Isaiah 6:1-8
1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”
4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” (TNIV)
“The Advent Conspiracy: Spending Less, Giving More, Worshiping Fully, Loving All,” Week Three
Just before coming here to begin serving as your pastor this past September, I accepted the (unenviable?) task to guest preach at my home parish in Kansas City on Sunday, September 11, ten years after the attacks. I was 15 when the attacks took place, and while I remember where I was when I first heard, and while I remember the shock and awe that I felt, the sheer gravity of it did not truly sink in for me until I prepared for that sermon ten years later, immersing myself in the history of 9/11 in order to vainly try to do it justice. The text I chose was the closing words of the book of the prophet Habakkuk, which is a poem about trusting in the Lord in times of calamity, that even then, God will be our strength, that God will allow us to walk upon great heights. It’s one of my all-time favorite passages, but in looking around after the fact to see what other pastors had done for that Sunday, I saw that many, many of them had chosen this passage from Isaiah, this passage that begins, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” And it made perfect sense—because for so many people, the new words were, “In the year that thousands of Americans died, I saw the Lord!” In the year your king dies, in the year your neighbors die, in the year when what you feel most is hurt and pain, you see the Lord. And Advent is nothing at all if not preparing ourselves to see the newborn Lord.
Two Sundays ago, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, began a new sermon series for us, as well as a new church year for us. This is the Third Sunday of Advent, the season the church traditionally dedicates to preparing the way for the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. And…well, we do prepare for Christmas Day, but these days, it feels like it is more for the arrival of Santa Claus than the arrival of Jesus—the arrival of presents and stocking stuffers, rather than the arrival of our salvation. And so in response to this, three pastors across America started this project a few years ago called “The Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?” as a means to preach preparing for Christ’s coming by giving differently. This project promoting charity revolves around four main themes—spending less, giving more, worshiping fully, and loving all Via the major prophets who preceded Christ—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—plus Jesus’s mother, Mary, we’ll explore a different theme in each of the 4 Sundays of Advent, and this Sunday’s theme is “Worshiping Fully,” coming on the heels of two earlier sermons that revolved around the themes of spending less and giving more.
Last week, a number of you joined us in this sanctuary well after our regular service to say farewell to Bess Ray, a longtime member of this parish who passed away on Halloween night. There was, of course, music—some of which we struggled with! There was Scripture. There was a sermon of middling quality. There were prayers, there were all the trappings of a regular funeral service. And then the rituals of church gave way to the eulogies. I heard about the memories of Bess found from cleaning out her purse, I heard from Buffe Antilla about Bess’s church life, but the most moving moment was a young man from Bess’s family saying he saw her in the orange juice he drinks, simply because she would pour a glass for him every morning at breakfast, and for whatever reason, that memory is what stuck. And in the year that Bess died, a sister of faith whom I had never met, I saw the Lord! I saw Him in something vastly different than the rites of church-as-usual.
I have to think that we see people in times of tragedy because, for lack of a better or more elegant term, that is when life gets real. Forget the mundane details of everyday life, if you want to see what a person is really like, to really pierce the façade that many people put up, be there when a person dies. But, hopefully, a person in our life doesn’t die just every day, or every week, or every month. And if it takes such a drastic, life-changing moment to see the Lord, then what does that say about the state about my spirituality, or your’s, or Isaiah’s? How can we bring ourselves to the point of worshiping even if we haven’t seen the Lord? Or, how can we teach ourselves to see the Lord in the mundane, in the everyday?
Isaiah’s vision of seeing the Lord is remarkable simply because it is a vision. Unlike Ezekiel, who we heard from two weeks ago, Isaiah does not deal much in visions. While the book of Isaiah begins with the words, “The vision of Isaiah,” the first five chapters are mostly poetry and song, not an actual, literal, vision. And that completely changes in chapter six, when the first king under whom Isaiah serves dies, and Isaiah’s world is turned upside down—in the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah sees the Lord in such a completely different way, and that is what goes to the heart of this sermon series—the belief that Christmas, unshackled from the societal demands of credit cards and obligations and overshopping, that Christmas is all about us seeing the Lord in such a completely different way. Abraham saw God as an angel come to earth. Moses saw God in the burning bush. Isaiah saw God as this being who was so great that the entire Jerusalem temple could contain only the very tip of His robes. And far from the majesty and drama of any of those scenes, we are called to see God in a little baby boy.
But that little baby boy also got lost in the mess for some folks—we haven’t talked about him at all this Advent, but look at the innkeeper, occupied with running his business and did not know or could not realize who the child he was turning away was. Only if he were to get away from the business-as-usual movements of his life would he actually be free to worship Christ as God would have intended, surrounded by the wise men, the angels, the proud parents, all there to worship fully! While the innkeeper is the sort of example of what-not-to-do in the Christmas story, it is not because I think he is, or was, a bad man. Innkeepers did not exactly rake in the big bucks back then—we know from the story of the Good Samaritan that just one day’s wage was worth a month’s stay at an inn. Now, a day’s wage is worth much less than a month’s stay at a motel. So this is a blue-collar fellow concerned with keeping his business afloat rather than with actually stopping, pausing, and recognizing the divinity that is in his presence and tantalizingly within his grasp. He has an out, though—he hadn’t heard the Gospel story yet, because he was a part of the story! So for us, if we have been raised in church, hearing the same Christmas story year in and year out, what is our excuse?
And believe me…I am pointing the finger at myself here—after 18 years in church, I only had what
I would consider a God experience on the morning after an old childhood friend was killed in a car wreck three weeks before I was going to graduate high school. It is the same thing all over again—only instead of the year that King Uzziah died, it was in the year that my childhood friend died that I saw the Lord! I wish, and I hope, and I pray, that this is no longer the case, that instead of the year when we see hurt and pain and death that we will see the Lord, but in the year when we are finally able to escape—even if only for one Advent season—from the financial and social and economic and work and family obligations that keep us running to and fro without rest and that keep us spending our limited resources without end, in the year when we can escape from that, I promise you, with every fiber of my faith in God, that you can indeed see the Lord. Not just in the year that our neighbors of 9/11 were killed, not just in the year that our longtime friends and fellow church members pass away, not just in the year that King Uzziah died, but that in each and every year, you can say to one another, “In the year that I celebrated Christ’s coming, I saw the Lord!” By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
December 11, 2011
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