In the Year that King Uzziah Died - Isaiah 6:1-13

A favorite Choir Camp memory of mine is the summer we sang David Williams’ incredible piece, “In the Year that King Uzziah Died.” If you’ve never heard it, I highly recommend giving it a listen. It’s a magnificent piece that captures the fear and splendor of the prophet Isaiah’s call story, which we heard just a few moments ago. It opens ominously, with the rumbling of the lower voices, and soon the sopranos and altos chime in to highlight the trepidation and awe of the angels. Over the years, reminiscing about singing such lovely music has endeared this passage to me, though I still approach it cautiously because, well, it’s quite a story.

Isaiah was an 8th century prophet who proclaimed God’s message in Judah. We meet him today in the temple in Jerusalem, which is a wonder in itself. Isaiah understood God to be so fearsome and mighty that no one could look at or speak to God without great danger, and also that God was so physically immense as to barely fit in the temple, which Isaiah trusted to be the home of God. Today’s passage tells us that even the angels who attend God must cover their eyes. For Isaiah to approach God in such an intimate way must have required great bravery.

Upon entering the temple, Isaiah met seraphim with six wings whose voices shook the rafters, and the whole place filled with smoke. His courage is rewarded when God gives Isaiah a message to proclaim to the people of Judah. But first, before Isaiah could begin his ministry, or even accept the call, an angel had to touch his lips with a burning coal to cleanse him of any sin that might escape his mouth. The whole scene feels deliciously cloak-and-dagger. And although it’s certainly enthralling, I wouldn’t exactly call it comforting. We may have to look more closely to discover the Good News here.

On the other hand, it’s not hard at all to see where we fit into the story. The first 39 chapters of Isaiah come from the last few years of the Kingdom of Judah before the Babylonian Exile. The people’s beloved king, Uzziah, had just died, and they worried that their nation’s stability and security may have died with him. It was a tumultuous time of social and political transition for the Judeans, to which we can most certainly relate.

The people in Isaiah’s community searched desperately for signs that their future was protected. Their desperation strikes me as painfully familiar, like watching the news or scrolling social media too late into the night to find that one, elusive headline among the all doom and gloom that will help us get to sleep easier. And as people of faith, we are always looking for signs of God’s presence.

In the midst of communal chaos, we often struggle to detect God’s presence because we are looking for something gentle, comfortable, and easy. We expect God to be made known in our lives through good fortune, clear instructions, or problems solved. But our friend Isaiah is here to tell us, that is not always how God makes God’s self known in times of trial. Sometimes, God comes into the world ominously and rumbling, with hot coals for our lips, inspiring both trepidation and awe.

When this happens, it can help to take a wider view. God has a lot of work to do besides making our individual lives more pleasant. There are global systems of oppression that need bringing down. In fact, for the Kingdom of Heaven to be made fully manifest here on earth, the kingdoms of our world have to be defeated, even the comfortable ones. As a colleague reminded me this week, God will tear down every empire, every time, until it no longer diminishes God’s people. This is such good news. It’s also a little scary.

But perhaps what the church needs is a little more fear and awe. Sometimes the magnificence of a God whose power we cannot fathom is exactly what we need to cling to, because it’s the only thing that can compete with the destructive powers of this world, that can grab Isaiah’s attention and tear our eyes away from our screens.

After the last few weeks of swift and varied changes from our federal government, most Americans are either resting in the glory of an administration they support, or fighting it tooth and nail. In either scenario, we reveal our conviction that we can create a political system that will save us. We can and must work towards a society that reflects the love of God, but in the end, elected leaders of any kind will pale in comparison to the saving power of an impoverished man from Nazareth, hung on a cross, and if it takes rumbling smoke and six-winged seraphim to remind us of that, we’ll take it.

Of course, the weight of the world and today’s formidable depiction of God can overwhelm us and make us hesitant to act. I am just one person, who leaves her tea on the counter when walking out the door multiple times a week. How am I supposed to overturn oppressive empires? And what do I risk losing in the process? These are reasonable concerns. Being called by God in tumultuous times is daunting. To help us overcome the paralysis of fear, we need Isaiah.

Isaiah was terrified of what he might find in the temple, but he approached it anyway. He was not prepared for the encounter. The text tells us he was “unclean,” which means he hadn’t performed the cleansing rituals necessary for worship. And it wasn’t a painless experience. Remember that hot coal on the lips? But it turns out that approaching God, even when we’re scared, even when we’re unprepared, and letting God change us, even if it’s painful, is precisely what forms us into people who can proclaim the Good News.

And you all do this every week. For a few minutes on Sunday mornings, you look away from the false security of earthly kings and seek instead the mighty God who cannot fit in the temple. You make the trek downtown and walk though those red doors looking for an encounter with the divine, knowing that the experience might leave you vulnerable, or that you might hear or see or feel something that challenges or changes you. You approach the power of worship bravely and faithfully and it is a privilege and an inspiration to witness.

Now, I have my doubts that we will encounter anything in this room quite as dramatic as what Isaiah saw. I’ll never say never, but I suspect that as we journey through our nation’s transition, God will be made known to us in slightly more subtle ways, though no less life-altering. Luckily, we here at Christ Church know a thing or two about extraordinary worship, powerful music, and radical hospitality, and together we continue to enter this place with love and awe, trusting that God and God alone is mighty to save. Amen.