere of influence to rescue her brother and do something relatively unassuming to great consequence, at least for her family.
We, too, are rarely called on to be superheroes. We are unworthy, unqualified to be God’s hands. So were the heroes of the bible. Jacob was a liar and a cheat, Moses a stutterer prone to anger, Mary an unmarried child. But we are often called on to work within our families and workplaces and neighborhoods. That dichotomy of being both unworthy and called is so very Lutheran, the sinner-saint paradox that is still somehow entirely honest and true.
I do hope we listen to the call. After all (L’Engle again), “What would have happened to Mary (and all the rest of us) if she had said no to the angel?”
Although I am not worthy, here I am. Send me.
Dear God,
I am not a superhero. I am unqualified and unworthy. But I am here and I can make a difference. Help me see the need in my community. Send me.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen