Vision
Isaiah 6:1-8
Click here to view the full sermon video for Trinity Sunday, May 30th 2021, entitled "Vision."
When it comes to matters of faith, matters of the Spirit and of God, it’s easy to fall into abstraction. After all, faith is the assurance of things not seen. As Jesus tells Nicodemus in their famous encounter, “the Spirit blows where it will, you do not know where it comes from or where it is going.” And God… well, God is one of the words that all kinds of people use to stand in for so many different ideas and understandings that it can all get a little murky after a while. Particularly on a Sunday like this that we set aside as Trinity Sunday, the Sunday when pay deliberate attention to one of the distinctive claims of the Christian tradition: that the one God is known to us in three persons- the Creator, the Christ, and the Holy Spirit. To talk about any of it out loud feels a little risky, in part, because all of it can easily become an esoteric exercise in navel gazing. Which I suppose is why, when the prophet Isaiah shared the vision he had of God in the Temple and the subsequent call to speak God’s Word to the people, he set it against an easily understood, defined and common reference point in history. The encounter that the prophet has that compels him to speak isn’t some amorphous sense of God, it is in direct relation if not in response to the death of King Uzziah. What the prophet, and any of us have to see and say about and for God is inextricably linked to what is happening in our lives and in the world around us. Isaiah doesn’t randomly see God in the temple and step forward to answer God’s call. The vision comes to him in the year of Uzziah’s death.
According to the biblical book of 2 Chronicles, Uzziah’s reign as king of Judah lasted 52 years. That’s a long time. Long enough that people probably thought Uzziah would reign forever. But, of course, he didn’t. No one does. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing, that is, except God. Isaiah begins his account of this vision by naming what in all likelihood was a fairly traumatic event in the lives of the people of Judah. Uzziah, their king, their stability over a period of time longer than the average life span back then, was gone just like that. The death of king Uzziah would have destabilized everything. In moments like that- in moments when a relationship that felt solid, or a job you thought was secure, or a way of life you’d come to rely on suddenly comes to an end- it can feel like nothing is certain, like we’re standing on shifting sand. But in the year when Uzziah died, in the year when the marriage ended, in the year when the position was downsized, in the year when the world shut down and a previously unknown virus claimed the lives of at least 3.5 million people worldwide, God is still sitting upon a throne high and lofty. That is, God is still in charge. God is still the master of all creation, all appearances to the contrary. In times like that, the voices of these many winged seraphim call our attention to what has no end, the holiness of God. Isaiah’s vision declares that the whole earth is filled with God’s glory. As the mystic Julian of Norwich observed so long ago, “only in the falling apart of your own foundation can you experience God as your total foundation and your real foundation.” That foundation is the first person of this triune God that we trust, the one whose glory fills all of creation, the one who is our true foundation.
That can be at once reassuring, the holiness of God is not subject to the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows of human life. As the prophet will declare later, the everlasting God does not faint or grow weary. It can also be daunting. To find oneself before the thrice holy God, even if it is in a kind of vision, is to be blindingly aware of our own unholiness. The one who makes heaven and earth is not like us, but is holy- that is to say, set apart from it, wholly other. This is what is meant by the phrase ‘the fear of the Lord.’ Not so much that we have anything to fear from God, after all God is the one who made us in God’s own image. God is the one to whom we belong in life and in death. God is unequivocally for us and with us. No, the fear of the Lord is the feeling of awe that we experience in the presence of the God’s holiness that makes our own unholiness, our own fallibility, our finite existence that much more evident. It is to know in a visceral way the vast discrepancy between who we are and who God is. This is not an invitation to self-abandonment, or self-denial. We do God no favors by playing small and failing to be who we were made to be. It is, says scripture, the beginning of wisdom. Isaiah’s cry, “woe is me,” is the beginning of knowing our limits, naming them, and being assured that whatever those limits may be, whatever the uncleanliness of our lips, or the people around us, it is certainly no obstacle to God’s ability to cleanse our mouths and our hearts of all that keeps us from fully living into who we are and what we are called to do. That is what the second person of the triune God does, removing our guilt and blotting out our sin, so that we can hear with open hearts and minds what comes next.
Because what comes next is the voice of the Spirit, with a question. To come before the grandeur and holiness of God, to have our sins laid bare in that light and be forgiven is only the first two parts of an equation that does not end there. The American theologian Dallas Willard once mused on the popular bumper sticker that read, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” Really? Willard asked, incredulous at the idea that the surpassing goal of the Christian life could be reduced to sin management. In the economy of the world in which we live, that approach might make sense. We’re told we’re sinners who need to repent so that God will forgive us. Sin managed. The end. But if Isaiah is to be believed and what it means to repent is to go in a new direction, then forgiveness and the cleansing of our sin isn’t the reward we receive for being so very sorry. Rather, coming to recognize the unholiness of our sin is what makes us ready to receive the forgiveness that comes in the presence of God. The grace of that gift is what enables us to repent, empowers us to move in God’s direction. It isn’t until the prophet experiences the gift of forgiveness that he can answer the question asked by the third person of the triune God, the one who gives voice and breath to the word God speaks. “Who will go for us,” it asks. “Whom can we send?”
Here is a vision of what it means to be caught up in the life of God as three-in-one, the one-in-three. It means finding a foundation in the one whose glory fills all of creation when our own foundations crumble; when the crisis, or the failure, or the heartbreak send us reeling. It means coming to see ourselves more fully in the presence of the one whose glory lays it all bare and being cleansed of all that we say and do that is out of step with what God would put right. And finally, it means hearing the calling voice of God that would send us back into the world on God’s behalf, to say what needs to be said and do what can be done; to speak love and to do justice with humility and grace. It’s an invitation to carry this vision with us on the new path that God would send us. To respond to the call of the Creator, the Christ and the Spirit, “here am I. Send me.”