July 13, 2025
I Heard You Calling
Matthew 9:35-10:9
Today we’re continuing our series, “How Can I Keep from Singing,” focusing on some of our congregation’s favorite hymns. The hymn this morning is called, “I, the Lord of Sea and Sky,” but known much better by the refrain: “Here I Am, Lord.”
Journalist Colleen Dulle wrote in the Catholic magazine America a few years ago a story about this song. Her opening line is, “Love it or hate it, most Catholics could probably sing ‘Here I Am, Lord’ from memory.” And you know what? Even though it’s only 45 years old, a lot of Presbyterians could sing it from memory too.1
To write her article, Dulle posted a Twitter survey asking for opinions on the song, the responses came flooding in, all of them strong.
One person wrote: “It’s my favorite hymn. I feel the lyrics are about being called by God and trusting [God] to walk with you through everything.”
Another responded: “Can’t stand it. My daughter smirks at me when it starts playing because she knows I hate it. Would pay big $ to never hear again at Mass.”
Now, I know many of you get a little teary when we sing this hymn. I’ve heard you express your love for it after the service. And I need to confess something to you: I don’t really like this song. That feels like a terrible thing for a pastor to admit, but there’s something about it that has always felt “too much” to me, too dramatic, too big.
Yet here we are, and it is one of our congregation’s favorites for a reason. The message resonates, and I think even with those of us who struggle with the song itself.
The story behind “Here I Am Lord” is intriguing. It begins with a 31-year-old Jesuit named Dan Schutte, studying theology in Berkeley, California. He’d been suffering from the flu for several days when one of his friends came knocking on his door. It was Wednesday, and his friend needed a favor: could Dan write a song for an upcoming diaconate ordination Mass? The ordination was on Saturday.
“I sort of had to catch my breath,” Schutte said, “because he was knocking on my door on Wednesday and I knew the ordination was on Saturday.” His friend wanted the song to include specific images—the word of God, the light of Christ, the bread and wine. Dan had no idea how to work those images into a song.
So there he sat, sick with the flu, at his desk with his guitar and a blank sheet of staff paper in front of him, praying: “God, if I’m going to do this for my friend, you’re going to have to help me.”
As he thought about the idea of vocation for the ordination Mass, Schutte turned to Scripture, particularly to the stories of the prophets. “In all those stories,” he said, “all of those people God was calling to be prophets have expressed in one way or another their humanness or their self-doubt.”
Think about Isaiah in our Old Testament reading. When he encounters the divine presence—the seraphim, the smoke, the overwhelming holiness—his first response isn’t confidence. It’s terror: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips.” That’s the classic understanding of calling: overwhelming, mysterious, and wrapped in uncertainty and doubt.
I can resonate with that some in my own call, and I bet many ordained clergy can. My call to ministry was not a dramatic encounter or a lightning bolt of clarity. My Dad was a pastor, and honestly I wanted to go in a different direction, into law or government. But when I was in college, I worked as a music director at my home church and through that experience I began to sense a possible call. Spending time with that congregation, doing the work of ministry, resonated with me. But there was no lightning bolt. It was step by step, it was a continual questioning, “God, is this what you want me to do?”
Dan Schutte captured that same feeling after sharing his first draft of the hymn with his friends. Originally, he had written confident lyrics: “Here I am, Lord; here I stand, Lord.” But feedback from his fellow St. Louis Jesuits—a group of young Jesuit songwriters who revolutionized Catholic liturgical music in the 1970s—led him to change it. They didn’t resonate with his sense of absolute confidence.
The final version became: “Here I am, Lord; is it I, Lord?” That shift from confidence to questioning, from certainty to self-doubt, captures something profound about how calling actually works.
And it aligns well with the more humble version of calling we see in our Gospel reading from Matthew 9.
Jesus shows us a completely different pattern than Isaiah’s overwhelming vision.
Look at verses 35-36: “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
Jesus’ pattern is simple: He saw. He felt. He acted.
That middle step, “he had compassion,” deserves closer attention. The Greek word Matthew uses is one of my favorite New Testament words, splagchnizomai. It literally means “to have the bowels yearn.”
I know that sounds strange to our ears, but in ancient understanding the bowels were considered the seat of deep emotion. This word describes a gut-level response to suffering. It’s actually the same word used to describe how the Good Samaritan felt when he saw the man in the ditch. We might say, my heart breaks for them. You feel it in your body.
This is central to Jesus’ sense of his own calling, in fact it’s the driving engine, the energy and motivation of his own call and his commission of the disciples into ministry. After Jesus saw the crowds, he called his twelve disciples and gave them the same mission and authority he’s been exercising. “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” In other words, help people.
And who were these disciples? A tax collector who worked for the Romans. A radical who worked against them. Business-people who owned fishing boats. Ordinary folks. There was Peter, who will deny Jesus three times. There was Judas who will betray him.
These weren’t people with special qualifications or mystical experiences. They weren’t wrapped in robes of light.
They were people willing to do what Jesus was doing: see, feel, and act with compassion.
Let me tell you a little more about the song. Dan Schutte sketched out “Here I Am Lord” over two days, walking to his friend’s house Friday evening to deliver it, pencil in hand, still scribbling edits along the way. “At that point,” he said, “I really had no sense that the song would be any good, and I was actually very nervous.”
But people related to the song in ways Schutte never expected. “I couldn’t figure it out,” he said. “If only they knew the story of the last two days of my life trying to make this work!”
In the decades since, he has received letters from all over the world. One of his favorites came from an army captain serving in Afghanistan. The captain wrote that troops would gather in a field for Mass, near where they were fighting, and their chaplain would lead them in singing “Here I Am Lord.” The servicemen and women who had grown up with the song could all sing it by heart.
“We stand here in this awful place,” the captain wrote, “where we are asked to serve our country but fear for our own lives, and we sing ‘Here I Am, Lord.'”
Schutte has received other letters from people suffering terminal illnesses or from their spouses, who say the hymn has helped them face their hardships with the hope that God accompanies them.
“Their spiritual journey,” Schutte said, “is to say, here I am, Lord; I’m going to walk through this journey in my life with you.”
When he receives these deeply personal letters, he says, “I feel so grateful that God seems to have chosen that song to accompany people through so many moments of their life. I didn’t plan that. I didn’t know that the song was going to be special. I’m very aware that God is doing something beyond me when I get those letters from people.”
This is God’s way with disciples – the ones in Matthew’s gospel, and people like Schutte—God uses ordinary people to the care for the world with extraordinary grace.
Jesus says to the disciples, “Look, the fields are plentiful and ready for harvest.” The harvest he describes in Matthew 9 isn’t a distant, mystical realm. It’s right here, right now. Look around our world and you’ll see it everywhere. In the language of Matthew, we see people who are harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
That image of “harassed and helpless” is such a provocative metaphor for recognizing and feeling the needs of others.
I think of individuals I know who have endured one challenge after another and they can’t catch a break. As soon as one crisis passes, another comes. They keep going with a smile, but underneath their buckling under the weight. Harassed and helpless.
I think of folks in our community who have been trying for nearly a year to get their lives back together, with insurance companies, and government aid, and contractors. The delays keep coming and the goal posts keep moving. They are trying to put their lives back together. Harassed and helpless.
It’s certainly not hard to see “harassed and helpless” when we open our news. Personally, I think immediately of immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life, in some cases who were welcomed here on temporary protected status.
Now, with the current administration and enforcement guidelines, they are harassed and helpless. They face deportation to countries where they have no connections and do not speak the language. In many cases, they cannot go home, and they have no way forward. Harassed and helpless.
Honestly, I think of the recent budget bill that passed the congress. The plan to reduce the cost of Medicaid is simply a plan to harass the poor – the make them jump through more hoops, more bureaucracy, to fill out more forms, make more phone calls, and do more paperwork, to get basic help.
Harassed and helpless.
Now, those are situations I think of…maybe you think of others. When we see this suffering and feel a gut-level response—that splagchnizomai—that’s often where calling begins. Not in a burning bush or a vision of seraphim around the throne of God, but in our gut’s response to the pain we see around us.
One reader who responded to that America magazine survey wrote: “I have never been able to finish this hymn without waves of emotion rising up and having to stop, take deep breaths and I think oh man, here it comes, the Holy Spirit is overflowing and bursting inside me.”
Maybe that’s what calling looks like—not certainty, but waves of emotion when we encounter suffering and realize we have a calling.
Jesus commissions us to see, feel, and act.
Ministry in Jesus’ name looks like the ministry Jesus did: marked by the same compassion, humility, and vulnerability we see in him.
Isaiah’s calling started with a life-changing experience of God. Not many of us are likely to have that. The disciples calling started when Jesus sent them to care for people. Just as he sends us.
Whether you love “Here I Am Lord” or, find it a little overwrought, we can all agree on this: The question “Is it I, Lord?” is exactly the right question.
In a world full of pain and possibility, full of suffering and hope, the call that is yours might be the one that’s closest to home—the one your gut already knows, even when your mind is still catching up.
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina