I Saw the Lord: A Pilgrimage Through Isaiah 6

By Kenneth L. Waters

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0835807843
• ISBN13: 9780835807845
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: Upper Room
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

An Afrancan American spirituality in fine biblical form

How do we know when God is present and calling us -- and how can we be ready and able to respond to this call? Los Angeles pastor Kenneth Waters Sr. provides thoughtful and inspiring answers to these questions in I Saw the Lord: A Pilgrimage Through Isaiah 6. Using a well-known and much-beloved passage of the Bible, Waters reveals the miracle of spiritual transformation in Isaiah's encounter with God. Going beyond Isaiah's mere summons to ministry, the author proposes ten aspects of spirituality in Isaiah's experience and designates a chapter of discussion and reflection to each. There is considerable learning and much integrated life experience in these practical and shrewd reflections upon the nature of God's call to us. Traversing such themes as seeing, hearing, conviction, confession, purification, calling, commitment and commission, these chapters are further illuminated by Water's personal stories grounded in his life experience, a mature reflection of scripture and his African American spiritual heritage. He recalls with ease about his mother's speaking to God while in the kitchen. Going about her daily chores, singing the "Old One Hundreds" she was a strong witness to sustained faith. He remembers hearing for the first time the "Old One Hundreds" at the Visitors' Chapel, African Methodist Episcopal Church in Texas when he was a boy. "Even though I stood outside of her engagement with God," he says, "I was yet included in it because I heard her, and the sound I heard during my formative years became an integral part of my spiritual development." In discussing aspects of feeling in our spiritual experience, Waters makes the connection between Isaiah's inferred sensations of shaking (as the temple doorposts shook when the angels spoke) and his intense emotions at finding himself in the divine presence of the Lord. He notes that "the shout" in African American worship tradition is a physical expression of joyful or liberating emotion -- a way of becoming a whole person in communion with God, of authentically experiencing God's love in our hearts. "Feeling, therefore, gives us access to knowledge that lies beyond the boundaries of reason," Waters says. The final chapter of I Saw the Lord, on commission, deals with Isaiah's -- and our -- summons to spiritual and social wholeness. Waters discusses his experience of the violence and destruction that took place in his neighborhood in the summer of 1992, after the city of Los Angeles exploded into a rage over the outcome of the Rodney King trial. He describes the outreach activities his church and other social service agencies undertook during these "days of turmoil and uncertainty," confirming that these actions were God's commission for his church. Waters concludes with this battle cry: "Prophetic courage is holding up the standards of justice for all people, especially the historically oppressed and disenfranchised. It is challenging all falsehoods and half-truths whether they are spoken