Unresolved
Isaiah 6:1-8
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Through the Looking Glass was Lewis’ Carrol’s follow-up book to his children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In it Alice once again enters a fantastic world, only this time she does it by stepping through the large mirror hanging over the mantle of the fireplace in her home. Along the way she encounters a number of unusual characters, including the white king and queen who come alive on the chess board.
In one exchange between the two, the queen asks Alice her age, and then offers her own, “I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day,” she tells Alice.
“I can’t believe that!” Alice exclaims.
” 'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone.
'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'
Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said 'one can't believe impossible things.'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
Today, we are being invited to believe only three impossible things, or one. It’s complicated.
Someone once asked the famous trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong to explain jazz to them so they could understand it. To which Armstrong reportedly replied, “if you have to ask such a question, you will never understand the answer.” That’s a little what it feels like to stand up here on this Sunday following Pentecost that is celebrated in Protestant and Catholic churches alike as Trinity Sunday. It feels like there isn’t an understandable answer to the questions that get asked about the Trinity.
Is God one? Yes.
But God is also three? Yes.
So, which is it, is God one, or three? Yes, and no.
You start to feel like Alice, conversing in riddles with the characters on the other side of the looking glass. How can this be, and truly, why does it matter? That may be the real question, beyond the impossible mathematics of one being in three persons. Does a doctrine that is so incomprehensible to so many Christians, let alone non-Christians, really matter in the way we understand and live out our faith?
Getting back to Louis Armstrong for a minute, not everyone likes jazz, and for a lot of the same reasons that not everyone likes the doctrine of the Trinity. In the opening author’s note of his book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes,
“I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve.
But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night
when I saw a man playing the saxophone.
I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something
before you can love it yourself.
It is as if they are showing you the way.
I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve.”
I suppose that is the single greatest barrier to an appreciation of what it means to say that the one God is known in three. There is a tension in that statement, a theological and mathematical paradox that we cannot resolve in our minds.
We’re a little like Nicodemus in the reading we just heard from John. Jesus is trying to explain to him how a person comes to see God at work in the world, but it just doesn’t fit into the way that Nicodemus is used to thinking about God, and so, finally, in exasperation he says, “how can these things be?”
There is a story told about the salty, radicaland provocative Baptist preacher Will Campbell attending the trial of a Klansman who was accused of murdering a black man. A reporter who was covering the trial noticed that, during recesses, Campbell incongruously seemed to be on close personal terms with both the accused Klansman and with the family of the murdered man. Indeed, he spent a great deal of time speaking with both parties. “How is this possible,”
the reporter asked Campbell, sounding a little like Nicodemus, “for you to be on positive terms
with both the man accused of a hateful, racist murder, and the victim’s family?” Campbell muttered something about every person being a human being, but the reporter wasn’t satisfied.
“This just is not logical,” he insisted. “You can’t care for both the Klansman and the victim. Why do you think you can?”
“Because,” exploded Campbell, “I’m a <expletive deleted> Christian,”
The reporter was using the framework of how he thought the world was supposed to work, and simply could not resolve the idea of reconciliation that might come in some other way.
Maybe that’s why it’s important to set aside at least one Sunday in our church calendar to consider this rather bedrock assertion of Christian orthodoxy, because it invites us to consider that faith is not something that can be resolved using the tools of enlightened rationalism. Indeed, it is a little like believing in the impossible. Or, at least, impossible for us.
The God who is known to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit isn’t something we can tie up in a neat little logical bow. The God who is known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is someone to stand in awe of.
But in order to do that, we need something to snap us out of our everyday way of thinking and snap our attention to the holiness of God right in front of us. That’s what happened to Isaiah. It was in the year that King Uzziah died. That might sound like a small detail, one that gets lost in the rumble and grandeur of what comes next, but it’s an important one. You see Uzziah was the last of Judah’s truly powerful kings. His death had profound implications not just for the prophet himself, but for the whole nation.
It would be like saying, In the year that President Kennedy was assassinated, or the year Pearl Harbor was attacked. We have similar events in our own lives, smaller event perhaps than a national tragedy, but no less important. The year when mom, or dad, or a child died, forever changing things; the year a marriage ended, or a business failed; the year you finally hit rock bottom. It isn’t a case of God causing these terrible things to happen, that’s really not God’s style. But the Spirit of God can and does move through such events, both large and small, to get our attention and draw us back toward God.
That was certainly the case on the Sunday following September 11th, when so many churches were filled with people looking for a word from the Lord. That’s where Isaiah is, in church, in the temple, when through the swirl of the incense he sees the awesome presence of God filling the place. But it isn’t just the temple that is filled with the presence of God. The fiery attendants that Isaiah sees announce that the whole world is filled with God’s glory. The whole world is filled with the presence of the one who is holy times three.
We’re conditioned to think of holiness as some kind of exemplary moral behavior, when in truth holiness is a way of naming something that is distinct from everything else. The whole earth may be filled with the glory of God, but there is a distinction to be made between the world and God. It is that distinction, when we come to fully recognize it, that causes us to stand in awe of all that we are not. It is a distinction that elicits cries of woe from the prophet’s lips.
Not because God is mad, or out to get him, but because in that moment- in that moment of utter clarity at the difference between who God is and who Isaiah is not, the prophet becomes painfully aware of his own failing, and the failing of his people. “I am a man of unclean lips,” he confesses- as much to himself as anyone else, “and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Who is he, who are any of us to behold the glory and majesty of God?
It’s a fearful thing to come into the presence of the living God less because of who God is, but who we are not. Notice, however, that instead of striking Isaiah down, instead of condemning or punishing him, the winged seraphs take a live coal from the altar fire and touch it to his lips, cleansing him of any guilt or sin.
When the events of our lives draw our attention to the holiness of God all around us and we become painfully aware of everything in usand the world around us that separates us from God, the result is not God’s wrath, but rather God’s mercy- and a question. “Who will go?”
Because you see, the whole point of worshipping the awesome mystery of the Triune God is not to figure it all out. The point is to be sent out into the world, burning with such love for the One who has claimed us, cleansed us and called us that others can see it in us.
This weekend in our national life we take an extra day to honor the sacrifice of men and women who were themselves asked to go and serve; men and women who answered that call saying, ‘here I am.’ It is right and good to remember them, and the way in which they laid down their lives serving our country. That is about as much of the story as many around us will tell this weekend; that is the framework that gets used to make sense of their deaths.
Even so, as brothers and sisters in faith, we confess that the rest of the story is that their sacrifice is in some measure our failing. On the one hand, many of them died in order to protect and defend against very real threats to our world, to secure the freedoms that we hold so dear.
On the other hand, it must be said that such deaths are never God’s will.
As former president Jimmy Carter said in receiving the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.”
As Christians, while we honor the sacrificial service of the fallen, we also mourn with those who have mourned those deaths. We mourn the reality of war that takes our loved ones from us and pray God’s mercy upon the unholiness of our waging it.
As people of faith we are called to hold both things in our hands, and not allow them to be so easily resolved that we become reconciled to the cost of violence. Only then can each of us answer to the call to go forth to be the kind of peacemakers that that Jesus calls blessed as children of God.
Our call isn’t necessarily to come up with explanations to resolve something that cannot be resolved about God or our world. Our call is to go and let other people watch us love God by loving those whom God loves, watch us love God in such a way that when they see it, they too might come to see, marvel, and believe in the awesome and impossible love of God too.