Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
Theme: “Cauterization”
The Festival of The Holy Trinity
June 7, 2009
St. Andrew Presbyterian Church
Denton, TX
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau
+In the Name of Jesus+
The great festivals of the Christian church celebrate events and people, but there is one exception. There is an age old festival that does not celebrate an event or a person, and we celebrate it today. It is the festival of the Holy Trinity, the beginning of the second half of the church year. And what it celebrates is a teaching: the teaching that God is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We confess the Holy Trinity, the three-in-one and the one-in-three; not three gods, but one God in three persons. The word “holy” shows up in our reading for tonight not once but three times: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts.” God is three times holy! Why is that? Some scholars have seen hints of the teaching of the Trinity in this Old Testament passage. By the way, you won’t find the word Trinity in the Bible. Neither will you find The Apostles’ Creed in the Bible. But you will find what both the word Trinity and the Creed teach. They are like hummingbirds that pull the nectar out of the Bible and give us the good stuff in concentrated form. There’s your theological lesson for the day! Maybe you found it a bit dry or boring. Nowadays, it almost seems that boredom is worse than sin. And so, among other things, we want our worship to be entertaining. But worship isn’t entertainment, as Isaiah surely found out.
Now, even though I’ve slept through some of them, the movies aren’t supposed to be boring. They are there for entertainment. Speaking of the movies, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has had a considerable run. Long before Rowling, the great C.S. Lewis took pen to paper and wrote a children’s series called The Chronicles of Narnia, and the motion picture people have had similar, profitable fun with two books in that series: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.
In Lewis’s Narnia, God – or Jesus Christ – is portrayed as a lion named Aslan. At one point in the series, one of the Pevensie children asks a question about Aslan to a Narnian. “Is he safe?” the question went. The reply followed: “No, he’s not safe. But he’s good.”
Many young people in Denton graduated from high school this past Friday. They are entering a world that’s not safe, but, hopefully, their education is part of the good that they will take with them. Congratulations to them all! I thought back to my own high school graduation ceremony a little over thirty years ago. Afterwards, I ran back to my Mustang II, threw my gown in the back seat, hopped in, put an 8-track tape in the stereo, and listened to Jackson Browne sing “Doctor, My Eyes”:
Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can.
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?
A few days later I had my wisdom teeth pulled. Not a pleasant experience. Shortly after that, I took on a job where I actually made some real money. I worked at a galvanizing plant. We gave steel light poles a bath in eight hundred and forty degree molten zinc. Was it a safe job? No. We weren’t allowed into the plant unless we had on our hard hats, asbestos coats and gloves, and steel-toed boots. I worked the graveyard shift, and one night while we dipped some steel, globs of hot, smoky, molten zinc popped into the air. (That happened if there was any moisture on the steel.) One glob landed between my coat and glove and on my wrist. It turned out to be a third-degree burn about the size of a dime. It cauterized away some hair follicles. As I said, it wasn’t safe, but the money was good.
As our Scripture text for tonight unfolds, it’s pretty clear that Isaiah the prophet wasn’t in a safe place. He may have wondered, like Jackson Browne, if he kept his eyes open for too long. But was it a good place? That remains to be seen. There sits God, high on a throne, with robe filling the temple. There are bizarre looking flying angels with six wings and covered faces. This isn’t the lovely, sentimental, even safe image of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is it? These angels have something to say to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory!” The thresholds shook and smoke filled the air. It doesn’t look as though hard hats and steel-toed boots would have been of much help.
But there, in the mix, is Isaiah, and he’s woefully out of place. He says: “Woe is me! I am lost!” A lost person once said: “Show me the way to go home; I’m tired and I want to go to bed; I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went straight to my head.”
Isaiah wasn’t lost because he was drunk. He was as sober as a judge, and he saw an astounding reality, a reality beyond reality, the reality. He thought it was “curtains” for him – not because he was lost, but because he knew he was unclean. And it wasn’t because he stepped barefoot into a muddy creek or was digging around in a garbage can. Unclean is here understood as being only too aware of his own sin, of the fact that he wasn’t holy.
Since I’ve become a member of the Presbyterian Church, I’ve read a goodly amount of Presbyterian literature – both in print and online. There’s a lot of talk about justice, and that’s good. Basically, we’re for it; we believe it’s a good thing. Now, we tend to define justice in a rather limited way; we define it as fairness. We want to work toward eliminating inequities, we say.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we best be careful if we ask God for fairness, we might get it. Fairness means that we get what we deserve. Is it fair for sinners to even be in the presence of a holy God?
No, my friends, it’s not justice understood as fairness that we must have. Our only hope is that God is unfair toward us. That’s another way of saying that God is merciful toward us.
The country singer Mary Gauthier senses this in her song “Mercy Now”:
My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor
Fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over
It won’t be long and he won’t be around
I love my father, and he could use some mercy now.
My brother could use a little mercy now
He’s a stranger to freedom
He’s shackled to his fears and doubts
The pain that he lives in is
Almost more than living will allow
I love my brother, and he could use some mercy now.
Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now
Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now.
In our text, the mercy comes in a bizarre way. It comes with a pair tongs. Where do we usually use tongs? At the backyard grill or in the kitchen. Most of the time they hold something that is hot, something we don’t want to touch. In our reading, the angel had a pair of tongs, and it held a live coal that came from the altar. Isaiah says that the “…seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’”
One can almost picture Isaiah pulling back in dread. That live coal is hot and it will burn! It will cause pain – and we don’t like pain; we go to the doctor when we have pain; we get prescriptions to relieve pain; we want to be a million miles away from pain! We don’t want burning coals and holiness multiplied three times.
But that live coal that touched his lips brought burning, cauterizing mercy. His guilt departed and his sin was blotted out. God does tend to get to the root of the problem. Putting band-aids on symptoms won’t do.
And I submit that it isn’t fair. In view of the holiness of God, fairness would dictate that all of Isaiah – body, mind, and soul – would have been burned away and blotted out. But that doesn’t happen here. Instead, bizarre and unfair as it may be, mercy happens here! Isaiah found, as the Pevensie children did, that God is not safe, but God is good. This is the God who comes with throne rooms and flowing robes and seraphs and smoke and altars and tongs and coals and crosses and empty tombs and winds and tongues of fire and water and blood and bread and wine. This is the God who loads up one astounding, incredible, merciful surprise after another! I speak of the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the One who’s Name was put upon you with the waters of your Baptism.
That means that we’re in on this too! As the popular phrase goes, we’re “in the mix and part of the conversation. So when this bizarre, unsafe but good, triune God says “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”, how will you respond? Here’s how Isaiah responded: “Here am I; send me!”
Here we are, Lord! Send us! We don’t want to miss it for the world!
Amen.
Theme: “Cauterization”
The Festival of The Holy Trinity
June 7, 2009
St. Andrew Presbyterian Church
Denton, TX
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau
+In the Name of Jesus+
The great festivals of the Christian church celebrate events and people, but there is one exception. There is an age old festival that does not celebrate an event or a person, and we celebrate it today. It is the festival of the Holy Trinity, the beginning of the second half of the church year. And what it celebrates is a teaching: the teaching that God is revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We confess the Holy Trinity, the three-in-one and the one-in-three; not three gods, but one God in three persons. The word “holy” shows up in our reading for tonight not once but three times: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts.” God is three times holy! Why is that? Some scholars have seen hints of the teaching of the Trinity in this Old Testament passage. By the way, you won’t find the word Trinity in the Bible. Neither will you find The Apostles’ Creed in the Bible. But you will find what both the word Trinity and the Creed teach. They are like hummingbirds that pull the nectar out of the Bible and give us the good stuff in concentrated form. There’s your theological lesson for the day! Maybe you found it a bit dry or boring. Nowadays, it almost seems that boredom is worse than sin. And so, among other things, we want our worship to be entertaining. But worship isn’t entertainment, as Isaiah surely found out.
Now, even though I’ve slept through some of them, the movies aren’t supposed to be boring. They are there for entertainment. Speaking of the movies, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has had a considerable run. Long before Rowling, the great C.S. Lewis took pen to paper and wrote a children’s series called The Chronicles of Narnia, and the motion picture people have had similar, profitable fun with two books in that series: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.
In Lewis’s Narnia, God – or Jesus Christ – is portrayed as a lion named Aslan. At one point in the series, one of the Pevensie children asks a question about Aslan to a Narnian. “Is he safe?” the question went. The reply followed: “No, he’s not safe. But he’s good.”
Many young people in Denton graduated from high school this past Friday. They are entering a world that’s not safe, but, hopefully, their education is part of the good that they will take with them. Congratulations to them all! I thought back to my own high school graduation ceremony a little over thirty years ago. Afterwards, I ran back to my Mustang II, threw my gown in the back seat, hopped in, put an 8-track tape in the stereo, and listened to Jackson Browne sing “Doctor, My Eyes”:
Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand
I have done all that I could
To see the evil and the good without hiding
You must help me if you can.
Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what is wrong
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?
A few days later I had my wisdom teeth pulled. Not a pleasant experience. Shortly after that, I took on a job where I actually made some real money. I worked at a galvanizing plant. We gave steel light poles a bath in eight hundred and forty degree molten zinc. Was it a safe job? No. We weren’t allowed into the plant unless we had on our hard hats, asbestos coats and gloves, and steel-toed boots. I worked the graveyard shift, and one night while we dipped some steel, globs of hot, smoky, molten zinc popped into the air. (That happened if there was any moisture on the steel.) One glob landed between my coat and glove and on my wrist. It turned out to be a third-degree burn about the size of a dime. It cauterized away some hair follicles. As I said, it wasn’t safe, but the money was good.
As our Scripture text for tonight unfolds, it’s pretty clear that Isaiah the prophet wasn’t in a safe place. He may have wondered, like Jackson Browne, if he kept his eyes open for too long. But was it a good place? That remains to be seen. There sits God, high on a throne, with robe filling the temple. There are bizarre looking flying angels with six wings and covered faces. This isn’t the lovely, sentimental, even safe image of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, is it? These angels have something to say to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory!” The thresholds shook and smoke filled the air. It doesn’t look as though hard hats and steel-toed boots would have been of much help.
But there, in the mix, is Isaiah, and he’s woefully out of place. He says: “Woe is me! I am lost!” A lost person once said: “Show me the way to go home; I’m tired and I want to go to bed; I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went straight to my head.”
Isaiah wasn’t lost because he was drunk. He was as sober as a judge, and he saw an astounding reality, a reality beyond reality, the reality. He thought it was “curtains” for him – not because he was lost, but because he knew he was unclean. And it wasn’t because he stepped barefoot into a muddy creek or was digging around in a garbage can. Unclean is here understood as being only too aware of his own sin, of the fact that he wasn’t holy.
Since I’ve become a member of the Presbyterian Church, I’ve read a goodly amount of Presbyterian literature – both in print and online. There’s a lot of talk about justice, and that’s good. Basically, we’re for it; we believe it’s a good thing. Now, we tend to define justice in a rather limited way; we define it as fairness. We want to work toward eliminating inequities, we say.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we best be careful if we ask God for fairness, we might get it. Fairness means that we get what we deserve. Is it fair for sinners to even be in the presence of a holy God?
No, my friends, it’s not justice understood as fairness that we must have. Our only hope is that God is unfair toward us. That’s another way of saying that God is merciful toward us.
The country singer Mary Gauthier senses this in her song “Mercy Now”:
My father could use a little mercy now
The fruits of his labor
Fall and rot slowly on the ground
His work is almost over
It won’t be long and he won’t be around
I love my father, and he could use some mercy now.
My brother could use a little mercy now
He’s a stranger to freedom
He’s shackled to his fears and doubts
The pain that he lives in is
Almost more than living will allow
I love my brother, and he could use some mercy now.
Every living thing could use a little mercy now
Only the hand of grace can end the race
Towards another mushroom cloud
People in power, well
They’ll do anything to keep their crown
I love life, and life itself could use some mercy now
Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now
I know we don’t deserve it
But we need it anyhow
We hang in the balance
Dangle ‘tween hell and hallowed ground
Every single one of us could use some mercy now.
In our text, the mercy comes in a bizarre way. It comes with a pair tongs. Where do we usually use tongs? At the backyard grill or in the kitchen. Most of the time they hold something that is hot, something we don’t want to touch. In our reading, the angel had a pair of tongs, and it held a live coal that came from the altar. Isaiah says that the “…seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’”
One can almost picture Isaiah pulling back in dread. That live coal is hot and it will burn! It will cause pain – and we don’t like pain; we go to the doctor when we have pain; we get prescriptions to relieve pain; we want to be a million miles away from pain! We don’t want burning coals and holiness multiplied three times.
But that live coal that touched his lips brought burning, cauterizing mercy. His guilt departed and his sin was blotted out. God does tend to get to the root of the problem. Putting band-aids on symptoms won’t do.
And I submit that it isn’t fair. In view of the holiness of God, fairness would dictate that all of Isaiah – body, mind, and soul – would have been burned away and blotted out. But that doesn’t happen here. Instead, bizarre and unfair as it may be, mercy happens here! Isaiah found, as the Pevensie children did, that God is not safe, but God is good. This is the God who comes with throne rooms and flowing robes and seraphs and smoke and altars and tongs and coals and crosses and empty tombs and winds and tongues of fire and water and blood and bread and wine. This is the God who loads up one astounding, incredible, merciful surprise after another! I speak of the Triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the One who’s Name was put upon you with the waters of your Baptism.
That means that we’re in on this too! As the popular phrase goes, we’re “in the mix and part of the conversation. So when this bizarre, unsafe but good, triune God says “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”, how will you respond? Here’s how Isaiah responded: “Here am I; send me!”
Here we are, Lord! Send us! We don’t want to miss it for the world!
Amen.
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