Isaiah 6:1-8 (9-13)
Trinity Sunday Year B
May 31, 2015
First and Harmony Presbyterian Churches
The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry
Of
all the theological concepts and constructs the church has managed to devise
over the last two thousand years, none is as confusing, confounding, or down
right difficult to understand than the doctrine of the Trinity.
Since the early 18th
century work of German theologian Johan August Urlsburger, Trinitarian theology
has focused on the distinction between an immanent trinity and the economic
trinity. The immanent trinity seeks to
understand the relationship of the triune God and the world; how does God
encounter creation as Father, Son, and Spirit; how does God relate in the here
and now?
The economic trinity seeks to
understand how the persons of the trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, relate to
one another.
As if the concept of a God who is
three in one, three persons of one being, Urlsburger and those who followed him
did what theologians often do; they unnecessarily complicated something that was
not exactly easy in the first place.
The problems with the immanent and
economic trinity are too numerous and, frankly, too boring to name this
morning.
Almost twenty-five years ago, a book
was published that sought to address what is arguably the most troublesome of
those pesky theological problems. By
speaking about the trinity in either immanent or economic terms, in other words
by speaking about how God relates to the world OR to Godself, our theology
begins to separate the nature of God into halves.
Catholic theologian Catherine Mowry
Lacugna argued that far from two technical ways of speaking about God, the
immanent and the economic, the language of the trinity is in fact the language
of the radical holiness of our present and active God. Trinitarian language is the cornerstone, she
argued, of any systematic theology.
Trinity Sunday invites us to attend to this
mystical reality of the God who is present and active in our lives and in our
world.
Part of that mystic reality is God’s
radical holiness.
That is the focus of Isaiah’s vision we
head this morning.
In his vision, Isaiah encounters the great
I AM, the Lord of Hosts, the Divine Other, the Lord of all. In that moment, the distant otherness of God
was right there. This was no still small
voice like Elijah encountered, this was the Triune God in full glory complete
with seraphs covering their faces as they sing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD
of hosts…the whole earth is full of God’s glory.”
With the possible exception of those parts
we hear around Christmastime, the first eight verses of chapter six are probably
the best known of all of Isaiah’s writing.
Summoned to the throne of God, Isaiah is
struck by his own unworthiness. He does
not belong there and he knows it.
Yet there he is.
Standing before the throne of God hearing
the divine voice calling him to this prophetic ministry.
At its heart, this IS a call story.
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.”
If the movement of Isaiah’s vision
sounds familiar, it may be because there is a roadmap of it in your hand this
morning. Our order of worship is similar
to Isaiah’s vision. We come into God’s
presence to give praise and, like the Seraphs, we sing our “Holy, holy, holies”
to God.
We acknowledge our sinfulness.
We seek God’s forgiveness.
We ask that God would give us ears
to hear and hearts to understand God’s word so that we too can respond in
faith.
All of the elements of our worship-
gathering, praising, confessing, praying, hearing, and responding- are
appropriate responses to the holy Triune God who claims us.[i] It was precisely this sort of encounter that
Catherine Lacugna had in mind when she said that the doctrine of the Trinity is
the cornerstone of any theology of our calling God.
Call is what happens every time God
breaks down the walls that divide the creator and the creation; every time God
speaks in the life of one of God’s children; every time God flips a light
switch and reveals something new and unexpected.
I have to admit that my own sense of
call was less of a light switch being flipped the way it was for Isaiah and
more like a dimmer switch being turned up very, very slowly.
Whether it happens with the clarion call
of Isaiah’s vision or sneaks up on you when you least expect it, at its heart
there is a deep mystery at work whenever God calls and whether it is loud as a
siren or silent as a lamb, God’s call always brings with it a profound
upsetting of our equilibrium. We tend to
read this text like Isaiah is recalling a placid encounter with the holy, but I
imagine that hearing it first hand from the prophet there would have been a
dose of trembling wonder in his voice…
“In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the LORD…sitting on
a throne…high and lofty and the hem of his robe FILLED the temple!...”
Divine call is a bit frightening.
Or at least it should be.
Far too often we leave the power of
divine call the same way we leave worship on Sunday mornings…we cut it off at
the comfortable points.
This text we have today from Isaiah
is a case in point. Churches around the world
who use the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary are reading this passage
from Isaiah 6; these familiar and appealing and sentimental words of the
prophet ending with that familiar phrase of holy surrender… ”Here am I; send
me.”
On the one hand it is a beautiful
place to end the reading. But on another
it is actually quite dangerous. It is
dangerous because leaving it there leaves the impression that the heat of
divine calling is this romantic notion of sweet surrender.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I would be fine with it if the end of the
matter was a moment of sweet surrender to God; if the whole of the Christian life
was dewy garden paths and sweet chariots coming to take us home. I would be fine if ministry was what so many
pastors start out thinking it is- just a life of loving people and being their
friend just like a lot of us are lulled into thinking that the Christian life
happens between 11am and noon once a week.
Here am I, Lord. Let’s leave it at that.
That would be nice. I wouldn’t mind it if the whole of Christian
call ended with our reading today.
The problem, of course, is that life
does not end at verse 8 and neither does God.
There is more to this whole call
thing than a moment of holy surrender, there is also the matter of the rest of
the text; the part that comes after the moment of sweet surrender; the part
that comes after the benediction in church on Sunday morning.
After the moment of sweet surrender,
comes the hard part; the part when God says…
“Go and say to this people:
Listen
intently, but don’t understand;
look carefully, but don’t comprehend.
10 Make the minds of this people dull.
Make their ears deaf and their eyes blind,
so they can’t see with their eyes
or hear with their ears,
or understand with their minds,
and turn, and be healed.”
look carefully, but don’t comprehend.
10 Make the minds of this people dull.
Make their ears deaf and their eyes blind,
so they can’t see with their eyes
or hear with their ears,
or understand with their minds,
and turn, and be healed.”
11 I said, “How long, Lord?”
And God said, “Until cities lie ruined with
no one living in them, until there are houses without people and the land is
left devastated.” 12 The Lord will send the
people far away, and the land will be completely abandoned. 13 Even if one-tenth remain there, they will be
burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, which when it is cut down leaves a
stump. Its stump is a holy seed.
While
the lectionary text ends with verse 8, it is what follows that gets Isaiah, and
us, into trouble. Rather than a call to
a settled ministry- a call to a settled life nestled comfortably in the familiar
surroundings of your usual pew on Sunday mornings- God calls Isaiah and us to
prophetic engagement in a world that is profoundly deaf to our words.
To
be sure there is a hint of hyperbole in these latter verses of Isaiah 6. The picture of Israel that is painted sounds
like a desolate landscape devoid of life or hope like the scenery of Cormac
McCarthy’s novel the Road. Things were
bad in Israel but they weren’t nearly THAT bad.
Still, it isn’t any
surprise that the compilers of the lectionary and the preachers who follow it would
rather leave things with “Here am I; send me.”
That sun kissed dewy garden path is a lot more appealing than the grey
skied post-apocalyptic wasteland of “until cities lie ruined with no one living
in them.”
Just watch the
news or read the paper or pay the slightest attention to the world around us
and it won’t take long before you start crying with Isaiah’s other words, “How
long, LORD?”
How long until we
get beyond the petty jealousies of political rivalry?
How long until we get
past the cancer of racial and ethnic hatred?
How long until we
put sexism, racism, ageism, xenophobia, homophobia, religious intolerance, and
economic disparity behind us?
How long will the
world remain deaf to the word proclaimed and blind to the word revealed?
How long, LORD,
how long?!
If verses 1-8
recounts the awe inspiring wonder of being called by this holy Triune God, 9-13
reveals the perils of saying yes to God.
Because whether it is destructiveness of a culture of consumption that
threatens to consume us or idolatries that threaten to drive the church to
distraction or destruction, there is plenty in the world to persuade even the most
faithful of prophets to move quickly from “Here
am I” to “How long, LORD?” in
less time than a TV preacher can ask for a donation.
The inevitability
of the reality of the world make prophetic calling seem anything but appealing.
The opening words
of T. S. Eliot’s epic poem the Waste Land have an eerie echo of this harsh
truth. He writes,
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with the spring rain.
Like the prophetic
call that begins with sentimental surrender and ends with a desolate landscape,
year after year spring offers up new life only to remind us that it is merely
temporary- fleeting.
The call to
proclaim the gospel in a world that is deaf to our words is like admiring the
beauty of lilacs that will only be swallowed up by the earth again. The church speaks, the world does not hear,
the church speaks, the world does not hear.
It is an endless cycle of inevitability.
Even the heartiest,
the prophet says, will die- they will be cut down to the stump. By the end nothing remains.
Nothing, that is,
except a holy remnant; the stump, Isaiah says, is a holy seed.
That is the true
inevitability; hope.
The hope that
remains even in the most desolate of places.
The hope that
dwells even in the most barren of lands.
The hope that
cannot be defeated, denied, or destroyed.
The holy
disruption that is the call of our triune God in the life of each and every one
of us is the holy disruption of hope.
“Whom shall I
send?”
“Here am I; send
me.”
“How long, LORD,
how long?”
“Soon and very
soon.”
Alleluia. Alleluia. Amen.
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