GOING TO CHURCH WITH THE SERAPHIM June 7, 2009, Trinity Sunday Isaiah 6: 1-8 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: The worship service trains us for a life of service after worship. Great God, whose perfect truth is beyond any words, forgive us when we imagine that our ideas could ever box you in. Nevertheless, give us the courage to think about you deeply. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. The book of Isaiah is probably the single most important Old Testament book for Christians. The New Testament quotes Isaiah over and over. The book we name Isaiah is almost surely the work of two, maybe three different prophets. Their several books had been bound together in one scroll that was placed in synagogues and called the Scroll of Isaiah, named after the first book in it. This first author, Isaiah, is the only of them for whom we have a name and the only of them about whom we know much. The eight verses that Amelie just read to us tell the story of this Isaiah s call to be a prophet. And what a story it is! Isaiah s career lasted from about 742 BC to 701 BC. In those 40 years, four kings of Israel came and went. The first of them, Uzziah, was immensely popular. When he died, the country slipped into national panic. Nobody knew what was coming next. In that year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah was called to be a prophet. Today s reading tells the story of that call. It came in the form of a vision, perhaps a dream, as he worshipped in the great Temple in Jerusalem. This experience, this dream, however you conceive it, is nothing more nor less than a vision of a heavenly worship service. God is God. Isaiah and creatures called seraphim form the congregation. Fearsome mythical creatures these seraphim were, even more fearsome than New Yorkers lions with human heads and multiple wings. Their three pairs of wings allowed them to do what you would do if you found yourself in the presence of the Lord God of Hosts. With one pair - 1 -
you cover your eyes from the blinding glory of God. With another you hide your nakedness in modesty. With the last two you fly off to do exactly what you re told. But even more remarkable than the seraphim is just how precisely these eight verses from Isaiah track the sequence of the service of worship we are part of right now. This intriguing parallel between a 21st Century Christian worship service and a passage from a 2,700-year-old prophet is no coincidence, of course. It s not like some worship designers sat down and said, Let s model church after the 6 th chapter of Isaiah. Rather, they are parallel because the experiences of being in the presence of God track with each other. Isaiah went to the great Temple to be in the presence of God. You and I come to this church to be in the presence of God. [A caveat about that It s not as if God lives in this or any particular space. The Divine is not somehow thicker on the corner of Park and 91st. God is all places and no one place, not even church. Church is simply where we self-consciously come to be deliberately present to God who is, in fact, radically ubiquitous.] And when we come into the conscious presence of the Divine One, be we ancient Hebrew prophet or post-modern New Yorker, God being God and us being us, parallel things happen in roughly the same sequence. In order to unpack this parallelism for you, I m going to ask you to do something participatory quite optional, of course. If you d like, open your worship bulletin to the Order of Service. Once you ve got that in front of you, open a pew Bible to the 6 th Chapter of Isaiah. It s page 635 of the Old Testament, bottom right-hand. I m going to walk you through this intriguing parallelism between the Bible and the bulletin. This is not just fascinating; it s important. The first verse of Isaiah 6 sets the time and place: the year that King Uzziah died, in the great Temple in Jerusalem. The cover of today s bulletin does the same thing. If you turn the left leaf of the tri-fold over you ll see it: Trinity Sunday, June 7, 2009; the Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York. Back to the Bible. The next verse, verse 2, introduces us to the rest of Isaiah s congregation, those seraphim I mentioned. And what do they do, this congregation of seraphim? They praise God just like we did at the beginning of this service. - 2 -
There was the Choral Prelude, then responsive praise, one to another, in the Call to Worship, then the Processional Hymn. Isaiah s seraphim simply cry, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory. By the way, these are the very words we sing as part of the communion liturgy today and every communion Sunday. This demeanor of praise is exactly where worship always begins. What I mean is this: when you and I merest mortals, creatures of dust, children of Adam realize ourselves to be in the presence of Divine mystery, transcendent perfection, praise is the fit thing to do. Verse four tells us that during this praise the pivots of the thresholds shook If Keith cranks up the organ and if this fabulous guest choir really lets loose, some pivots might even shake around here. Verse 4 adds, and the whole house with filled with smoke. Well, you ve got to go to the Episcopalians to get smoke. No smells and bells with the Presbyterians. Praise is at the core of worship. Praise was at the core of worship then and now, but Praise may not be the most important thing. That comes later. So what does Isaiah do after praise? Exactly what we do next confession. In verse 5, Isaiah confesses, Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. We do our confessing less theatrically, but the force is the same. Like Isaiah, we confess that we are imperfect human beings in a world of imperfect human beings. The next movement in our Sunday service is called The Assurance of Forgiveness. It s the promise that God does indeed love and forgive us in spite of it all. The parallel in Isaiah comes in verse 7, that s over on the next page of your Bible. One of the seraphim says, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out, just about what we say in an Assurance of Forgiveness. You ll have noted that this word of seraphic grace is accompanied by a consummately dramatic action. One of the seraphim flies over to penitent Isaiah and touches a hot coal to Isaiah s lips. Now, you might have expected a six-winged monster with hot coals to be the end of you. But Isaiah gets not death. Isaiah receives grace. But fear not, Brick may be open to symbol and pageantry, but hot-coals are one liturgical innovation not under consideration by our Worship Committee. - 3 -
Confession and forgiveness are at the core of worship. Confession and forgiveness were central then and now, but they may not be the most important thing. That comes later. The next movement in our order of worship (note the large-print light gray heading) is The Word. The Word is the reading of Scripture, the Children s Message, and then this longer word we are in the middle of, the sermon. A side note about sermons. Sermons are not the preacher s personal opinion de jour. Rather, sermons should be the preacher s best, but always mortal, attempt to pull the Bible passage just read across the ages to our time and place and apply it to our lives. The Isaiah parallel to the word at the center of our worship comes in verse 8. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? This is the word straight from God no preacher in a pulpit interpreting it. Raw, direct, and blessedly short is this sermon from God. I guess if you re God, you can do it in a sentence. The Word: scripture and sermon, are at the very core of worship, but even the Word may not be the most important thing. That comes later. What comes next, at the end of verse 8, is Isaiah s response to God s word: Here I am, he says. In our order of service, it s also the response that comes next. In a few moments we will, in fact, respond to the word. We will respond by declaring faith as we stand to say the Confession of Faith. We will respond in the offering. We respond not only laying checks in an offering plate, but by symbolically offering our time, our talents, our lives as the choir sings the Offertory Anthem, itself a response to God. And then we will respond by coming forward for communion, responding to the invitation of God to be nourished by the presence of the Living God made real in bread and wine. And finally, as is the case every Sunday, we respond to God, by praying, today the Prayer after Communion, on other Sundays, the longer Prayers of Thanksgiving, Intercession, and Petition. This response to God is at the core of the worship service faith declared, music sung, sacrament and prayer offered. But even this response may not be - 4 -
the most important thing. That comes later. Actually, the most important movement comes next and last. In the order of worship before you, it s short and simple. It s called The Sending, nothing but a final hymn, a benediction and charge. Then it s out into the big old nasty, wonderful world. It s also short in Isaiah, just the end of verse 8 and the verse nine. Isaiah says, Send me, and God says, Go! The point is this. The most important part of worship isn t in the service itself. The most important part of worship is what happens after the benediction. It happens after the choral postlude. It s what happens after you walk out the building onto the streets of New York. It s what you do out there with what happened in here. It s how you live your life because you were in this place for 70 minutes. It s the moral choices you make because you confessed your imperfect humanity and received God s forgiveness. It s the way you love or don t because you heard the word read and preached. It s God alive in and through your being because you took bread and wine into your being. The most important part of the service begins about 12:15. I understand that Herb Anderson, my predecessor in this pulpit, often used an ironic benediction to end the service. After the last hymn, Herb would say, Now let the service begin. I like that. This hour we spend together, sweet as it may be, is not exactly for us, and it s not simply for itself. Worship is for the sake of the rest of our lives. Worship is for the sake for the rest of the world. The six verses we heard today from the story of Isaiah are just the beginning of his career. The next forty-some chapters are the real story of Isaiah. In the same way, this hour of worship is always just a beginning. Every week it s a new beginning. What we do when we leave, how the live after the benediction, that s our real story. In the name of the Father, and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 5 -