Texts: Isaiah 6:1-10; Luke 6:12-16

By Reverend Joel Miller

Two weekends ago I was up at Camp Friedenswald.  For those of unfamiliar, Friedenswald is in southern Michigan.  It’s the camp of our church conference, Central District, where we send our youth – and sometimes adults.  Pastor Mark, Bethany Davey, and Anita Gastaldo are there right now for a training with Our Whole Lives, which is a Sunday school curriculum addressing healthy sexuality across the lifespan. 

I was there for only slightly less exciting reasons – Central District board meetings.  These board but never boring meetings coincided with another event hosted at Friedenswald – the Restoration Retreat.  It featured speaker Sarah Augustine.  She is a Pueblo Mennonite, and Director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery.  Board members were able to sit in for her opening talk.

It was the third time I’ve heard Sarah speak.  One of them was a sermon with us over Zoom back in January.  Each of these times, Sarah has opened with the same proposal.  I don’t know about you, but when I hear something twice it catches my attention in a new way, and when I hear it three times, months apart, I think, OK, how long before this actually sinks in?

The way Sarah begins her presentations is by talking about the difference between faith and reverence.  Faith, she says, has to do with what we can’t see.  We might have faith in God, faith in reason, faith in zodiac signs, faith in an afterlife, faith in the arc of the moral universe being long but bending toward justice, faith in Jesus, faith in democracy.  Or any combination of these.  Faith, as we have come to use the word, is a particular orientation to the world of the big unseen.

Without discounting faith, Sarah points to reverence as a much-needed remedy for our time.  Reverence has to do with things we can see.  For Sarah, reverence includes greeting the sunrise, whenever possible, with gratitude for the regularity of the new day.  Reverence.  She tells the story of how she and her son place their hands on the earth each morning as an act of reverence.  It’s something I’ve tried with irregular regularity.  But even that has a noticeable effect.  God, Sarah says, is present in the many life-support systems right in front of our eyes.  The healthy human response is one of reverence.  There is another pretty popular option — treating what we see as a pool resources for the accumulation of personal wealth. This irreverence infects all of us and for this, reverence is an antidote. 

Reverence can be a walk in the woods of Camp Friendenswald.  It can be greeting the sunrise or kneeling down to touch the earth.  It can also be closer to what the prophet Isaiah experienced. 

“In the year King Uzziah died,” Isaiah writes, “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne high and lofty; and the hem of God’s robe filled the temple.  Seraphs, (depicted in ancient Egyptian art as fiery winged cobras) were in attention above the Lord; each had six wings, with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet – cobra feet, and with two they flew.  And one called to another, and said, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God’s glory.’  The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house – the temple — filled with smoke.”

Isaiah says he saw all this, but this is clearly more of a vision-type-seeing than watching-a-bird-type-seeing.  It’s an encounter, provoking reverence to the highest degree.  Isaiah is in the temple, the seat of the Presence of God, and he has a vision in which the mere hem of the garment of this Divine King, fills the entire temple.  The thresholds are shaking and smoke is filling the whole place, billowing out.  It’s like trying to fit 1000 gallons of water into one of those Dollar General party balloons.  The Holy Presence is just overwhelming the place.  And overwhelming Isaiah whose reasonable response to this Divine excess is to say “Woe is me!  I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts!” (6:5).  Isaiah is seeing something inconceivably grand, and he is feeling inconceivably small and absolutely unfit to see what he is seeing. 

This is not your ever day kind of reverence, but it is reverence of another variety.  Observe the sunrise from your backyard and you go away grateful for the new day.  Observe the sunrise from Mercury, and you go away blind and a hot mess, shouting Woe is me!  Same sun, different intensity.

Isaiah gets a few steps closer to the Source and has a lesson in reverence he’ll never forget. 

“Holy, holy, holy” call out the seraphs.  “The whole earth is full of God’s glory.” 

The writer Annie Dillard once wrote this about our relationship with the Ultimate:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, 1982, pp. 40-41.)

So there’s a new addition to the usher job description and maybe some new line items for the annual budget.  Signal flares and crash helmets.

Holy, Holy, Holy, the whole earth is full of glory.  It’s here.  It’s everywhere.  It’s even partially detectable with the human eye, despite the very small spectrum of light our brains can perceive.  0.0035 percent, Google says.  That’s how much of the electromagnetic spectrum the human eye can see.  There aren’t good stats yet on the percentage of spiritual consciousness we’re able to detect. 

How far can we go down this path of reverence for the visible that Sarah Augustine, and Isaiah, and Annie Dillard point to?    And where does it ultimately lead?

Well, perhaps surprisingly at this point, it doesn’t lead to getting torched.  It doesn’t lead to choking on the smoke that fills the temple.  It doesn’t lead to wallowing in one’s own unworthiness or teeny, tiny insignificance in the face of such grandeur.  Quite the opposite.

Isaiah’s vision continues with one of the winged- cobra-seraphs plucking up a live coal from the altar, flying it over to Isaiah, touching it to Isaiah’s lips, and declaring him free of any guilt or sin he may have accumulated over his years.  And then, startlingly, the voice of the Lord: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”  It turns out you can’t send the whole flaming orb of the sun to visit and warm up a small corner of the world.  For this, the great Majesty on the Throne needs creatures more on the scale of a single live coal.  Who can they send?  Who’s up for the task?  Maybe one who has no illusions about simply being a small ember.  One who has encountered the holy and oriented their lives around reverence. 

Isaiah goes from viewing the unthinkable to doing the unthinkable.  He raises his hand, and says “Here am I, send me.”

As far as we know, Isaiah didn’t even know what he was volunteering for.  He might still be suffering from some impaired judgment, given the circumstances.  Or maybe he knew exactly what we was doing.  Maybe it was exactly these circumstances, being overwhelmed by reverence, that empowered him to say “Here am I, send me.” 

He’s going to need the empowerment, because there’s one more twist to this story.  After hearing Isaiah’s willingness to be enlisted in whatever Divine project there might be, the Lord comes back with these words:

“Go and say to this people: ‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.’  Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes. so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” 

In other words, Isaiah is about to have a very, very, extremely, unsuccessful ministry.  If, that is, you define success by minds changed, hearts healed, lives transformed.  Isaiah lives during a time when this just isn’t in the forecast.  And yet, he is called to speak, and to act – to be a representative of the sacred within a desecrated world.

I won’t say we live in a time just like this.  That sounds a little too grim.  But I will suggest that whatever it is we feel called to do in this world – whatever love, whatever kindness, whatever healing and justice we may give ourselves to – we will be in for a rough ride if we depend on visible, measurable success according to whatever typical standard we may apply.  We may impact lives and change systems, or we may not. 

I wonder if this is why the gospels tell us so frequently that Jesus would go up mountains, or out in the wilderness, by himself to pray.  Like in Luke 6.  After having an intense confrontation with the scribes and Pharisees over Sabbath practices, an argument where Jesus made some great points but seemingly did not persuade any of his foes, Jesus heads out, by himself.  He spends the night on a mountainside – more like a big rocky hill than the Sierras – but a mountainside nonetheless.  He’s praying.  He’s putting what he’s doing in a larger context of Divine reality.  He’s practicing reverence.  And, not coincidentally, the next morning he gathers his closest companions, and he commissions them as apostles, his messengers.  Much like Isaiah became a messenger, with reverence as his home base.

All this reminds me of an essay I came across early in my pastoring years that helped me get a better handle on what the heck pastoring was about.  It was by Celeste Kennel Shenk, at the time recently ordained.  Celeste wrote about the strange new experience of being called Reverend.  After pondering this, she decided that being called reverend meant that a key part of her job was pointing people toward reverence.  This, she decided, was doable.  We’re not a reverend-calling kind of congregation, but I have come back to Celeste’s thought time and again when I lose my bearings.  And since we are a priesthood of all believers-type congregation, maybe we could also be a reverendhood of all believers in this specific way.  Together, we practice, and point to reverence.   

Now I’m going to admit that I have an unfair advantage this coming week in practicing reverence.  This afternoon I’m going to get on a plane, fly to Phoenix, and meet up with a couple college friends.  Early tomorrow morning we’ll be hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and camp out three nights before hiking back up.  I have never even been there, but fortunately one friend has done a similar hike into the Grand Canyon and the other is a medical doctor.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure what I’m bringing to mix, except maybe pointing toward reverence.  That I can do, although it may be rather obvious there.

Isaiah’s vision and Jesus’s call invite us to orient our lives around reverence.  We are part of the reverendhood of all believers.  This may not include a full transformation of society into the kin-dom of God.  It certainly includes giving ourselves over to the sacred work of persistent love.  Sarah Augustine reminds us that reverence has to do with things we can see.  The seraphs call out that the whole earth is filled with God’s glory.  Holy, holy, Wholly.