By
Reverend
Litton Logan
February
4, 2007
Scriptures:
Isaiah 6:1--13 (NRSV)
1In
the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and
lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphs were in
attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and
with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one
called to another and said:
“Holy,
holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;
the
whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 The
pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house
filled with smoke. 5 And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a
man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have
seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
6
Then one of the
seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with
a pair of tongs. 7 The seraph touched my mouth with it and said:
“Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is
blotted out.” 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom
shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
As I prepared a list of scriptures that I would preach from over the next
few months, I was surprised to see the call narratives of Isaiah and Jeremiah
back to back in successive weeks. What
was even more surprising was to see them chronologically out of
sequence—Jeremiah, a later prophet’s call narrative first, last week, and
Isaiah, an earlier prophet’s call narrative this week.
To set the stage for Isaiah’s prophetic ministry, let me give a brief
historical overview of ancient Israel. Please pay close attention to the Power
Point Slides.
Under King David, (c. 1000-961) the loose federation of the
12 Hebrew tribes became a nation--Israel. At
David’s death, his son, Solomon, continued and expanded his father’s work in
various ways but in particular, Solomon built a Temple to Israel’s god and
tried to restrict Israel’s worship of Yahweh to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was located in the land originally allocated to the tribes of
Ephraim and Judah.
However, at
Solomon’s death the united kingdom broke in to the Northern and Southern
kingdoms ostensibly along old tribal theological lines.
The Northern Kingdom composed of roughly ten of the original Hebrew
tribes was known as Israel with its capital located in Samaria and its principle
sanctuary in Bethel. The Northern Kingdom of Israel occupied a strategic location
along principle trade routes connecting the African continent with Asia Minor
and the Fertile Crescent.
The Southern Kingdom, as I said earlier, was composed of the
tribes of Ephraim and Judah but was generally referred to as just Judah.
The capital of the Southern Kingdom was Jerusalem and the site of the
Solomaic Temple. Judah occupied a
less strategic geo-political area. Interesting
to note, that the Southern Kingdom, Judah, became collective known as Israel
after the Northern Kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E.
Confusing I know.
Isaiah prophecies in Judah, the Southern Kingdom, toward the
end of the Northern Kingdom, and shortly after the death of King Uzziah, one of
the Southern Kingdom’s most revered kings.
The presenting problem for Isaiah’s entire prophetic ministry was
Judah’s, in particular Kings Ahaz and Hezekiah, seeking national security
through political, economic, and military alliances with the Assyrians, which
brought idolatrous, cultural accommodations as well as set the stage for
victimization of the least powerful people in Judah.
I might point out that Isaiah should never be seen as just a
shrewd political analyst, although I believe he was, but rather Isaiah is a
person who had an unwavering faith in God’s power to protect and keep God’s
people. This faith made Isaiah just
as confident in prophesying hope for a repentant remnant of Judah as he did doom
and gloom for the unfaithful and unrepentant.
For Isaiah, Yahweh was holiness to the factor of infinity and
as such, Isaiah rejected all human schemes and wisdom relating to Judah’s
divine destiny. God’s people must
rely on God or face the consequences of their faithlessness.
Judah’s security did not lie in political, economic, or military
alliances but in Judah’s repenting, turning from a pathway of destruction of
human design. Judah was to return
to a time of spiritual and moral purity and total dependence upon God’s
sovereign power and will.
Many years
ago Oswald Chambers, noted preacher, teacher and author, said to a group of
students in a college chapel service: We have to learn to make room for God --
to give God “elbow room.” We
calculate and estimate, and say that this and that will happen, and we forget to
make room for God to come as God
chooses. Expect God to come, but do
not expect God only to come in a
certain way. At any moment, God may
break in. Always be in a state of expectancy, and leave room for God to come as
God likes. James T. Garrett, God's Gift, C.S.S. Publishing Company, 1991,
1-55673-312-7
In today’s scriptures, we see God coming to Isaiah in a
very unexpected way and Isaiah willingly makes room for God.
Moreover, it is to this unexpected and unconventional coming of the Holy,
Holy, Holy and leaving room for the Holy, Holy, Holy in our lives that I would
like for us to think about for a few moments as we look at Isaiah’s call.
Let me interject at this point, that in the Bible, Old and
New Testament, God is never an abstraction whose existence is doubted. God was a
personal power and presence at work in the life of people and nations—end of
story. The continuum from God to
the land, the king, and the people was an unbroken reality. There were no
concepts of the secular and the religious or the separation of church and state.
A person, a nation was who and what it was because of its relationship to its
god.
Isaiah was a priest from a well to do priestly family.
Our scriptures today recount an event in his life as a young priest as he
attended a religious ceremony, possibly a New Year’s Celebration, in
Jerusalem, which featured the annual New Year’s seating of the King.
All of a sudden, the courtly scene for Isaiah becomes
transmuted into an “other-worldly” experience.
The boundaries between imagination and reality dissolve for Isaiah and
the seated king becomes God, the King of the Universe. The attending priest and functionaries become heavenly beings
attending the Most Holy. Isaiah’s
imagination becomes the occasion of his seeing beyond this world and all its
paradigms of power and purpose. He
sees the power behind all powers. Isaiah
has an encounter of the fourth kind—an encounter with the Holy.
In those moments of profound reverie, Isaiah comes to
understand the radically holy and all encompassing nature of God. The
word holy for the Israelites meant that they were to be separated, distinct from
other nations by their relationship to Yahweh, their God.
However, in these scriptures in Isaiah the word holy carries the
additional connotation of dreaded awe in the presence of God. This quality has
been called the sense of the numinous—the mysterious force or quality of
experience that overcomes a human being when they encounter the radical and holy
nature of God. The
attendant seraphim shielded themselves from [God’s] dazzling radiance as they
cried: "Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts"
In
Isaiah’s vision, he becomes self-conscious of his nature in the presence of
God. God very presence pronounces
divine judgment on the human sins of sensuality, self-sufficiency, pride, and
injustice. “…Woe
is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of
unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”
Isaiah comes to understand that in truth the king, the
priests, and the people with all their sense of righteousness and piety are in
fact unholy in comparison to God. The
only way God could be or can be in relationship with Isaiah or with humanity in
general is for God to take the initiative through an intermediary to cleanse and
purge human nature, 6 Then one
of the seraphs flew to [him], holding a live coal that had been taken from the
altar with a pair of tongs. 7 The seraph touched his mouth with it
and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and
your sin is blotted out.”
Isaiah
comes to understand in these moments that human religions are no remedy for the
un-holiness and un-wholesomeness of humankind.
The only hope for humanity is for God to take the initiative to purge,
clean, and to make Isaiah and the people acceptable before the Holy. However,
this purging, cleansing, and making holy can only occur if humans are willing
for it to happen.
We see this clearly, as we hear God ask a question regarding who will go
to the people and proclaim God’s words of warning and salvation.
Isaiah hears God ask, “Whom shall
I send, and who will go for us?” And
Isaiah said, (whether out loud and to the
chagrin of those around him or just to himself) “Here
am I; send me!” 9And God
said, “Go and say to this people:
Isaiah
is to go to the people and their leaders tell them that they a far from being a
holy people separated unto God. Isaiah
is to tell the people that their sense of holiness may be endorsed by their
collective religious sensibilities but it is not of God.
The leaders of Judah are to forsake alliances and accommodations with
heathen nations—they are to be holy, separated unto God, as God is essentially
holy and separated from the taint of the world.
The people are to rely on God and trust God alone for their safety and
well-being.
As
things come about, Judah faces an invasion from its sister country, Israel, that
is in an alliance with Syria trying to force Judah to join a military blocking
move in the North against the powerful Assyrians.
Isaiah understands that Judah’s only real and lasting hope lies in its
faith and trust in Yahweh. God
tells Isaiah to tell the king and the people, “If you will not be sure (faithful), you cannot be secure.”
Moreover, those who have faith in God have nothing to worry about; they
don’t need to panic when things look bad. God is in truth the sovereign God of all nations and the fate
of the nations rests in God’s hands not in human illusions of
self-sufficiency. However, Ahaz, the king of Judah at the time, didn’t believe
Isaiah and called on the Assyrians to come and protect him from rebellious
Israel and Syria, thus surrendering Judah totally to the Assyrians with all its
resulting corruptive influences.
Isaiah
never backed down from his commitments to God’s call. He used his gifts of imagination, his mind, and his social
position to serve God. He was
fearless, frank, and confrontational. He
publicly, verbally attacked state officials; he was down right cruel in his
denunciation of the rampant sensuality, land greed, and social injustice
prevalent among the leaders and people of Judah.
He told the rich and powerful exploiters of God’s people exactly what
God thought of them without mincing words.
In addition, Isaiah’s compassion and concern for the underprivileged
and oppressed never waned, and they were never without God’s voice before the
courts and halls of the rich and powerful. Answering God’s question and its
call cost Isaiah big time, but he never looked back.
As, I
look around at the moral, spiritual, political, and cultural corruption of my
world today I often ask the questions, “What is wrong with people?”
Especially, Jewish and Christian people—the people of the book. What
is wrong with this nation?” “What
is wrong with the world?” Hasn’t
anyone learned anything from history? Hasn’t any political leader learned that
violence, injustice, and oppression and the accommodation of such things contain
the seeds of destruction for the violent, the unjust, and the oppressors along
with their victims? This is a
spiritual truth well documented across the annuals of history.
It
seems that each generation of human beings learns too late that what is in the
common good is generally in the individual’s good. Human pride seems to blind each generation of political and
social leaders along with much of the populace to the self-evident benefits of
living holy, moral lives for all life on this planet.
There
are, however, a few people, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and Jesus
whose grasp of and participation in the lure of the Holy changes them from
ordinary humans into divine messengers or earthly presences of God, full of
world transforming power, righteousness, and holiness.
Isaiah
comes away from his encounter with the Holy a new person.
He is a new person in his life orientation, his values, his sense of
meaning and purpose in life. For all intent and purposes he is a new person purged and
cleansed but in the same body with his original memories, and life-shaping
experiences. However, now all that
he is, is even more focused on God’s will for his life given his insights that
day he answered God’s call.
My
friends, I venture to say that what is wrong with much of Christianity and
Judaism, our nation, and the world today is that either we have lost or we have
turned our backs on a sense of the Holy in this world.
We avoid the lure of the Holy that calls us into a morally and
spiritually committed relationship with God, nature, and our fellow human
beings. Like kings Ahaz and
Hezekiah, we turn our backs on God’s call to trust God’s will and ways, and
we seek self-sufficiency through our own powers of reason and wisdom alone. The whole idea of the Holy is passé; an idea of a more
primitive and less sophisticated time in human history, or at best the realm of
mystics and people out of touch with reality.
We
run from the Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of hosts, or keep it at arms length and
wonder why our lives are not as full and meaningful as they could be.
As Jesus so clearly says, “What will it gain us if we gain the whole
world with its illusions of power, safety, and comfort but loose our eternal
relationship to God?” A relationship, I might add, that brings life and it
more abundantly.
I
believe we are reluctant to surrender our lives to the will and ways of God
because we known that we will have to relinquish our prideful notions of
self-sufficiency. We will have to
live by God’s will and ways, not by our will and ways, which we know are often
immoral and unhealthy and always transitory.
We don’t trust that God will multiply life’s blessings, joy, and
pleasures if we become holy, holy, holy people. As the Gospel of John says, we
do seem to be creatures who love darkness over light.
To
surrender one’s life to God means one must die to self to be born anew in
God--a new creature, cleansed, purged, forgiven, guiltless, and full of divine
purpose.
I am
not talking here about religious escapism or air-head-ism, anything but.
God’s holy, holy, holy people must use their minds, talents, money, and
social standing etc., responsibly by balancing personal needs with God’s claim
on our lives... Moreover, in so
doing, I believe we will find peace, joy and a profound sense of our value
before the Holy, Holy, Holy of all existence. We become better people, our communities, our nations our
world becomes a saner and a safer place to be human or animal.
The only hope for the fundamental sense of human alienation from
God that Isaiah experienced lies, as Isaiah saw it, in God taking the initiative
to purge, cleanse and to make us acceptable before the Holy.
God took this initiative most completely in Jesus the Christ.
In the way of Christ, repentant humanity may be cleansed before God;
rendered guiltless before God. Jesus
in life, in death, became the Immanuel of Isaiah, God with us.
The Christ of God—God with us--empowers us to be holy, holy, holy.
The question God poses to Isaiah is not a question limited to just
Isaiah, but is a question to every person of faith in any time—“Who will go
and proclaim God’s will and ways to a world that seems hell bent on
destruction through the devices of human reason and wisdom alone?”
I encourage us today to make room for God in our lives in
unexpected ways. Let us allow the
Holy Spirit to touch our lives and remove all that is unholy, unhealthy, and
unwholesome that keeps us from being totally separated—holy--unto God.
I further challenge us to answer God’s call to proclaim the good
news of God’s salvation and eternal security to the world by responding as
Isaiah did, “Here I am Lord, send me!”
However, in the heat of the emotional moment do not respond lightly
because God will hold you to your words and your life will be irrevocably
changed—most likely for the eternal better.