HOW HOLY IS YOUR GOD?
Isaiah 6:1-8 2/29/2004
Soren Kierkegaard tells a parable of a community of ducks waddling off to duck church to hear the duck preacher. The duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. With these wings there was nowhere the ducks could not go; there was no God-given task the ducks could not accomplish. With those wings they could soar into the presence of God himself. Shouts of "Amen" were quacked throughout the duck congregation. At the conclusion of the service, the ducks left, commenting on what a wonderful message they had heard -- and waddled back home.
Too often, would-be worshipers waddle away from worship as they waddled in -- unchallenged and unchanged. Perhaps it is because we are creatures of habit. Week after week, congregants sit in the same place in the same pew, following an order of service that they know by heart, listening to a sermon which they assume is intended primarily for someone else.
Occasionally, though, something happens. Something unplanned. Something unrehearsed. Something uncontrollable. In the midst of a worship service, worship happens. Someone's eyes are opened to a deeper awareness of the grandeur of God by the majesty of the music, and new commitments are born. Someone recognizes his or her life's story as the Scripture is read, and a new believer is born. Someone hears in the sermon, as if for the first time, the forgiving love of Jesus, and a new hope is born. We may wonder why such happenings occur there but not here, to this person but not to that one. But experience has taught us that these events can't be explained, only described. (PAUSE) You know, trees and prophets share at least one important characteristic—both are planted for the future. Yet seedlings are often overlooked and prophets often ignored. Isaiah, the central character in this week's text is one of the best examples of this. The people of his time could have been rescued by his words but instead they refused to believe him. Isaiah’s calling came during an annual celebration of worship. It was for him an encounter with God so profound that afterward he could no longer see himself or his people in quite the same way. To Isaiah it seemed that the entire building shook with the presence of God. But have you ever wondered about the others who were present during that same worship service? Did they have a similar experience to Isaiah's? Did this act of worship affect how they viewed themselves? How they viewed God? (PAUSE) How is it that two persons can hear the same music, the same prayers, the same sermon, and one of them be utterly transformed by the experience, while the other is unmoved? What makes the service of worship a profound encounter with God for one and a routine ritual for another?
The answer appears in a moment Isaiah describes in today's text, a moment when, as songs are being sung and prayers are being prayed and the high priest is intoning the greatness of God, unexpectedly, worship happens. It happens to him. As each of us yearns for our own worship-filled moment, let us listen to Isaiah's account of an encounter with God when worship happened. (READ ISAIAH 6:1-8) Isaiah’s picture of God gives us a sense of God’s greatness, mystery and power, doesn’t it. The lofty throne, the angels in attendance, hovering around God’s throne and singing “Holy, holy, holy…” so loud it shook the temple.
If only WE could experience God in that way! What would it take to see God as He is, as Isaiah, the greatest of the Old Testament prophets saw Him? Have we reduced GOD to a human status, a God we no longer fear and say we love but don’t show Him love the same way we show others? An Old Testament, old God who doesn’t quite fit in our modern world? We need to begin spending at least this precious hour on Sunday mornings worshipping our God! We need to really worship him with all our hearts and souls and minds. We need to walk into this sanctuary with reverence, and think about worshipping—showing God we adore him and are devoted to him, at least for this hour once a week!
Worship only happens when God is present, and that doesn’t mean present here in this building, but present within and surrounding you. Worship only happens when you come in here expecting to meet Jesus, expecting something to happen.
The only way I can attempt explain it is by using the words, “radically present.´ We know God is always everywhere present, but radically present – worship—would describe those occasions when feeling God's presence bursts upon our consciousness in an unusually powerful way. Radically present is when you are overwhelmed by an encounter with the Divine which leaves you on your knees in awe-filled worship. When this happens, we experience true worship.
Another very significant person in the Old Testament is Jacob. He’s the one they call the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Let me tell you about his very personal encounter with God: Jacob was running away from a past full of lies to what would be an equally deception-filled future. Behind him was the murderous anger of his brother, Esau. Ahead of him was an uncertain reception by an uncle he had never met. Along the way, he stopped to rest for the evening with nothing but the stars for his blanket and a rock for his pillow. In this unlikeliest of places, the radical presence of God filled his dreams with such stunning reality that he could only respond, "Surely the LORD is in this place -- and I did not know it" (Genesis 28:16). Then the scripture says, “…he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (v. 17) The next morning took the stone he had used for a pillow, set it up as an altar, poured oil on it, and left it as an expression of worship. The radical presence of God cannot be controlled or programmed; it can only be experienced. I cannot add incense or special music or anything else that will give this gift to you, although I sure would love to! But know that this experience can come to us anywhere, anytime. For Isaiah it happened in the temple, but God does not limit holy moments to holy places. For Moses God's radical presence was discovered on the backside of a wilderness; for Elijah it was in a mountain hideout; for Saul it was on a bounty-hunting excursion to Damascus. And who would have thought that the most radical presence of God imaginable, the baby Jesus, would have begun among the distinctive smells of a barn and ended among the death throes of criminals? Yet the shepherds, wise men, and all those who were there knew it wasn’t just a baby because they felt the presence of God.
Isaiah's experience reminds us that the radical presence of God is found not only in the extraordinary, but in the ordinary as well. God can be as profoundly present in the sunset over a mountain peak as he is in a church or cathedral. He can reveal himself in a concert hall as vitally as he might in a moment of prayer. I’m sure each of us has a place or a sound or smell that helps us feel the presence of God and all of them are probably different.
More important than where we are is our willingness to see God in whatever is going on around us. Isaiah was engaged in an ordinary service of worship, seeing what everyone else was seeing, hearing what everyone else was hearing, when God broke through the ordinary to reveal himself. Isaiah "saw through" the smoke and the haze of the ceremony taking place in the temple, to the eternal reality which the celebration represented. He was not content to experience only worship; he was open to an experience of God.
We, too, are more apt to be surprised by the radical presence of God when our hearts are opened to seeing him in the ordinary events of life.
Such awareness, however, is made difficult for us because we are a society which celebrates the sensational and the spectacular. If an event is not filled with more glitz and glamour and ostentatious hype than what came before, then, for many, it is a non-event. God is to be experienced within these walls and also beyond them. If one cannot feel God’s presence here, how can we expect to every see Him in our everyday lives? Chances are, when you experience God’s presence radically, it will most likely be in the ordinary, because that is where you spend the majority of your hours. Just know that worship can happen any where.
I have had up-close-and-personal encounters with Jesus Christ in my car, in my back yard, in my office sitting at the computer, and in these very walls. Each of them filled me with awe, the awe of knowing how much He loves me, how much He wants to forgive my sins, and how much He wants me to love Him in return. See, worship happens whenever our inadequacies are met by the grace of God.
The radical presence of God caused Isaiah to recognize, perhaps for the first time, the spiritual shortcomings of himself and his fellow Judahites. Under King Uzziah, the nation of Judah had experienced an almost unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. Life was good, the economy was robust, the polls showed high consumer confidence, and all of the economic indicators pointed to more of the same. What’s more, all of this had been accomplished through human effort and ingenuity.
Is it any wonder that Isaiah's message of God’s anger and their impending doom fell on deaf ears? Who wants to listen to a gloom-and-doom prophet rain dire predictions on a good-time parade?
Perhaps this is why we, too, have such ineffective worship experiences. We are content with life, with our careers or retirement, with our families. We have settled into a comfortable routine of living. To be sure, we need God, but only to clean up around the edges of life. We certainly don't need his radical presence that might reveal the deficiencies of our neatly manicured existence.
And worship is fine as long as it helps us feel good about whom we are and what we have accomplished or if it confines its focus to how others can reach our level of spiritual well-being. We can come here on Sunday specifically to worship, feel sad about not having more “young people” among us, discuss what might build up our numbers, then we can leave and forget about all of it—including worshipping—for another week. We are willing to meet God, but only on our terms. We are willing to meet God, but only on our own terms.
I want to say something here about the movie (The Passion of Christ) that some of us are going to see together this afternoon. This movie is a very accurate view of Jesus’ last 12 hours on earth. I have been hearing people, both among us and others, say that they don’t want to see this movie. Some reasons given are “I don’t want to put any of my money in Hollywood’s (or Mel Gibson’s) pocket,” or “I’ve heard it’s really violent and bloody and I don’t think I can take all that blood.” And “All that violence and gore—is it really necessary?”
My answer is this: WE ARE WILLING TO MEET GOD, BUT ONLY ON OUR OWN TERMS. We want to package God as loving and kind, not as one who can get angry enough to kill thousands of us in one fell swoop. Isaiah described one episode of God’s anger saying, “The anger of the Lord was kindled against his people and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them, the mountains quaked and their (dead bodies) were like (trash) in the streets.) (Is 6:25) We want to picture our Jesus as a sweet-smelling baby in a manger, or a gentle carpenter pulling children onto his lap, or how about the Good Shepherd lovingly holding a little lamb?
People, the death of Jesus Christ WAS violent and bloody and gory! This movie is not for unbelievers, because if they don’t know Jesus, it’s just another violent movie of fiction like they see all the time. This movie is for YOU—those of you who proclaim to follow Jesus! You need to see this movie, you need to experience it. So the next time you placidly read the Bible and it says, “Take up your cross and follow me,” you will know just what that means in a radically personal way!
You need to see this movie so the next time you receive Holy Communion, perhaps you will actually see and taste the blood and body of Jesus Christ, who died a slow and indescribable death because of our sins., those sins we commit every day of our lives! If you decided not to see it today with our group, please reconsider and go see it alone or with a few other adults. Feel God’s presence in that theatre, in the lives of the actors, and there at your side to comfort you as you watch what was meant to be a horrible death because the sins of all men and women is horrible to God.
Know that God does not reveal his presence simply to overwhelm us or to make us feel worthless. Rather, he wishes by that presence to remind us of his empowering grace that meets and transforms our awareness of personal inadequacy. No sooner had Isaiah confessed his own and his generation's uncleanness, than God impressed on him the grace that forgives sins.
Indeed, in the text, we are led to understand that only because Isaiah was able to confess his own feelings of helplessness and hopelessness to God was God able to use him as a prophet to the people. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a person of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of angels! (my paraphrase of Isaiah 6:5) And in God’s grace toward Isaiah, worship happened.
Worship happens whenever a grateful response answers a divine call. It is important to note that God's question, "Whom shall I send, who will go for us?" was not directed to Isaiah, but rather to the attending seraphim, the angels. God was asking the angels, “Who will go as a representative of us, of heaven?”
Isaiah simply overheard the question and immediately stepped forward. One might want to question his sanity. After all, God did not say where the "whom" was being sent or what the task was. Isaiah might have waited until more information was given before he volunteered. How many of us say “yes” to anything, let alone the call of God on our lives, without knowing some of the details?
What could have prompted such a seemingly rash response? (PAUSE) Gratitude! It was gratitude, Isaiah’s gratitude for God's grace. Gratitude for God's forgiveness of sin. Gratitude for the experience of God's presence unlike anything he had known before. Our own gratitude for God’s blessings in our lives should be one that results in positive action and when we make that kind of expression of gratitude, worship happens.
Tony Campolo tells the story of a young woman named Nancy who gratefully responded to God's movement of grace. Although Nancy has a handicapping condition and is confined to a wheelchair, she has an extraordinary ministry. Every week, in the personals section of her local newspaper, she runs an ad that reads, "If you are lonely or have a problem, call me. I am in a wheelchair and I seldom get out. We can share our problems with each other. I'd love to talk." She spends much of her day on the telephone talking with the more than 30 lonely and discouraged people who call each week.
When Campolo asked how she came to be confined to a wheelchair, Nancy revealed that she had tried to commit suicide by jumping from the balcony of her apartment. Instead of dying, however, she ended up in a hospital room paralyzed from the waist down. One night in the hospital, she said, Jesus came to her and very clearly said, "You have had a healthy body and a crippled soul. From this day on you will have a crippled body, but you will have a healthy soul." She said, "I gave my life to Jesus that night in that hospital room, and I knew that if I kept a healthy soul, it would mean that I would have to help other people. And so I do."
No one so touched by God can remain still. No one who has accepted the grace of God can remain silent. If we are silent, it is because we don’t want to believe God pulled through for us; we did it ourselves. Through our own willpower or perseverance or money or whatever.
But no one who hears in their heart the divine call for service can do anything less than respond with gratitude, "Here am I; send me!" And in moments like this, worship happens.
I’d like to close with this parable of today’s scripture from Isaiah from Frederick Buechner,There were banks of candles flickering in the distance and clouds of incense thickening the air with holiness, and stinging his eyes, and high above him, as if it had always been there but was only now seen for what it was (like a face in the leaves of a tree or a bear among the stars), there was the Mystery itself whose gown was the incense and the candles a dusting of fold at the hem.
There were winged creatures shouting back and forth the way excited children shout to each other when dusk calls them home, and the whole vast, reeking place started to shake beneath his feet like a wagon going over cobbles, and he cried out, "O God, I am done for! I am foul of mouth and the member of a foul-mouthed race. With my own two eyes I have seen him. I'm a goner and sunk." Then one of the winged things touched his mouth with fire and said, "There, it will be all right now," and the Mystery itself said, "Who will it be?" and with charred lips he said, "Me," and Mystery said, "Go."
Mystery said, "Go give the deaf Hell till you're blue in the face and go show the blind Heaven till you drop in your tracks because they'd sooner eat ground glass than swallow the bitter pill that puts roses in the cheeks and a gleam in the eye. Go do it."
Isaiah said, "Do it till when?"
Mystery said, "Till Hell freezes over."
Mystery said, "Do it till the cows come home."
And that is what a prophet does for a living and, starting from the year that King Uzziah died when he saw and heard all these things, Isaiah went and did it. (-- Peculiar Treasures (Harper and Row, 1979), 55.
God's purposes will be done in this world. Are you going to be a part of it? (PAUSE)
PLEASE PRAY THE CLOSING PRAYER WITH ME, PRINTED IN YOUR BULLETIN: O God, as we leave this place, grant us a sense of your holiness to go with us. Enable us not only to hear your call, but to respond to it. Give us a broader vision of you so that we may then serve and worship you until we see the whole earth full of your glory. Amen. Benediction
God, Grant us to be silent before You -- that we might hear you, At rest in You -- that you might work in us, Open to You -- that you may enter. Empty before You -- that you may fill us. Let us be still -- and know that you are our God. Amen. (-- Source unknown)
Children's Sermon
The question asked in Isaiah 6:8 is the focus of this week's time with the children. Begin the discussion by asking them if their parents or teachers have ever sent them on a special errand (to the store to get something, to a neighbor's house, to the principal's office, to another classroom, etc.). They will be eager to share their stories, and you can compliment them on being so responsible. Suggest to them that God would like to send them on an errand, and ask them what type of errand it might be. As they respond, produce a pad of memo slips. Ahead of time, write the child's name by To and GOD on the From line. As they respond and as you suggest ideas, write that idea for each child, give them the memo, and tell them that this is their responsibility for the week. (For example: Billy's errand is to volunteer to help the teacher after school; Lisa's errand is to give a compliment to a classmate everyone laughs at, etc.)
