Hearing the word (or not), Isaiah 6.1-13
Hearing the word (or not), Isaiah 6.1-13
Eastminster United Presbyterian Church, 5th Sunday after Epiphany C (February 10, 2019)
Tom James
Maybe you’ve heard the story about a conversation between a lawyer and her client. She told him, “I have some good news and some bad news. Which do you want to hear first?” Her client replied, “Give me the bad news first.” “The bad news is that the DNA tests showed that the police found your blood all over the crime scene.” “Oh, no,” her client mourned, “What could possibly be good about that?” “The good news is that your cholesterol is down to 130!”[1]
The Bible is a sort of a bad news-good news book. There are times when the biblical story can seem like an emotional roller coaster. The people of Israel are freed from slavery in Egypt! But now they’re in the desert with nothing good to eat. Jesus is the Messiah we been waiting for! But the Messiah has to die. But then he’s raised again! But then he goes away and leaves us to do the work. But he sends the Holy Spirit to empower us! But then that means that we speak boldly and make enemies, and then get persecuted for it. But, we win in the end! But, in the meantime, we are called to bear the cross… You get the idea. There’s almost no good news that doesn’t bring with it something challenging and perhaps difficult to bear. On the other hand, there’s almost no bad news that doesn’t point to some remarkable way that God is renewing and transforming us. Good news and bad news, in fact, are sometimes hard to pull apart.
Our text from Isaiah is remarkable in many ways. It’s another “call” story, somewhat like the one we read from Jeremiah last week. There’s good and bad very closely intertwined here, too. There’s the incredible vision that Isaiah has—the amazing display of God’s glory. What a privilege to have such a vision! And, yet, the very sight of it brings Isaiah face to face with his deep personal flaws and the flaws of his people. One of the great theological works in our Presbyterian tradition starts off by saying that knowledge about God and knowledge about ourselves are deeply related to each other: when we gain a glimpse of God’s perfection, God’s holiness, we find ourselves exposed. We see ourselves more clearly, and all that is imperfect and unholy comes to light. Our love for neighbor, we might say, looks a little paler, maybe even filled with opportunism and more than a hint of selfishness, when compared with God’s. So there’s good news (God is great!) that brings with it some bad news (we are not God, we are not all that great).
And yet, of course, that’s not the end of it. The good news is that the goodness of God is good enough to overcome our not-so-goodness. God reaches out to Isaiah, through the angel, and touches him, cleansing him from his sin, making him worthy of the sight that he beholds, and making him a fit messenger for the word. In other words, there’s forgiveness. We are exposed by God’s greatness as being not-so-great, but we then quickly find that God’s greatness is great enough to meet us in even in our not-so-greatness, that our sin is no barrier to God, and that God and can heal us of our moral diseases and our cleanse us of our unrighteousness.
By the way, our pattern for worship is drawn directly from this passage. What do we do when we gather in this sanctuary? We sing a hymn that celebrates God’s greatness and God’s goodness. We concentrate on who God is and what God has done. You might say that, in our call to worship and our hymn of praise, we are lifted a little bit out of ourselves and invited to catch a glimpse of the glory of God. But that does something to us. It makes us realize how we, in our actual lives, fall short of what we glimpse in our heavenly vision. As one of my seminary professors once put it, “God is great. Oh, and I guess I’m kind of a jerk, now that I think about it.” And, so, we confess our shortcomings. The high that lifted us up has also now brought us down. We are humbled enough to be honest with ourselves before God and each other. But, of course, that’s not the end of it. As soon as we confess our shortcomings, we find that God’s greatness and God’s goodness are not limited by our failures, but that God reaches out to us to free us from our bondage to the past, to liberate us from guilt and forgive our sin.
So, all’s well that ends well, right? I sometimes think that the high point of the service is the declaration of forgiveness and that we should just close up shop for the day and all go home after that. Someone once said that the three phrases that everyone wants to hear are “I love you,” “You’re forgiven,” and “Let’s eat.” Well, it seems like once the declaration of forgiveness has been made, the first two are taken care of, and we might as well go have lunch.
But, of course, that’s not the end of the service, is it? And why not? It’s because there’s more for us to hear; there’s more for us to say. There are things about our lives that we have to understand and there are challenges to face. I’ve said before, I believe, that the book of Isaiah was written in three parts, possibly by three different authors. In this first part, Isaiah preaches to the people during the last years of the kingdom of Judah, much like Jeremiah did. Throughout the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, the prophet preaches hard words, words of judgment and warning, exposing the people’s complicity in a reign of injustice that exploits the most vulnerable and condones idolatries.
I’ll repeat what I said last week and say that a good way to characterize Judah’s spiritual downfall is to call it a succumbing to what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls “royal consciousness.” As I said last week, “royal consciousness” is a mentality that undergirds monarchy and the centralization of power and wealth that it embodied in the ancient world. Royal consciousness was akin to what we might call “imperialism” today. It was a mentality that valued domination and control of one people by another. The insidious thing about royal consciousness, of course, is that it can take over the hearts and minds of people that it doesn’t actually benefit. We can fall into a sort of “Stockholm syndrome,” giving support and even love to a regime or a way of life that actually violates us. For Judah, royal consciousness supported a monarchy that imposed unjust policies that further concentrated wealth and power but offered a psychological compensation in the form of a wealthy king and impressive standing army that the people could symbolically identify with. In other words, their lives may have been getting worse, but look at the splendor of the nation: look at the temple; look at the palace; look at the king! Isn’t that great? Aren’t we great? Never mind the fact that all that splendor was funded by taking from our own pockets.
Royal consciousness is not done menacing God’s people, it seems to me. We Christians, for some reason, seem to be especially susceptible to impressive displays of power, even if those powers threaten our values and our very lives. During the centuries in which the church was being persecuted by the Roman empire, many leaders in the church came to the point where they no longer rejected imperial power, like Jesus and his early disciples did, but began to claim it for themselves. And, ever since, we have had this tendency to sell out our faith for the sake of identifying ourselves with those in power.
Isaiah’s message was and is, watch out. For those who have power will not always have it, and the kingdoms and the standing armies we devote ourselves to will not dominate the earth forever. Judah’s kingdom was about to fall, and its corruptions and its exploitation of the poor and its violence against the most vulnerable were going to be exposed for what they were. History was going to do just what Isaiah’s vision of God’s glory did for Isaiah—it was going to show the kingdom what it was made of, what it stood for, whom it benefitted and whom it destroyed; it was going bring its failures to judgment.
Once again, though, there’s a mixture of good news and bad news. The good news is that God was sending Isaiah to speak the truth about Judah. And speaking the truth is an act of love. For, whenever the truth is spoken, people are invited to come back to reality, to see their situation for what it is, and to take steps to make things better. There was going to be, you might say, an intervention. The word would go out! A prophet had been sent. And, therefore, the future was still open. The judgment might be suspended, and Judah might survive.
But, of course, even in the initial words of the prophecy we see that the word will not be heard. People are too caught up in their own heads. People are too enslaved to royal consciousness and to its psychological compensations. They are too in love with the symbols of power to even see that they have become powerless.
You see, this is why preachers don’t always like to preach the Old Testament. Because here is where it ends. There are upbeats and downbeats, and our passage ends frustratingly on a downbeat. And we have to wait a long time for the next change of tone. But maybe that’s just as well. Maybe it’s good to sit with some discomfort for a while. We Christians should never lose sight of the good news and should never forget that the kingdom of God prevails, even when the kingdoms of the world falter and fail. But maybe it’s not a bad thing to take stock of our complicity in the kingdoms of the world, to recognize our tendency to sell out our faith and our values, to betray God’s calling, for a nation or for an ethnic identity or for a feeling of cultural superiority or for an economic system—all of which, as great as they may seem to us, are as dry grass in a wildfire, as far as God is concerned. Maybe it’s not a bad thing to be called once again, by this voice from an ancient past, to open our ears, straining if need be, to hear words about ourselves that we have a hard time hearing, that we are conditioned not to hear, so that we might be opened once more to the work of God, who speaks from beyond the disasters of our life together and calls us again and again to be the people of God that God longs for us to be. In the name of God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
[1] https://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/trinity-sunday-b-2/?type=old_testament_lectionary
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