This sermon was originally preached at St. David’s by the Sea on July 9, the day set aside by the Diocese of Central Florida for the commemoration of Canon Nelson W. Pinder. The texts were Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 27:1-7; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Matthew 25:35-40.
Every hero’s journey begins with a calling, an invitation to transformation, a quest to undo, avenge, protect, save, or discover. Essentially, the hero’s journey asks and answers one of life’s biggest questions: What is my calling?
One of the greatest stories written during the last century was Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy which begins with the well-known Fellowship of the Ring. Written as a sequel to his classic, The Hobbit, the Fellowship of the Ring chronicles the unlikely union of 9 individuals on the most significant quest ever seen in Middle Earth. Given that the literary trilogy has sold over 150 million copies and that the movie trilogy has grossed just under 3 billion dollars, I will assume that there is at least a general familiarity with the story…
In the mythical land of Middle Earth, the dark and insidious Lord Sauron has created a set of rings which he has given to the various ruling factions of the world. In total, 20 rings were made.
“Three were given to the Elves; Seven, to the Dwarf Lords, and nine, given to the race of Men…” But another ring was made: “One ring to rule them all.”
Through chance, circumstance, and happenstance, the one ring ends up in the least likeliest of places: in the possession of Frodo Baggins, a hobbit living in the Shire. Guided by Gandalf and accompanied by three other hobbits, Frodo takes the ring out of the Shire to Rivendell, where a secret meeting is convened with representatives from the elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men. This meeting will determine the fate of the ring, but emotions run wild and a verbal fight breaks out amongst the leaders. No one wanted to destroy the ring, everyone wanted to use it as a weapon for their own purposes, and no one was willing to step forward and do what was right…except for Frodo.
Although half the size of a man, Frodo stands tall and says, “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way.” Basically, “Here I am, send me.” The hero is born in this moment: selfless, forthright, courageous. And as the saying goes, the rest is (3 billion dollar) history.
Call narratives are laced throughout the Bible.
God called Abram, making him a series of promises, and Abram obeys with little more than an “I’ll tell you later.”
God speaks to Moses from the Burning Bush and calls him to become the Deliverer.
Mary is anointed and appointed by God to become the bearer of Jesus and she replies with the Magnificat.
Jesus calls fishermen to become disciples by saying, “Follow me” and they drop their nets.
And this morning, we get to look at the calling of Isaiah.
Calling narratives in the Bible can be separated into two distinct camps. In the first camp you find highly reluctant leaders who respond to God’s calling with humility and excuses. I’ll call that group “humble and reluctant.” The other, much smaller camp is made of people who have been humbled by God and are eager to step up and step out in faith. I’ll call that group “humbled and eager.” While Moses and Jeremiah are humble and reluctant, Isaiah is humbled and eager.
You can find this story in Isaiah 6, and I encourage you to follow along in either your bulletin or in your Bible.
As you are turning to the passage, I want to offer two guiding statements as we prepare to dig into the text. First, do not be fooled into thinking that Isaiah is the hero of this story. As you’ll see in the text: God is the hero, God is the primary actor; Isaiah is simply the one who is called and who is sent.
Second, this story asks and answers three big questions. These three will give rise to an obvious fourth. The 3 are:
- Who is calling?
- Who is being called?
- To whom are the called sent?
Our passage opens with the phrase, “In the year that King Uzziah died.” We might be tempted to jump straight over this historical information, but to do so would be to miss the foundational point from which Isaiah is writing. Uzziah had been king for 52 years, the second longest reign in all of scripture, shorter only to Manasseh. The chief difference betwixt the two is that Manasseh was an evil king and Uzziah was an altogether good king. Here, Isaiah is marking history for us here in a very significant way.
Think about how the world came to a collective stop last year with the death of her majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. This moment for Israel would not have been altogether different and it most certainly would have been an easy way to mark time moving forward. One of my favorite recurring lines in Downton Abbey is the exclamation that “things are different after the war.” We could imagine the prophet Isaiah saying something like, “Things are different after the King’s death.”
Uzziah’s reign is described in 2 Chronicles 26. In addition to sitting on the throne for 52 years and being an all-together-good-king, we find out that Uzziah made an uh-oh during his reign; his magnificent mistake is important to our current story. Like most kings of Israel, Uzziah was good until he wasn’t. Uzziah’s name and fame grew so big that his head couldn’t make it through doorways and at one point he decided that he could and would enter the Temple and make an offering before God.
It was the priest’s responsibility to make offerings, however, not the King’s. In fact, King Saul had famously gotten in trouble for offering his own sacrifice! But Uzziah decided that he would do it on his own. He marched into the Holy Place of the Temple, just outside the Holy of Holies, where there stood the altar of incense and the censer for the altar. As he started performing his own offering, he was confronted by the High Priest and 80 of his men. Rather than acknowledging his sin and mistake, Uzziah doubled down and became enraged.
As a result, Uzziah was struck with leprosy, a disease which remained with him until the day he died. Lepers were not allowed in the Temple. Lepers had to live lives of seclusion and isolation. So Uzziah was forced into a life of hermitude and solitude because of his pride and he was unable to go to the Temple for years and years. Uzziah had to have a representative in public functions due to his leprosy.
So, when Isaiah begins a passage with “In the year King Uzziah died…” this is a BIG deal. It is akin to saying In the year JFK was shot; or in the year of 9/11; or in the year that a global pandemic broke out…
What happened in that year? Isaiah saw the LORD in the Temple.
Isaiah was the son of Amoz. He was a prophet in the Southern Kingdom of Judah, the kingdom whose capital was Jerusalem, and his ministry took place during the 8th century BC, just before the Northern Kingdom fell to Assyria. Ancient sources say that Isaiah’s father, Amoz, was brother to King Uzziah’s father meaning Isaiah and Uzziah were first cousins and Isaiah a member of the ruling elite.
While most prophets came from the middle and lower classes, Isaiah was an “insider.” The prophet Amos, on the other hand, was a “bruiser of sycamore fruit.” Sycamore fruit was very cheap and the only way to get the fruit was to bruise it…farmers would employ laborers on the cheap to come and bruise the fruit so that their clientele, most of whom were poor, could eat it. Amos bruised sycamore fruit while Isaiah was first cousin to the king!
Who did Isaiah see in the Temple? The LORD! This is remarkable because, as Jack Miller said, the LORD was the last person Isaiah expected to see there! If Isaiah had expected to see God in the Temple, if Isaiah routinely saw God there then there would be nothing to write about. Isaiah finds God precisely where he least expected him…
So let me ask: how many of us expect to see God when we come to church on Sunday? I have a hunch that far too many of us show up at church because that’s what Christians are supposed to do rather than coming to church because we expect God to be there! Oh that we would show up weekly with the hopeful expectancy to see God!
The Temple was the meeting place of heaven and earth! It was the place where God has established his presence. It was the center of Israel’s religious, political, and societal life. God’s presence would dwell and reside there until his glory leaves the Temple 150 years later.
So, in the year that the King died, Isaiah unexpectedly and remarkably saw the LORD in the Temple. For Israel, nothing was bigger than the Temple and yet God is bigger than the Temple! Isaiah wasn’t seeing the pillar of smoke, the outward manifestation of God’s glory that Israel had been experiencing since the Exodus. Instead, Isaiah saw the LORD high and lofty, the train of his robe was filling the temple. He’s so big, so great, so grand that the hem of his robe fills the Temple.
Isaiah experiences the vast transcendence and glorious magnificence of God. Isaiah sees the God who is higher than he, who is greater than he, who is stronger than he, who is altogether more wonderful than he, the God’s whose grandeur charges the whole world. Other calling narratives describe the God who is intimate, but Isaiah shows us the God who is infinite.
What is God doing? He is seated on the throne! In the year that King Uzziah died, in the year that Israel’s throne was empty, in the year that the threat of the Assyrians came knocking on Israel’s door, God is seated upon the throne, reigning and ruling over all of creation. Even when the most shocking and unexpected things happen, even when world events bring us to our knees, the throne is never empty! Even when our earthly stability is rocked, God’s stability is always and forever, world without end.
Isaiah sees seraphs, six winged angels, surrounding God. With two wings they flew and with two wings they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet. Why cover themselves? Because God’s holiness is so radiant and magnificent! They cry out to each other, ceaselessly, without pause, saying, “Holy, holy holy is the Lord of hosts!” Why aren’t they stopping? Because no amount of words or praises or songs or hymns can adequately and accurately depict and describe the holiness of God.
This scene is breathtaking and terrifying because as Isaiah sees the LORD in the Temple, he is transported to the heavenly throne room as he looks upon the All Holy One. He says that the “pivots on the thresholds shook” as the angels were praising God.
Did you see the news from Carowinds amusement park in North Carolina this week? One of the support beams on Fury 325, a ride with a peak height of 325 feet and a top speed of 95MPH, one of the tallest support beams cracked. The crack was so significant that you could see it from the ground and the beam shook when the roller coaster ran over it.
The support beams of the Temple and the heavenly throne room were shaking at the words of the thrice-holy hymn. There were no cracks in the pivots, the shaking is simply because God is that Great!
Isaiah is faced with a decision. He has encountered the most momentous, calamitous, and rapturous scene that he has ever laid eyes on…now what? What do you do in the presence of such infinite holiness, beauty, and glory?
He humbles himself, that’s what. In the presence of God’s holy glory there is only one thing to do: repent with humility. And here is why the story of Uzziah’s pride matters!
Isaiah says, “Woe is me, I am lost!” Essentially, he says, “I am unclean! I am not worthy! I am a ragamuffin sinner who lives amongst ragamuffin sinners!” Uzziah was unclean because of his sin, becoming ritually unclean with leprosy, and there is no evidence that he repented. He lived in isolation, separated from the Temple and God for the rest of his days. Isaiah, on the other hand, humbles himself before God immediately.
And God doesn’t argue with him!
God doesn’t placate Isaiah’s self-deprecating-awareness by falsely saying it isn’t true. Rather, God purifies Isaiah. One of the angels takes a burning coal from the altar. Which altar, you ask? The altar of incense! The same altar upon which Uzziah tried to make his own offering. Uzziah’s story is being restored and redeemed, at some level, through Isaiah. The coal is touched to Isaiah’s lips, an experience which couldn’t have been pleasing, and the angels say to him: your guilt had departed and your sin is blotted out. Isaiah is purged, purified, forgiven in the moment.
Friends, where does God need to touch a burning coal to your life, your lips, your heart? Don’t jump past that question too quickly.
Isaiah is able to stand before the LORD because the LORD has made him holy.
God is the actor, Isaiah is the sinner.
God is the maker of holiness because he is holy…
Isaiah is but the recipient of holiness and forgiveness.
It is then, and only then, that the story moves to the formal calling. God says, “Who shall God for us?” and Isaiah replies, “Here I am, send me!”
Who is calling? God is calling.
This is not just any God. This is the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the God who chose a man to become a nation, who fashioned a people from himself, who rescued them from Egypt, who led them as a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, who settled them into the Promised Land. This is the God who is both covenant maker and covenant keeper. This is the God who is seated upon the throne, reigning and ruling over creation. This is the “holy, holy, holy” whose glory fills the whole earth. This is the God before whom our only response can be, “Woe is me! I am lost! I am unclean! I am a ragamuffin!”
Who is called? Isaiah is called…and so are you.
Having seen the glory of God and having experienced his purging, purifying touch, Isaiah offers himself in the service of God. If repentance is the only response to the glory of God…obedient service is the only response to the call of God. God called and Isaiah answered.
To whom is the called sent? Isaiah was sent to a people who mistreated the poor, who took advantage of the weak, who trod upon the downtrodden. He was sent to a group of people who no longer served God. He was sent to a group of people who might acknowledge God with their lips but then deny him with their lifestyles. He was sent to his own people, to a nation not unlike the one with live in today.
Isaiah the insider-turned-prophet is sent to call people to God, to call people to justice, to call people to mercy and kindness.
Our Matthew passage fleshes this out even further: we find out in Matthew 25 that the disciples, and therefore us, are called to the poor, the hungry, the lonely, the downtrodden, the prisoners.
Here is the obvious question I forewarned you of:
If you are called by God, then to whom is he sending you?
Yes, he is sending you to those very people groups I just described because Jesus identifies and stands in solidarity with the down and out. But let’s be more specific:
Jesus is calling us to the students and families of Freedom 7 next door and the students and families of Cape View Elementary. This is not an either/or situation but a both/and. 412 students attend Freedom 7 and many face the same financial hardships as the students at Capeview.
Jesus is calling us to the neighborhood surrounding 4th Street South.
Jesus is calling us to Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island.
Jesus is calling us to the Space Coast.
Jesus is calling you to your neighbors and coworkers; to your friends and family.
Beloved, Jesus is calling us to go and this morning is your opportunity to respond with “Here I am, send me!”
Porter C. Taylor 