Together: Isaiah 6:1-8
Trinity Sunday
In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord
sitting on a high and exalted throne, the edges of his robe filling the
temple. 2 Winged creatures were stationed around
him. Each had six wings: with two they veiled their faces, with two their feet,
and with two they flew about. 3 They shouted to
each other, saying:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of heavenly
forces!
All the earth is filled with God’s glory!”
4 The doorframe shook at
the sound of their shouting, and the house was filled with smoke.
5 I said, “Mourn for me;
I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean
lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!”
6 Then one of the winged
creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that he had taken from the altar
with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth and said, “See,
this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.”
8 Then I heard the
Lord’s voice saying, “Whom should I send, and who will go for us?”
I said, “I’m here; send me.” (CEB)
I’ve been watching a series on Netflix called “Hilda,” based
on a British graphic novel series of the same name. The animated episodes follow the adventures
of blue-haired 11-year-old Hilda, a girl who grew up with her mother in the
wilderness and moves to the town of Trolberg after her house is flattened by a
giant. See, the thing about the series
“Hilda” is that the common elements of making new friends, learning how to ride
bikes, and navigating having to do homework are right alongside the fantastical
adventures of befriending elves, warding off stone trolls, fighting with
nightmare-inducing witches called marra, and chasing house-sized dogs
through the physics-bending pouches of the universe in which you always lose
your spare change.[1]
It’s a very
strange show, which is what makes it fun.
You never know how the next episode is going to bend the reality that is
familiar to us in this world and treat some off-the-wall dream as a completely
normal part of existence. The show
reminds me to think of the world with some of the adventurous imagination that
I’ve lost in my adulthood, not because the world is filled with stone trolls
but because of all the strange things that really do exist.
Today is
Trinity Sunday, part of the Western calendar since the 10th century,
the one Sunday of the liturgical year in which the Church takes a moment to
contemplate the way in which we think about the relational dance that is God—and
that may well be one of the strangest things of which I know. All our human attempts to explain or describe
God fall short, as the mystery is part of God’s description. We even wrestle with how to name there being
different parts of God—to talk about the Trinity means we have to talk about
there being three Persons but only one God, and how exactly those Persons
interact, and what does it mean to say they multiply each other rather than
add,[2] and just which part of God
are we dealing with these days.
This text from Isaiah invites us to
something as strange and unexpected as anything found in “Hilda.” We begin in concrete reality: “in the year of
King Uzziah’s death.” Dr. John Holbert
notes that, “That year is 740/739 B.C.E. Uzziah had become king some 45 years
before that, and had become a leper about 750, requiring the appointment of a
regent to rule publically [sic] in his place. The death of a
long-reigning king is always an occasion of political uncertainty, and it is
fully appropriate that Isaiah should feel the sharp call of YHWH at such a time.”[3]
We in the
United States who weathered an intense leadership change in the last year can
sympathize that the world seems a little rocky while things are transitioning. Isaiah finds himself in the Temple—not a bad
place to be in moments of uncertainty, really.
After national moments of grief or shock, attendance at worship spaces
spikes for a while because we humans often reach beyond what is earthly to what
is somehow more, seeking the inexplicable for inexplicable times.
And Isaiah
certainly gets inexplicable. “I saw the
Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne,” he says, describing winged
creatures—in Hebrew, seraphim (שְׂרָפִ֨ים), a word meaning “fiery ones”
or “burned ones”[4]—surrounding
the throne as the Lord’s robe tumbles out to fill the Temple, each creatures
shouting so loudly that they shook the doorframe. Curling around them, in addition to their six
wings, was smoke. This is not what one
normally sees when one comes to church—unless y’all are having a rather
different experience than I am. (Perhaps
those of you watching along from elsewhere have a more fantastical browser open
behind this tab?)
It is a moment
to remind us that one of the many, many faces of God is awe-some, in the
original linguistic sense of inspiring awe.
God is “wholly Other,” a phrase used in the 1917 book The Idea of the
Holy by Rudolf Otto to say that God can be so tremendous and overwhelming
in God-ness that we can’t help but fall down before that majesty. It is the response Isaiah has; his words are
not, “Oh, God, I’ve been meaning to ask You a few things” or “oh, how much I’ve
longed to meet You!” but “Mourn for me; I’m ruined!”
This is not
everybody’s favorite face of God. In
fact, it’s a face that has been used to great harm on many who have been told
that they are the ones with unclean lips, that they are the ones who should
cower before this holy God Who surely is disgusted by them. When we consider the Trinity, this is not the
Person to Whom many would turn—we often prefer the quicksilver action of the
Spirit or the human kindness of Jesus.
Yet on this Trinity Sunday we face the fact that God is so much bigger
than a dove or a man in sandals. Those
are certainly part of this Being, but so is this enthroned wonder—and it is
part of the adventure of faith to allow ourselves to be bowled over by the
fantastic and strange.
As we consider
that which is awe-some, let us note that God’s reaction to Isaiah’s grief-stricken
response is not scorn or horror; it is salvation. “Your guilt has departed, and your sin is
removed,” says the seraph who held the coal against Isaiah’s lips, and
immediately after God openly asks for one to send among God’s people, accepting
Isaiah’s volunteered request that he be the one sent.
Even in this
moment of a vision stranger than any stone troll or friendly elf, God reaches
out in reparative relationship. When
Isaiah feels that he cannot remain in the presence of God, God makes it
possible. After the death of an earthly
king, this King of all kings offers both an incredibly wild vision and the
support for Isaiah to minister to God’s people—unsuccessfully, as we discover
if we keep reading in chapter six, but wholeheartedly. “Here I am; send me,” says Isaiah, because
the only response he can have after seeing this aspect of God and hearing
that he is welcome right where he stands is to say yes, use me, whatever comes
next. And God say okay, I can work with
this.
The vision is
both weird and entirely normal, much like the adventures of little Hilda. As Dr. Melinda Quivik explains, “Standing in
the holy sanctuary, the narrator has a vision which tells something about the
Holy One and also about the narrator. God’s presence is so large, the narrator
says, the hem of the Lord’s robe alone fills the temple space. This is
vastness. Strange but faithful creatures envelop the throne. Smoke obscures the
whole scene. We are used to the images of fire and smoke, cloud and height
being associated with God. It is all here. And, in comparison with that
grandeur, we see ourselves, along with the narrator, as puny and inadequate.
But God’s power to cleanse and make whole is ready to do its work.
“The vision is one of grandeur that
lies outside the scope of normal human experience, and yet it is described as
happening at a specific historical time, namely, when King Uzziah died in 8th
century BCE, the time of the prophets Amos and Hosea. Uzziah was admired for
having enhanced the kingdom’s agriculture with new wells and watchtowers in the
wilderness, and he built up the army.” An
entirely understandable human king gets eclipsed by an entirely ineffable divine
marvel and we here on Trinity Sunday have to reckon with the fact that this,
too, is God. God is the Jesus Who called
Mary by name in the garden and Who invited a tax collector to eat with Him; God
is the Spirit Who danced in tongues of flame on the disciples’ head and opened
their mouths to speak languages they never learned; and God is the King Who
sits surrounded by bizarre burning ones shouting God’s holiness to the rafters.
But what does it matter? As Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault points out, “With
so many urgent practical issues facing spiritual humanity, why waste time with
the Trinity, a doctrine that most of the world (and even much of Christianity)
regards as contrived and irrelevant? It
takes a real stretch of the theological imagination to claim that it was ever
part of the original Jesus teachings or that it does a single ting to clarify
or enhance these teachings. In fact, the eminent twentieth-century theologian
Karl Rahner has claimed that if the Trinity were to quietly disappear out of
Christian theology, never to be mentioned again, most of Christendom would not
even notice its absence.”[5]
I offer two main reasons on this
Sunday in 2021 after a year of pandemic and unrest, poised as we are on the
edge of so many uncertainties: the
Trinity matters for wonder and flexibility.
First, wonder. At every age, we must be able and willing to
be flummoxed by the world. Things like
giraffes exist; how long has it been since you thought about how wild it is
that giraffes exist? Or that blue comes
in so many shades? Or that trees send
each other messages through root systems?
Or that the planet is tilted in just such a way that my friends in New
Zealand are experiencing winter as I begin summer? We are creations of a creative God Who
invites us to use that creativity, that sense of wonder, to make space for mystery. Isaiah’s vision reminds us that there are
parts of the universe we will never understand, which is not an indictment
against questions at all but is a reassurance that we are allowed to simply
marvel. God is weirder than a giraffe
and bluer than the sky or the sea and subtler than the trees and more capable
of containing dichotomies than a planet experiencing multiple seasons all the
time. When we come to God, we can open
our arms to the vastness of Who God is and find ourselves wrapped up in the wonder
of the reality that that God knows us by name and loves us, loves me, loves
you. Yes, you.
Second, flexibility. Isaiah did not go into the Temple expecting
to meet seraphim and a room-filling robe clothing God. But that’s what he got—and, as Dr. Holbert
points out, his response set the pattern for our worship even thousands of
years later: praise, confession,
forgiveness, and response.[6] Isaiah understood that in that moment, it
wasn’t God Who needed to shift; it was him. “Mourn for me, I’m ruined!...Yet I’ve seen
the King.” He accepted the coal,
accepted the pardon, and said here I am; send me.
We do not see the moving pieces of
the world; sometimes, we have enough trouble seeing the moving pieces of our
own lives. But God appears in whatever form
or face is needed and says, “Whom shall I send?” Are we flexible enough to say this is not
what I expected, this call is different than I’d planned for but okay, send me?
This is an odd day, and an odd text,
which is fitting because it’s an odd time.
But hold to the wonder and the flexibility, Church. Hold to the God Who is never only one thing
because we, too, are never only one thing.
Peter Lockhart writes, “The paradox of our Christian existence is that
whilst we are born from above, whilst signs of the kingdom do break in, whilst
we do with one voice praise God with the sanctus, we live in the tension
of still having unclean lips. We harm one another, in pride we compete for
power and position, we neglect the cry of our brothers and sisters who do not
even have the basic necessities of life. We carry a message of love and hope
yet struggle to be all that we are called to be, even to those whom we love
most dearly.
“We are the world for whom Christ
died; we have been saved, we have been made whole. We are constantly being
renewed by his love as we continue to enter his presence to have our lips touch
by the burning coal and like Isaiah, like Nicodemus, we are given an opportunity
to respond, saying ‘Here I am send me’, even when the message we carry is a
difficult one to understand, live by and proclaim to a world that wants to
ignore it.”[7]
How shall you respond to the God Who
calls to you? I don’t know what form God
will take; if it’s a King surrounded by seraphim, let me know because that
would be an intense vision. But it may
also be a friend nudging you down a new path, or a stranger asking you to
consider something anew, or even a Netflix cartoon saying look, look at how
strange and beautiful the world is.
May we have our eyes open to this
singular God Who invites us to a multiplicity of exhausting, difficult,
marvelous, sacred things. Amen.
[2]
Anecdotally, the ELCA pastor Wendell Hendershott took the usual formula of
discussing the Trinity (1+1+1 still equals 1 somehow) and said no, it is
1x1x1=1. Each Person multiplies the
others in the relational dance.
[4]
Ibid.
[5]
Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2013), 1.
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