Send the Other Guy: Isaiah 6:1-13
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
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.”
9 God said, “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.”
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. (CEB)
Nothing quite
like kicking off February with a cheerful text, right?
“In the year
of King Uzziah’s death,” we begin, which is significant not only because we
later readers can then place this text on a historical timeline but also
because it marks a notable change in the life of Isaiah and his fellow Hebrew
people. Uzziah inherited the throne at a
time when the kingdom of Judea was under attack by the Edomites, the
Philistines, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians—it was the scrawny kid on the
block, and as such unable to protect itself against the larger nations.[1] Under Uzziah’s rule, the Judean army grew and
grounded itself in strength such that it could fight back. Uzziah fortified the borders, protected trade
routes, and reestablished formal relations with the kingdom of Israel. He made the people feel safe, both militarily
and economically, which is no small feat for a ruler.
He wasn’t
perfect; when he died, he was not actually king anymore. At the height of his rule, Uzziah decided
that he should be not only king but also high priest, an office given by God to
the house of Levi. He went into the
Temple to offer incense, one of the jobs of the priests, and was struck with
leprosy for his arrogance. He abdicated
the throne for his son Jotham and lived on as a sort of royal advisor.[2] Uzziah “remained a stabilizing presence, a
reminder of all that he had accomplished,” writes Charles L. Aaron, Jr.[3]
So when Isaiah
anchors this vision in the year that King Uzziah dies, this is a national
faltering, a time of uncertainty about whether Jotham really has it together enough
to rule without his dad on call. Isaiah,
faithful man that he is, goes to the Temple; if the human king is dead (long
live the king), then at least the heavenly King is still going and can protect
the nation. Once there, however, Isaiah gets
quite a different experience than he was probably expecting.
“I saw
the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, the edges of his robe filling
the temple. Winged creatures were stationed around him.” This famous vision of purified lips and
singing seraphim lives in the heart of many of our call-based stories now; it
gets mentioned at ordinations, at membership Sundays, at missionary
sendoffs. “I’m here; send me” is a
powerful and beautiful response to this overwhelming vision of splendor and
encouragement.
But it doesn’t
end there. This isn’t “send me” and then
God emails Isaiah the next business day to confirm a date. This isn’t “send me” and then we roll credits
over a beautifully sweeping orchestral score in which things are going to be
okay for Judea. God responds immediately
to Isaiah’s willingness and says, “Go and say this to the people” and then
gives Isaiah a message to which God knows they will not listen, not only
knows they will not but seems to be ensuring that they cannot—“make”
them unable to understand, God tells Isaiah.
It is tempting
to see this as God setting up Isaiah to fail—tempting for me, at least, because
I absolutely hate when I’m given a task that I cannot complete. There’s a reason I finished my last degree
with a 4.0. But this isn’t that; this
isn’t God showing up in splendor with creepy winged creatures to cow Isaiah
into submission and then frustrate him.
This is God recognizing that we, as a people, are often not ready to hear
what God has to say for a multitude of reasons but that God is going to say it
anyway, just in case someone is listening.
Here in this
season between Epiphany and Lent, we are walking through the idea of going home
by a different road—taking a few small steps that utterly change us down the
line. Last week, we were fortunate
enough to hear from Lindsay Richardson of the Bay Area Women’s Center about
some concrete examples of people who are doing just that, who are making
different decisions at even the smallest levels that completely alter the lives
they then lead. And here, with Isaiah,
we are reminded that sometimes the answer to those offers of small changes can
be no, I do not want that.
It was the
year that King Uzziah had died and the nation was uncertain and God knew that they
would be looking for another human king, not a divine one. They were not ready to look anywhere else,
but the invitation to see God in all God’s holiness and splendor was there
anyway. This is the heart of our belief
in the goodness of God: that the offer to come and see is always there, and
we always have the right to walk away from it. It's probably not going to go well for us to
do so, but the option is there nonetheless because God is not God unless that
kind of love is freely given, the love that says “I am here for you even when
you do not want Me to be.”
Charles Aaron
continues, “Ironically, the powerful God, seated on a throne, with flying
snakes all around him does not (cannot?) change the intransigence of the people…The
powerful God allows the people to ignore the message. God tells the prophet to
proclaim the message despite the unwillingness of the people to hear
it… God does not call the prophet to change the world, or even the people
of Israel. Isaiah proclaims the message, even in spite of apathy and
opposition. This understanding of ministry may not provide a stirring rallying
cry. Nevertheless, the passage calls the church to integrity, to endurance, to
trust in God despite an unfavorable response.”[4]
When we read
this passage at ordination or membership Sunday or wherever, we gravitate
toward seeing ourselves as Isaiah—awed but ready, answering in hopeful
trepidation, “I’m here, send me.” However,
far more often, we are the people of Judea—the ones who listen but don’t
understand, look but don’t comprehend. We
decide that even the small steps are too much, and so we say to the God with
the hem that fills the Temple, “Ask someone else; I’m tired.” Or if we are Isaiah, the answer to “send me”
being “you’re not going to see any recognizable fruits of your ministry” may be
enough for us to say well then, good talk, I’m out, send the other guy.
This past week
was Groundhog Day, a holiday that has roots in Candlemas and seasonal change
and a lot of other things that we’ve forgotten in favor of watching a groundhog
obey the laws of astrophysics. I didn’t
know this, but apparently the critter in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania isn’t the
only rodent who does weather reports. In
Milltown, New Jersey, there is a groundhog named Milltown Mel who also pops up
to see if he can see his shadow—well, there was a groundhog. Milltown Mel died this week, right before
Groundhog Day, and he can’t be replaced until the next groundhog birthing
season.[5] There was a tweet that made the rounds of
social media that said, “The volunteer shortage is so bad that even groundhogs
can’t be found to predict the end of winter.”
Milltown Mel
is no King Uzziah, but that somewhat macabre joke of a lack of people showing
up to do things is as real now as it was in Isaiah’s time. Following the call to help—to speak truth to
power, to lend a hand to the disadvantaged, to feed the hungry and care for the
poor, to listen when a fight feels much more satisfying, to refuse to break
underneath the sheer weight of hatred and cruelty in the world, to allow
ourselves to be helped by the ones called to the work of compassion—is hard. It’s scary, it’s exhausting, it’s enough to
make one ask, “How long, Lord?” and then despair when the answer is “until
cities lie ruined” and everything that you know is cut down to a stump. Following the call, accepting the call
is so much harder than finding a new groundhog and naming it Mel; it is so much
harder than that opening act of saying, “I’m here, send me.” It’s listening to the sending that happens
next and actually doing something with it.
It’s accepting that people will not listen, that pain will still exist,
that it may feel like no one else is listening to the winged creatures crying “holy”
with loud voices.
So why bother,
if it’s that hard? Why keep returning to
the call, to the volunteering, to the work of gradually getting buried by the
grief of the world? Many of you have
been doing it for years; it’s someone else’s turn, send the other guy, it’s
time for a new Isaiah. And for many
things, that’s true—each generation must cede leadership to the next one. But that doesn’t mean that you are done,
because none of us are ever done with the call.
It’s a lifelong commitment, more binding even than marriage, because
it’s rooted in who we are constantly becoming as people in a mission-based
faith. Pastor Patrick Johnson writes
that, “At its fount, missional theology flows from the conviction that the
community of Christ is sent to join God in God’s mission of
redemption and new creation. But there is a great difference between
volunteering for a job and being sent on a mission…We are sent to join
God in mission because we have encountered God, because we have been brought
face to face with God’s holiness and our brokenness, and
because we have been made whole by God’s grace. In response to this
worshipful moment, we lay our lives before God and in God’s
service. Isaiah hears the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for
us?’, and the prophet responds ‘Here I am, send me!’ At its root,
Isaiah’s cry of ‘Here I am!’ is a response to God’s presence and
grace. Isaiah is not volunteering because he thinks he has skills God can use,
or has time on his hands. Isaiah is laying his life before the God who
encountered him and has made him whole.”[6]
Following the
call to mission is not a gimmick or a moment of feeling really in tune with the
universe or replying to an awesome sight; it is a choice, every day, to say “I’m
here, send me” no matter what. It’s
refusing to be the people who do not listen but respecting that those people
will always exist. It’s going to the
Temple when the king dies to be reminded that earthly rulers aren’t the only authority
around. It’s grieving for the way we as
humans destroy ourselves and yet continuing to work toward tearing down the
oppressive systems we use.
Today we celebrate the sacrament of
communion, that millennia-old ritual of gathering to be fed literally and
metaphorically in the broad community of the Christian faith. When we take these elements of the Body and
Blood; when we speak our confession with one voice and hear that God is with us
on this journey, forgiving us, purifying our lips with coal to give us words to
speak, we are saying, “I’m here. Send
me.” Communion is our consent to God,
our yes to the fact that we will be told to speak and it may be that no one
listens; that we will be invited not to change the world but to change our own
hearts. God will invite the other guy to
do something else, but you, beloved, you are called. Take the bread; drink of the cup. Here you are.
Are you willing to be sent?
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