Always on Memorial Day weekend we remember with thanksgiving those who have given
their lives for our nation in the armed forces across the years of our history.
A member of our church, Eddie Dawson, died fighting in the Pacific theater of war during
World War II. Fifty-three years ago on June 6, 1944, "our boys" as we called them stormed
the beaches at Normandy.
Several years ago CBS did a television special on the anniversary of the day has come to be
known as D Day. It made possible victory in Europe and the defeat of the Nazi German
forces of Adolph Hitler. Dan Rather interviewed the successful general in the Persian Gulf
War, General Norman Schwartzkopf, as they walked at Normandy Beaches, along Omaha
Beach where the fighting was bloodiest and the casualty tolls of those killed or wounded
were highest.
"How would you describe this beach, General Schwartzkopf?" the newsman asked. Before
answering the question in terms of military strategy, he said simply and eloquently, "This
beach is holy ground."
Holy ground...holy ground because men gave their lives in the supreme sacrifice for
freedom, for God and country in a struggle to liberate a continent from the sick, vicious,
evil, murderous, racist regime of a madman.
HOLY GROUND AND THE HOLY
Holy ground...an expression which has been a part of our religious heritage since a fugitive
from Egypt named Moses was tending the sheep of his father-in-law in the wilderness and
heard a voice bid him, "Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are
standing is holy ground" (Exodus 3: 5)
Holy ground...what makes something holy? What is "holy?" Here is one good definition of
"holy."
"Only God is holy, just as only people are human. God's holiness is his Godness. To speak
of anything else as holy is to say that it has something of God's mark upon it. Times,
places, things, and people can all be holy, and when they are, they are usually not hard to
recognize." (Frederick Buechner, "Holy," Wishful Thinking - A Theological ABC [NewYork: Harper and Row] 1973, p. 38)
Our text for today is classic for understand understanding the holy . To understand this
classic text on holiness is to follow the prophet Isaiah as he moves from his misery over the
dead of a great king into his own calling to ministry, a move from misery to ministry which
every servant of the Lord can make. It all begins when God "calls" Isaiah.
WHEN GOD CALLS
What does it means to say "God calls someone"?
One the ablest theologians of this century, H. Richard Niebuhr, wrote in The Purpose of the
Church and Its Ministry (New York: Harper Books, 1958, p. 64) that there are at least these
four elements in a call to ministry:-
(1) the call to be a Christian, following Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior - no call without this
step!
(2) the secret call, that inner persuasion or quickening whereby one fells summoned or
invited by God to some special service;
(3) the providential call, in which God provides a person with gifts and talents along a
particular course in life to equip a man or a woman for ministry.
(4) the ecclesiastical call - through an ordination council and ordination service a church
body recognizes all that has gone before in the call to be a Christian, the secret call and the
providential call.
ELEMENT IN ISAIAH'S CALL
* The call to ministry began in tragedy, came in the year of the king's death. For all of us
the call of God is heard so clearly when we experience the tragic limits of human life.
When Isaiah's world was shattered by the death of the king, he did not stay home, alone in
his pain, and feel sorry for himself. He went to the house of worship.
The most powerful man in the nation's life was dead. Perhaps you can create your own
illustration by thinking of the impact from the death of a beloved American president. (The
death of President Warren G. Harding apparently was most upsetting to our forebears in this
congregation. Our minutes contain a lugubrious resolution on the occasion of his death,
bemoaning the loss of this great Baptist champion of Christian family values! Amazing!
It helps to know a few things about the king who died. Uzziah became king when he wasonly sixteen years old. He reigned for fifty-two years. 2 Chronicles 26: 4 gives him the
key endorsement, "He did what was right in the sight of the Lord...." He did well on the
military front against the Philistines, the Arabs and the Ammonites. He had a successful
building program in Jerusalem. His flocks and vineyards were prosperous. His army was
well prepared and equipped. You know a "but" is coming.
"But when he had become strong he grew proud, to his destruction." It was not enough to
be king, Uzziah seemed to want to be priest also. "He entered the temple of the Lord to
make offering on the altar of incense."
The priest Amaziah accompanied 80 other brave priests stopped him because he was not a
consecrated descendant of Aaron, that is, he was not called and consecrated. The king was
furious (if not incenses...sorry), and while he stood there holding the censer, a leprous
disease broke out on his forehead.
That stopped the service. King Uzziah, the priest Amaziah and his eighty fellow priests
scurried out of the place as fast as they could, convinced that the Lord had struck him with
this disease which rendered him ceremonially unclean. This king who would be priest never
again was allowed in the temple or the palace. He lived in a separate house the rest of his
days, "excluded from the house of the Lord." He could not even be buried with the other
kings because of his leprosy. (II Kings 26: 16ff.)
The chief of state who had done so well in so many areas had been a terrible disappointment
in the important area of religious values. But he had done so much so well; now he was
dead. The man who had gone uncalled into the Temple and who had been excluded from the
Temple was dead. How ironic that in the Temple of all places when the king had just died
of all times Isaiah should be called!
* The call came in the setting of corporate worship, the Temple. The personal despair did
not remain a matter of individual, lonely suffering. To the Temple Isaiah went and there he
was lifted out of his individual suffering to see the Lord, high and lifted up. The king of
Israel was dead, but the King of the universe was alive.
* Awe and mystery, beauty and wonder informed the call. These more than rational
experiences point to a Reality beyond our limits. There will always, indeed, there must
always be elements of awe and mystery, beauty and wonder in our worship and in our
calling.
Those seraphs are mysterious creatures. You sang about them in the second verse of Holy,
Holy, Holy (Wesley Forbis, editor, Baptist Hymnal [Nashville: Convention Press] 1991,
Reginald Heber, No. 2) This hymn puts them on equal footing with cherubim even though
seraphs appear only once in the whole Bible and the cherubim fly around in ninety-one
verses! (p. 15) (Ched Myers, Pentecost 1 - Proclamation 6, Series B [Minneapolis:
Fortress Press] 1996, p. 15)But what is a seraph, the singular form of seraphim? If you go downtown to the Walters Art
Gallery, you will see the oldest representation of a seraph ever found in the ancient near
east, a relief sculpture from Tell Halaf in Syria. Photographs of this seraph at the Walters
often appear in Bible dictionaries and books on the Hebrew scriptures.
Seraphs may have sometime to do with the fiery serpents in Numbers 21: 6-9, an event
mentioned by Jesus in John 3: 14, a text we considered during Lent with the help of the
serpent on the pole fashioned by June Heintz and arranged by Maryan Brown. Scholars
believe the seraph was a cobra with wings, an interesting idea for those whose image of
snakes is shaped by the serpent of Genesis. If a snake, cursed to crawl on its belly on the
ground, can sprout wings and fly, praising God, then there's hope for all of us!
I hope this bit of biblical background has proven interesting, but more important than
seraphim is what they represent in Isaiah 6 - the mysterious, the ecstatic, the transcendent
elements of worship. The relationship with the living God goes beyond, transcends of
human disciplines, even those which can be as helpful as archaeology and art history,
theology, logic and psychology.
* The whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord, according to verse 2 which is cited on the
cover of today's bulletin. God's glory is in the temple, but the temple cannot contain it all.
That is what is behind the puzzling line about the hem of the Lord's robe filling the temple.
(Isaiah 6: 1b).
This is a picturesque way of saying that God is bigger than the temple, so big that such the
hem of his robe is enough to fill the temple. The temple is the Lord's, but God transcends
the temple. (Ibid.)
If we remember that God is in the temple but greater than the temple, it safeguards us from
the non-sense of taking two extreme positions:
(1) the incorrect view that God can be worshipped only in a temple or a church, when in fact
the whole earth is the arena of his glory. The Bible teaches that God can be worshipped
anywhere in his world. "The heavens declare the glory of God...The earth is the Lord's and
the fullness thereof..." Psalm 19: 1; Psalm 24: 1.
(2) the equally incorrect view that walking along the beach or playing a round of golf is the
equivalent of worshipping God with the congregation of the faithful. The Bible teaches that
"The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence..." and that we are not to be
found "...neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some..." (Habakkuk 2: 20; Hebrews
10: 25)
The whole earth is indeed full of the glory of the Lord, but we do not always feel this way.
Not every moment of life will be like Isaiah's remarkable experience in the Temple, a "holy,
holy, holy" time when the whole earth was full of the glory of the Lord. But the Lord is
faithful; his steadfast love endures for ever. This means that when the hard times come,and they will, you and I can look back to the holy, radiant times and know that God will be
faithful to come again as he has in the past.
* Confession of sin comes in the face of the glory of God. It would seem that Isaiah was
once again in despair. He began in the Temple in despair over the death of the king. Now
he says in despair over his own sin, "Woe is me!" for both he and his contemporaries are
unclean before a holy and righteous God. (What on earth is a realistic contemporary
equivalent to translate "Woe is me!"?)
All of God's servants from Uzziah and Isaiah to you and me need continually to be in a
penitent posture before a holy God who extends a holy calling. None of us is worthy. All
of us need continual confession, continual cleansing.
How superior are Isaiah's instincts to mine and, I suspect, to many of us. When I hear some
bad news, my first reaction is to say, "Aren't people awful to kill in cold blood! What
terrible times!"
But Isaiah doesn't point the finger at others. Last weekend Cheryl Duvall-Harden's father
reminded me that when we point a finger a person, three of our fingers are pointing back at
ourselves! Isaiah would approve of this insight. He first look is inward. "Woe is me - I am
unclean..." Then he moves on to his unclean society.
Before clucking over the sins of a violent society he would first take note of the violence
inside each of us, of how our anger can seethe into spite and rage ready to boil over and
erupt into murder. Only fear holds us back. Isaiah would face this inner sin first, and so
should we. The old gospel song is not, "Lord, send a revival and let it begin in them!" It's
"Lord, send a revival and let it begin in me!" (B. B. McKinney, "Lord, Send a Revival,"
No. 272, Baptist Hymnal [Nashville: Convention Press] 1975)
Our friends, the seraphim return to assure Isaiah of cleansing. His guilt is taken away; his
sin is forgiven. The grace of God is mediated through the beautiful and mysterious
messengers.
Notice that the purification comes in very vivid but clearly symbolic imagery. His lips are
touched by a flaming coal held first in tongs by a flying cobra and then in its hands! What
hands? Literalists will have trouble, if not hot lips, with this passage! Do not try this at
home!
(Another thought of the folly of literalism - as a boy I assumed that when the snake in
Genesis 3: 14 was cursed by God to go "on his belly," he lost the legs by which he can
gotten around previously. Hmmmmm...maybe he lost his wings and ended up on his belly!)
* The end is the beginning. The end of the worship experience is not just smug possession
of a "feel good" moment. The end of worship is the beginning of ministry. There is healthand reality in Isaiah's ringing cry, "Here am I! Send me!"
CONCLUSION
Let me end by citing two great texts from the Hebrew scriptures and by pointing to the Holy
One in our midst, Jesus the Christ:
"Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for
I the Lord your God am holy."
(Leviticus 19: 2)
"Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come before him:
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."
(I Chronicles 16: 29)
These beautiful texts may sound harsh without some instructions on how to be holy. This
command is most difficult for us Gentiles to obey without a model, without an example,
without a Holy One in our midst.
For Christians our model is Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the
Holy one in our midst,
the Word made flesh, dwelling among us full of grace and truth,
the way to holiness
by following him,
by walking with him on the holy way,
by letting his holiness permeate our lives,
until at last on Trinity Sunday and every day we can see and others can see in us...
God the Father - the holy mystery beyond us,
God the Son - the holy mystery among us, and
God the Holy Spirit - the holy mystery within us,
all the same holy mystery, the same holy God,
the God who comes to us, the God we moves us from misery to ministry.
