In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, the edges of his robe filling the temple. 2 Winged creatures were stationed around him. Each had six wings: with two they veiled their faces, with two their feet, and with two they flew about. 3 They shouted to each other, saying: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of heavenly forces! All the earth is filled with God’s glory!” 4 The doorframe shook at the sound of their shouting, and the house was filled with smoke. 5 I said, “Mourn for me; I’m ruined! I’m a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips. Yet I’ve seen the king, the Lord of heavenly forces!” 6 Then one of the winged creatures flew to me, holding a glowing coal that he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips. Your guilt has departed, and your sin is removed.” 8 Then I heard the Lord’s voice saying, “Whom should I send, and who will go for us?” I said, “I’m here; send me.” (CEB)
“How Much is Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture,” Week Three
She is a friend of mine from college, has been a mother now for nearly five years. We have always lived on opposite ends of the country, but thanks to things like Facebook, we can weigh in on each other’s lives pretty regularly. Her daughter, Ava, starts school next year, and judging from all of the pictures of her my friend Lauren (her mother) has put on Facebook—of Ava smiling ear-to-ear wearing a princess dress, or of them getting spa facials together—Ava has become a delightful little girl. With Lauren’s permission, I want to share just a tiny bit of her story of when she found out about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut:
"Ava walked out of her room and saw me sitting teary-eyed on the couch as images from catastrophe scrolled across the TV. She came over and wiped my face, with a look of raw, honest, visceral concern and compassion sparkling in her eyes and tweaking the corners of her mouth upwards. She put a finger on each end of my mouth and attempted to contort my face into a grin. “Smile, Mommy,” she said. “Everything is a-o-k. Right?”
Here’s the thing. Everything is not ok. There is nothing ok about 20 children having their lives snuffed out before they’ve even had a chance to live them. It is not ok that hundreds of parents in Connecticut tonight are having to explain to their children why they won’t see their friends or teachers anymore. It is not ok that there are families in Colorado that fear movie theaters, and loved ones in Oregon who are skittish about making their holiday purchases at shopping malls. It is not ok by any stretch of the imagination, and unless something changes, it’s never going to be. These things are going to keep happening."
I confess, I worry the exact same thing. This is the sinful world we have made for ourselves—not the world God has created for us: a world where, rather than having faith that we will learn and act from such a tragedy, we are resigned to it happening again in another time, in another place, with other people. And this cannot be our way forward. This cannot be our way to God.
This is a new sermon series for us as a church, as well as a new year. This Sunday marks the first Sunday of the new church year, which doesn’t quite adhere to our January-through-December calendar—it usually runs November-through-November, and it begins with this first season that we call Advent. It is a time of, as John the Baptist preached to us, preparing the way for the Lord who is to come to us on Christmas Day. And we’ll be doing so this Christmas season by reading together one of the great forerunners in the Old Testament to Jesus, the prophet Isaiah. He is the one who prophesied the coming of a virgin who would give birth to a child called Emmanuel, but Isaiah has so much more to share with us than that. And we’ll be looking at what he had to say early in his prophetic career in light of the book “How Much is Enough? Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture,” by Arthur Simon, who founded the Christian nonprofit organization Bread for the World. We’ll be juxtaposing a passage from Isaiah with a chapter from “How Much Is Enough?” each Sunday. We began with the chapter entitled, “Fat Wallets, Empty Lives.” Last Sunday was the chapter “Rushing to Nowhere.” This Sunday, the chapter is entitled, appropriately and tragically enough, “Saying “Yes” to Life.”
This is the second sermon in just three so far in this series where I am veering far away from what was originally intended when I created this series many weeks ago. So be it.
But there is one story of Arthur Simon’s that I do want to share with you this week. He writes:
(Angsar) Sovik has had a long and distinguished career as professor of religion and Asian history at St. Olaf College…in retirement, one of his activities was to make bookends from the timber of old buildings being renovated at St. Olaf and give the bookends away before Christmas to anyone who agreed to contribute twenty-five dollars to world relief or advocacy against hunger…When I expressed amazement at what he had done with his (then) eighty-five years, Sovik told me how blessed he has been from childhood on. He said that from the time he was a young boy, his father always greeted him (in Norwegian) with the words, “Are you saying ‘yes’ to life, my son?”
In Arthur Simon’s retelling, “are you saying “yes” to life” is a greeting. It is incomplete, meant only as a beginning for a conversation, a get-together, an encounter of any degree of importance. And, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, there is, I think, a way to complete it. In a culture of death, are you saying “yes” to life? In a culture of death, are WE saying “yes” to life?
We are all scrambling, I am sure, to seek answers as to what has just happened in Newtown, Connecticut. We want to know how. We want to know why. And those answers may well come in time. But for the moment, there is a more important answer God wants us to seek: the answer to, “In a culture of death, are we saying “yes to life?” Because it is, in a sentence, the dilemma that Isaiah faces here today.
This is one of my absolute favorite stories in all of Scripture—the calling of Isaiah. It is mystical, inspirational, otherworldly, and awe-inspiring all at the same time. It elicits the best possible action from Isaiah: he says “yes” to God’s calling, he says “yes” to offering God’s word to us, he says “yes” to life in every possible sense.
Yet it is a story that begins in death. It begins in the year that King Uzziah died.
And in case you were wondering, Scripture tells us that Uzziah was an excellent monarch. Both 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles vouch not only for the prosperity that occurred under his watch, but also for, at least at first, his willingness to stay true to the ways of Yahweh.
So even though any death is a time for mourning for someone, this isn’t a case of “well, maybe they’ll be better off under the next guy.” This was the loss of a king who was the genuine article.
Yet still Isaiah writes, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.”
In the year that he and his countrymen experienced the loss of their leader, Isaiah saw the Lord. He heard the Lord. God asked him, “Who shall I send?” And Isaiah said, “Here I am, send me.”
Isaiah said yes.
In this year of loss, can you still bring yourself to say, “I saw the Lord?” I know the answer to that question may not always be “yes,” but…God is not a fair-weather friend. God is ever here.
In the year that I have had to bury three people—two of whom died too young—I saw the Lord.
In the year when our church was invaded, desecrated, and at the mercies of fire, I saw the Lord.
In the year when our brothers and sisters in humanity fell to the fire of gunmen in Clackamas, Oregon, in Aurora, Colorado, and at the Sikh temple at Oak Creek, Wisconsin, I saw the Lord.
And in the year when twenty kindergarten-aged children and their teachers were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, I saw the Lord.
Honestly, it is not shocking that the Lord is still visible. For God knows, just as we do, that anything can happen, but that in the end, only one thing will. And when that one outcome which does occur also happens to be God’s will, He rejoices in heaven that all is well in that moment.
But when what happens is not what He wills, God is visible. He makes His presence known. God makes His presence known to David as he mourns his son Absalom. God makes His presence known to Jeremiah as the prophet mourns his exile. God made His presence known to each of us by not only sending us His Son, but by resurrecting Him whilst we grieved Him.
Which means that I have no appetite for the belief that God was not there in the school because we have somehow kicked God out of school, or that we have somehow told God we no longer need or want Him. After all, only a few short weeks ago, an act of violence was committed against His house—against THIS house—and it surely was not because God had left this place.
No, God was present. God has never left the temple. Nor must we. We are still called here. Because out of all of the things that can happen, this is the one thing God wishes to happen: for us to hear His call. To accept it. To say “yes” to life in a culture of death.
It is not easy, saying “yes” to life. The way of death and destruction is much quicker. It is, sadly, far easier to use ourselves as weapons to destroy, rather than as tools to build.
But with his vision, Isaiah learned that the ease of the task does not matter. Not when it is God who wills it. So while saying “yes” to life might be harder for us now, the difficulty does not matter. It is, out of anything that can happen, the one thing that must happen.
Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
December 16, 2012
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