February 7, 2010 - Epiphany 5, Year C (RCL)
When I was in eighth grade
we did a play in English class.
I can’t remember what it was - maybe Noah -
but I do remember
what part I got to play.
I
was God,
and I dressed up in a white bed-sheet for a toga
and a cotton wool beard
and sat on a chair
balanced on the top of a couple of desks.
I’m no longer convinced
that that’s what God looks like,
but I suspect that at least part of my picture of God,
the sitting on a chair on a desk,
which was the closest I could come to sitting on a throne, high and lifted up,
came from our first reading today,
Isaiah’s vision of God.
It was the year that King Uzziah died,
somewhere around the year 740 BC.
He had ruled the kingdom of Judah,
the southern part
of what we now call Israel,
he had ruled Judah
for fifty-two years,
and they had been a good fifty-two years for the country,
prosperous and stable,
until the day
he decided that as king
he could do whatever he liked
and tried to take over
the role of the priests.
And he was struck with leprosy
and forced to abdicate in favor of his son
and lived out the remained of his days
in isolation.
It was the year that Uzziah died
that Isaiah
saw God.
And what he saw
was a throne,
raised up high,
and the edge of a robe
sweeping across the temple
and beyond that
what he saw
was beyond words
and he couldn’t even begin to describe
what God was like.
And there were heavenly creatures flying around, six winged seraphs singing out “Holy, Holy, holy”,
and there was smoke
and what felt like an earthquake
and Isaiah couldn’t see any more,
couldn’t describe it,
and all he wanted to do
was to make himself as small as possible,
because face to face with all the glory of God
Isaiah
felt like something
that had crawled out
from under a log.
And he knew too well
the stories of his faith,
the stories
of the men who had accidental put out a hand
to steady the ark of the covenant,
the symbol of the presence of God,
and were struck dead,
and of Moses
who pleaded to be able to see God
but was only granted permission to see God’s back
because in seeing God
he would die,
Isaiah had heard the stories.
“Woe is me”
he cried,
or perhaps, I suspect, something a little less polite,
and prepared himself
to die.
But God had a purpose
in showing himself to Isaiah,
God had a purpose,
and it wasn’t
to kill him.
And so a seraph shot down with a burning coal and words of forgiveness
and the voice of God rang out
calling for someone
to go speak on God’s behalf,
and Isaiah
after looking round to make sure no one else was there to volunteer
said,
somewhat tremulously,
“Er...I’m here. I guess, send me.”
And then Isaiah
heard what the job was,
and for a moment thought
he might have been better struck dead.
Because the job was
to go to people
who were complacent.
People who had had a good deal under King Uzziah
and even under his son,
people who were happy and settled
and had begun to think
that it was their right
to live like this,
had begun to think that
it was their work
that had got them there,
had begun to think
it was all their own doing,
had begun
to forget
about God.
And Isaiah’s job
was to go tell them
it was over.
The prosperity, the stability,
all that
was coming to an end.
They’d forgotten God,
and if that was the way they wanted it,
fine.
God would let them alone.
And all the blessings, all the prosperity of God,
all that came with the attention of God,
well, all that would disappear.
They wanted life without God?
They could have it.
Of course the implication was,
if you want all the prosperity, all the blessing,
then you’d better turn back, turn back
to God.
You can imagine Isaiah.
“Thanks God. But no thanks. I said “send me” in the heat of the moment. But I’d really rather not.”
Isaiah’s call
is not a call
that most of us would want.
And yet Isaiah went ahead
and did what he was called
to do,
and God was with him.
And if you remember some of the other passages from Isaiah,
especially the ones we read around Christmas,
the message he was called to proclaim
wasn’t all gloom and doom.
In chapter 2,
“‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.” (Is. 2:3-4)
or chapter 9:
“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined. “ (Is. 9:2)
The call of God to Isaiah
may have begon with bad news,
but good news was part of it too.
Isaiah, in his faithfulness,
didn’t back away from the call of God
that initial time,
and became one of the great prophets,
one of the forerunners of Christ,
that greatest prophet
and son of God.
And it was with Christ
that the prophet’s call
was transformed
into a call
for every believer.
It began one day
by a lake.
The crowds had gathered around to hear Jesus, and were pushing and shoving, trying to get close,
and he kept moving back to make more space, until there was nowhere else to move, except into the water!
And he saw a couple of boats,
and called to the fishermen cleaning their nets beside them
and had them take him out into the lake
so that the boat made
a kind of podium.
And next thing
he got to talking with the fishermen,
and Simon had exactly the same reaction as Isaiah,
“Woe is me,”
and like God to Isaiah,
Jesus called Simon
to new work, work on behalf of God.
And Simon became one of the first disciples,
and was there when Jesus
gave the Great Commission, to “Go...and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
And then there was Pentecost, when all the disciples present
were marked and commissioned by the Holy Spirit,
and from there the call spread
to each and every Christian,
each and every one of us
called by God
to proclaim the good news of
God’s love and forgiveness and resurrection and new life.
As we were reminded
in our New Testament reading - this is one of those few days
when all three readings fit together -
we were reminded in the words of the apostle Paul
that we are part of the chain
of good news,
the chain that was prefigured way back by Isaiah,
and began
with Jesus and his disciples
and has continued ever since,
parent to child,
priest to congregation,
believer
to non-believer,
two thousand years of Christians worshiping God
and passing on the good news of salvation.
And here we are today,
gathered to worship, gathered to have our annual meeting.
I have a suspicion that most of us groan when it comes to annual meeting time - who wants to spend an hour on a glorious Sunday morning doing business?
But this is the business of God,
both the worship, and the meeting.
As we do it,
remember your call,
the call of God that you once heard and keep hearing,
the call to faith, the call to worship, the call to share the good news of God in Christ.
Amen.
© Raewynne J. Whiteley 2010