Sermons

In the Year that King Uzziah Died, I saw the Lord
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind
June 3, 2007
Trinity Sunday
Isaiah 6:1-8

"In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord..." has got to be one of the most familiar and ironic phrases in all of Holy Scripture. It is familiar because it is appointed for reading at ordinations and confirmations. Everybody loves the question, "Whom shall I send," and the enthusiastic reply, "Here am I. Send me!" It is ironic because in public reading, we usually do not hear the assignment that this eager volunteer is then given. It follows in the next few verses when the newly ordained prophet Isaiah is commissioned to tell the people of Judah that with the exception of one very small remnant, a mere stump, they and their cities will be destroyed and their land will become desolate until they are cleansed from their wrongdoings. And to make matters worse, the sacred text tells Isaiah and us that the people might listen, but they won't comprehend; and they might look, but they won't understand. The newly anointed prophet, full of vim and vigor, is called to "make the mind of the people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look, listen or comprehend, so that they may not be healed." (Isaiah 6:9-10)

What on earth is God up to, and why on earth would anyone want to read this text at a service of ordination or confirmation? Are we all perverted, or what? Perhaps, if we explore the passage more carefully, we might hear, see, and comprehend what makes it so compelling and appropriate as a cornerstone for ministry.

First, we might ask what was going on in the year that King Uzziah died? In the eighth century before the Common Era, during the reign of King Uzziah, the Kingdom of Judah (the southern half of ancient Israel) was at the height of its power. Uzziah had ruled for over forty years (that's the equivalent of ten presidential terms). He was an able and popular sovereign. He presided over a period of military strength, fortifying the country and reorganizing and re-equipping the army. He had conquered the Philistines and the Arabians, while keeping the peace with his counterpart in the northern kingdom of Samaria. On the domestic front, it was a period of aggressive commercial growth, industrial expansion and strong trade relations, thus being a time of relative stability and prosperity. If, in the history of ancient Israel, there was ever a solid middle class, it was during the reign of King Uzziah. And so on the surface, all seemed to be well.

However, as the prophet Amos boldly articulates, the nation of Judah had developed an underside with many impoverished, neglected and oppressed people, especially in its large cities. The plumb line of justice in Judah was crooked and unleveled, and those at ease in Zion were trampling on the needy and exploiting the labor of the poor.

Over the course of this imperial expansion, King Uzziah's strength became his weakness. The biblical text reports that, "He grew proud, to his destruction." (2 Chronicles 26:16) Uzziah's pride was manifest in his attempt to usurp the power of the priesthood, even entering the Temple to burn incense on the altar. When the chief priest pleaded with the monarch to stop and told him of this wrongdoing, King Uzziah got very angry, and leprosy broke out on his forehead, thus making him unclean and thereby excluded from the House of God. With his father forced to live in isolation and quarantine, Uzziah's son Jotham assumed leadership as a co-regent in the public realm, and Judah continued in its stability and prosperity, as if things hadn't changed.

Then King Uzziah died. I liken this event to the death of President John F. Kennedy when, as some of you will remember, the shock and disorientation felt by the entire nation. "Where were you on the day that Kennedy was shot?" is a question that many older Americans can answer without hesitation. "What will we do now?" the people wondered.

On the day that King Uzziah died and Jotham became the official king, Isaiah had his vision and received his call to become a prophet. Scripture tells us that Isaiah, presumably a priest of the Temple, was lying prostrate in the middle room of the Jerusalem's most holy place. There he saw "The Lord sitting on an exalted throne," (Isaiah 6:1) and thus envisioned God as a king, an absolute ruler and commander upon whom authority, responsibility and leadership rested. This royal God was enveloped in billows of smoke and surrounded by strange creatures called seraphim flying about and shouting back and forth like children playing tag at dusk.

Overwhelmed by God's powerful presence, Isaiah exclaimed: "Woe is me! I am utterly lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." (Isaiah 6:5). The RSV translation reads that "dirty lips." Isaiah's reaction to God was an all-encompassing sense of uncleanness, impurity and sin. When confronted with the holy of holies, Isaiah saw himself and his nation unholy, a foul-mouthed people. For a moment, imagine that that you are Isaiah and have seen the Lord in all God's glory. The only scene I can get into my head is the one from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her companions enter the throne-room of Oz. Now try to think that that image as it were not a little man behind a curtain, but God, very God. Like the lion, you would stutter; like the scarecrow, your knees would shake, like the tin man, your body was rattle, and if you were a smart Dorothy, you would fall prostrate to the ground crying, "Woe is me!"

But God, being all merciful and loving, cleansed and purified Isaiah's sinful lips with a burning coal so that he was able to stand in the realm of divine holiness. Isaiah's surrender to the holy presence of God prepared him to accept readily the call of God without knowing its content or implications. When God asked, "Whom shall I send?" Isaiah immediately, directly, and without qualification replied with charred lips, "Here I am, send me." (Isaiah 6:8) And when God explained the negative character of his commission, Isaiah stood as an intercessor (a broker or go-between) for his doomed people. He did not resist, but merely asked, "How long, O Lord?" Isaiah's response reminds me of some army reservists returning to Iraq for a second tour of duty, not resisting but simply inquiring, "How long will this war will continue and how long will we have to serve?"

And God's answer was not comforting or reassuring. To the newly ordained prophet, the Eternal One responded: "Until the cities lie in waste without inhabitant, and house without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land." (Isaiah 6:11-12) God told the prophet that this painful prophecy would continue "until only a stump remains when it is felled; this trunk [being] the seed of the Holy One." (Isaiah 6:13) Or perhaps, a better way to put it, this doomsday reality would end in God's own time.

As the story of Isaiah progresses, we witness a prophet called to proclaim to his people that they are sinners, and for their sins of pride and arrogance, of rebellion and resistance, of selfishness and foolishness, they would be judged and "receive the rod of the Lord's anger." How were they to respond, we might ask with own quivering lips and shaking knees? They were to live with the quiet faith of waiting on God, of walking with God in humility, and of living in the presence of a silent but loving God. Or as Micah so simply says it, you know what the Lord requires of you: "do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8)

Isaiah never offered political solutions to what were ultimately spiritual problems. Rather, he simply, directly and forcibly, with a multitude of symbols and signs, proclaimed the glory of God and the holiness of the Holy One, and in doing so, he called the people of faith back to faith. Like a good preacher, he called them back to the faith of Abraham and Sarah who were called to walk into the wilderness to give birth to a new nation, back to the faith of Moses and Miriam who were called to lead these same people again into the wilderness to build a new society.

The call of Isaiah is a call to return to the basics, a call to return to the wilderness. I think Isaiah is a good prophet for us today. Do you not hear his voice calling us out of our stability and security back to the basics, back to the wilderness, back to the roots of our faith? Do we not know what the Eternal One requires of us, "but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with [our] God?" Perhaps, the reason that the call of Isaiah is read at ordinations and confirmations is that somewhere deep down inside, we know that we too are a people of dirty lips, of unclean thoughts and deeds, and that we, like Isaiah and his society, need to be cleansed and forgiven with the fire of God.

The people of Judah were eventually cleansed from their sins, forgiven, redeemed and renewed. After years of exile, a remnant returned to Jerusalem to begin again. Centuries later, the people again lost sight of their call to holiness, and so Jesus came into the world to cleanse, forgive and save. As today's reading from the Gospel of John suggests, in Jesus, God's Word came among us to convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, and to reassure the world of God's boundless forgiveness, redemption, and love. And God's Word will come again, again and again, because the world needs to be convicted and reassured over and over and over again.

And so we continue to say, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come." May we be ready to receive this Holy One in our midst, and give God the glory, honor, power, and all things due the Holy Name. Amen!