My dear friends, what a great, great joy it has been to be with you over these past three days. Again special thanks to the people of All Saints’, Tupelo for making us feel so welcome this weekend and part of your 140th anniversary celebration. And now we have gathered one last time together. Together as the church we are here to listen to the words of the Holy Scripture to find our place in the salvation narrative and to be fed by Jesus himself at God’s holy table. And we are also here as Garrison Keillor would say about shy people, who eat powder-milk biscuits . . . trying to find the courage to get up and do what needs to be done.
Every three years, our lectionary cycle allows this diocesan council to engage as our old testament reading the remarkably vivid story, the call of Isaiah. Though I have used that particular text as my sermon foundation over the past years, it is rich enough to return to again. That passage begins with the linking of the death of King Uzziah with the vision of God, Isaiah saw in the temple — the vision out which God claimed Isaiah as God’s profit and sent him to a lost and disobedient people:
“In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty . . . ”
King Uzziah together with his father, and later with his son, had ruled Judah for fifty-two years. He was hardly a perfect monarch, but during that time the nation had grown accustomed to his ways. So it was that stability and predictability were his gifts to his people. It is clear that this story of Isaiah in the temple assumes a kind of cultural transition that certainly would include uncertainty, even fearfulness, as Judah faces the future without Uzziah.
Years ago I said to this Council, that for us in our generation King Uzziah has died as well. The perceived predictability and stability of an earlier time has died. And if we scratch the surface of our souls, just a little, we can find considerable anxiety, uncertainty about our future.
But it was precisely this moment of confusion and uncertainty that Isaiah saw the holiness of God, far surpassing anything he had encountered as a priest. The place, of the vision, the Temple, was very familiar to this priest; but the encounter with God was far beyond the ordinary and the familiar. And it is precisely within this moment of our own worry — even fear — that God seeks to make God self known in ways heretofore mysterious and hidden.
I believe that the loss of the predictability in our culture, and in some degree in our church, has given us the possibility of encountering the Risen Lord in ways unimaginable in a calmer time.
But, even if we believe this — if we’re honest with ourselves, we as individuals and we as a Church are overwhelmed by a great sense of inadequacy. We are living in a spiritually starving culture and you and I struggle to put into words our own faith so that it might be shared, doubting, in our worst moments, whether what we have to share has any value, any eternal significance.
And we struggle to find ways that our churches can speak to the very real spiritual longings and physical needs of a culture increasingly deaf to us. So it is, if we are honest with ourselves, every one of us, at one time or another can cry like Isaiah before God’s altar — “I am lost”. I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how to do it!
The gospel — the incredible good news — in this moment is that God does draw near. And if our hearts and minds and souls are open and still enough in the noise and chaos of our lives, there comes, in time, an awareness of that cross on our foreheads.
“Sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever,” we say. And sometimes, miracles do occur, and we hear those words and take them in, and they begin to seep deep into those dark recesses of our spirit. And we remember, we remember in marvelously renewing ways, who we are and whose we are. For Isaiah, it was the burning coal. For us, it is that baptismal moment, often well beyond our baptism, that begins to burn away so much of the rubbish within us. For both Isaiah, and us, it is a purifying fire! And in the mystery of God’s providence there are moments, we would like them to be many, but they rarely are, moments, moments when we can experience, if only for a fleeting time, what it means to be forgiven, forgiven in the deepest part of our being. And every now and then, we taste that peace that passes all human understanding — in the midst of the chaos, uncertainty and anxiety of our lives, it lasts too short a time. We get a glimpse, and it gives us hope. And it is good, and it is holy and we so want to stay there, at peace with God, at peace with others, in miracles of miracles, at peace with ourselves.
And in those fleeting moments, we are gifted to see and hear and experience — we convince ourselves that this is the goal; this is the purpose of the pilgrim’s spiritual journey . . . to be at peace.
But the deepest truth about God’s work of salvation is that we are brought to that moment of wisdom, that moment of peace; or we have been brought to that sense of connection and joy with a particular people or congregation; or we have been brought to a moment of deep insight — theological or psychological, we have been brought to that moment as Isaiah was brought to that moment for a purpose that is beyond that moment and beyond our own spiritual needs.
After the purification of Isaiah in the temple, God asks the prophet-to-be: “Whom shall I send?”, “Who will go for us?” And though the scriptures do not immediately suggest this, I imagine there was a moment or two of silence . . . as Isaiah waits and thinks and considers the consequences of leaving this exalted and holy moment in the temple — the place where he is most comfortable as a priest and the place where he has been touched by the Living God — to go to, quite literally, God knows where.
It is a silence similar. I imagine, to that which followed the angel Gabriel’s announcement of God’s purposes for Mary, the mother of our Lord. Native American tradition says that the stars and the planets stopped their orbits as all creation awaited Mary’s response . . . and then the words that restarted creation: “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; Let it be with me according to your word.”
And so. Isaiah pauses . . . and you and I ponder that same question: Whom shall I send . . . to a confused and hopeless and violent world? Whom shall I send . . . to the physically hungry and spiritually starving? Whom shall I send . . . to pay the costly price of reconciliation? Whom shall I send . . . to be ridiculed by an increasingly hostile culture? And there is a poignant silence as we, like Isaiah, count the costs.
My dear sisters and brothers, my deepest prayer is that one day, our children and grandchildren will look back upon this moment, and will say to anyone who would listen: “In the midst of all their problems, and there were many, my church, my people, said with Isaiah: ‘Here I am. Send me.’ ”
