SERMON Unclean Lips May 27, 2018 The Reverend Dr. Eric C. Smith
I d like to ask you to imagine something with me. Imagine that in the 2016 election, Donald Trump was taking over not for Barack Obama, but instead he was taking over for Lyndon B. Johnson, who had become president 52 years earlier. Imagine that LBJ had been president for the past 52 years, and that no one except LBJ had led the nation through all those decades of our national life, and that every person born since 1964 had only ever known a president Johnson. Imagine that it was Johnson who led the nation through Vietnam, but also the first Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine LBJ being president through Watergate, Iran Contra, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, and all of the history that has transpired since 1964. Imagine then how traumatic would it be when Johnson left office. Imagine how much stronger the emotions around the national election would have been in 2016 if it had been not 8 years of the prior president, but 52 years. Imagine if one party had had control of the presidency not for two four-year terms but for thirteen of them, and suddenly a different party controlled the presidency, and there were people eligible for retirement who could barely remember any other person in the Oval Office. Imagine all of that, and you have some sense of the trauma and uncertainty and upheaval surrounding the prophet Isaiah in this passage. King Uzziah had just died, the king had just died after a 52 year reign, and it seems that Isaiah didn t quite know what to do with himself. In the Hebrew Bible, there are two basic kinds of kings. There are good kings and there are bad kings, and the fate of the nation usually depended on the goodness or the badness of the king. The good kings ushered in periods of prosperity, and the bad ones brought decline and struggle and defeat. The bad kings were sometimes especially bad; the Bible says of those kings that they did what was evil in the sight of the lord, and the nation suffered the consequences of their bad rule. Likewise, of the good kings it was said that they did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and the people prospered. Of all the good kings in the Hebrew Bible, there are a few that stand out as especially good, kings whose reigns were said to have been especially righteous and prosperous. King Uzziah was one of those kings. Uzziah reigned as king of Judah, the southern kingdom, for 52 years, which was a period of extraordinary stability in a time when kings might last a year or two. And in the Bible Uzziah has a reputation for mostly being just and upright. And so it is a big deal that when the prophet Isaiah begins to talk about this vision that he had, he frames it in time, and he marks time with the death of this great and long-reigning king: in the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. In the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah writes, in that tumultuous and perilous time, I had a spiritual vision. It s often said that you should keep your religion and your politics separate, but Isaiah never got that memo. Neither did any of the other prophets of the Hebrew Bible, really. Religion was always political for the prophets, and politics was always religious. The temple and the king were part of a single structure by which the people could have access to God; God worked and spoke through the king, or at least God worked and spoke through the good kings, just like God worked and spoke through the temple and its sacrifices, and through the prophets and their oracles. The king dying after 52 years was a very big deal, but it wasn t just a big political deal. It was a big religious deal. The king s death brought on a crisis of faith. It was a dangerous moment for God s relationship with the people of Israel and the nation of Judah. It was a time when it might have felt to Isaiah and to his compatriots that their special relationship with God was threatened. This is not so different from what you can hear in our own time from all different corners of the American political arena. Lots of people, including a lot of us, are convinced that Barack Obama was the Page 1 of 4
most ungodly abomination ever to enter our national politics, and that he was a threat to everything good and true and right about our nation. And most of the rest of the people in the country, including many of us, are convinced that it is actually Donald Trump that is the abomination, the worst thing to ever happen to decency and truth. Before that it was George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush and Reagan and Carter and so on down the line. It seems like we don t just have presidents in this country, we have lightning rods, and for some of us one president is a savior and for others of us that same president is an existential threat. And religion, of course, religion is wrapped up right in the middle of it all. Evangelical Christians get a lot of the blame on this, but they re hardly the only Christians or only religious people who think about politics as a religious exercise and religion as an extension of politics. We are not so different from old Israelite society with its blending of religion and politics, we are just less honest about it. So in the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord. Remember, he was shaken, he was reeling, he was afraid, and he saw this vision. And it was a strange vision. The Lord which is the Jewish way of talking about God when they didn t want to use God s proper personal name the Lord, in this vision, was sitting in the throne room, in the temple where God lived, and God was on the throne, and all around God were seraphs. Now if you ve always wanted to know what a seraph is, you have come to the right place, because yours truly is the author of a 7000 word academic article on seraphs and their close cousins the cherubs, in a forthcoming encyclopedia of early Christianity. It promises to be really page-turning reading. But I ll sum it up for you here: seraphs are really weird angel type things, and seraphs exist solely to serve God. So the seraphs were all flying all around God and they were singing this song, Holy holy holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God s glory. It was a strange vision, and for Isaiah it must have been a deeply spiritual vision, a vision of God in God s temple surrounded by God s attendants and angels, a heavenly liturgy unfolding right there in front of him. And in the middle of all this majesty and strangeness, Isaiah spoke. And I think that what Isaiah had to say in that moment is something we could stand to hear in our moment. I think that Isaiah s words in the midst of that vision are words that we could bear to hear, and maybe even to speak, as we live out our own lives and our own politics and our own religion in our own day. Isaiah said, Woe is me. Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. Does that sound familiar? Just turn on the news these days and it might sound familiar. Just log into Facebook or Twitter these days and you ll know what Isaiah must have meant. I have a Twitter account, and whenever I open that app I feel like I live among a people of unclean lips. Certainly I live among a people of unclean keyboards. Woe is me, Isaiah says, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. In other words, my country and my people are adrift. We speak unrighteously. We pollute rather than purify. We speak hatred rather than kindness, we speak violence rather than peace, we profane the world with our mouths rather than make the world a better place. Isaiah, he knows the kind of people he lives among, and he knows the kind of world he is living in, there in the wake of this political and religious crisis, and he knows that his world not a godly one. And he acknowledges it, in the presence of God; he says this out loud. The seraph, then, the seraph took a live coal from the altar, and he touched Isaiah with it on the mouth, and with that the seraph cleared away whatever uncleanness and sin was on Isaiah s lips. And then Isaiah heard another voice, and this is the heart of the matter. Isaiah heard another voice. The voice asked a question. Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? The voice that Isaiah heard was God s voice, and the question was exactly the question that the moment required. God s question Page 2 of 4
was the one that should be asked at that moment when you realize what a fallen world you live in, when you understand the ways in which your society is broken and in need of healing. God s question was, so what? So what? The text had just spent a long time establishing that there was a crisis, that things were falling apart, that the culture and the society even the church of the day were rotten at the core, and the question from God was, so what? What is anybody going to do about it? What is the practical effect of noticing, as Isaiah had just done, what is the effect of noticing that things were off the rails? What difference was made because Isaiah had realized what kind of broken world he was living in? Whom shall I send, God asked, and who will go for us? I don t need to recite for you all the ways our world is broken, all the ways our politics are broken, all the ways our social fabric is torn. We could all make our own lists of the ways our world is broken, and regardless of our politics probably most of our lists would be pretty similar. But I have some bad news for all of you liberals out there: it didn t all start with Donald Trump. And I have some bad news for all of you conservatives out there too: it didn t start with Barack Obama either. In fact, even if we had just finished a 52-year reign of Lyndon B. Johnson, even if LBJ had been sitting in the Oval Office for all these years, and everything that happened since the 60s had happened on his watch, we still couldn t even blame it all on him. The brokenness in our world does not belong to any person, no matter how powerful. The brokenness in our world is systemic, it is endemic, it has something to do with us, it belongs to us, and all of our hating on this or that politician is just an elaborate ritual that keeps us from having to confront that central truth: that the injustices in our world are injustices that we cause and we allow to keep happening. The inequalities in the world are here because we sanction them, in one way or another. This is not to excuse politics and politicians; there are good kings and there are bad kings, and some of them do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, as the Hebrew Bible says. But Isaiah s vision points us to a bigger truth. In the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. In the midst of political trouble and turmoil, in the middle of unsteady days, in a time of uncertainty and fear, I saw the Lord sitting on the throne. And God asked: whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And here is the high point of the story. When God asks whom shall I send, and who will go for us, Isaiah almost jumps out of his seat. Here I am! The NRSV translation says here am I, but that sounds a little silly to me, so I m going to rephrase it. Here I am, Isaiah exclaims. Here I am! Send me! Let me be the one you send. I think I can be the one to make a difference. Let me do it. And that is the call story of Isaiah. That is how Isaiah got to be Isaiah, the great prophet of the Hebrew Bible. It didn t happen because he was the smartest one or the friendliest one or the one with the most resources or the holiest most pious one. It happened because when God asked for someone to go out and speak a good word to the world, Isaiah raised his hand and said, pick me. And God sent him out, and Isaiah became Isaiah. That s a daunting example for us today. That kind of clarity of purpose is rare, where God is literally in front of you asking for volunteers. And that kind of bravery is even rarer, when you re willing to be the one to raise your hand and say yes. But that is how this works. That s how this whole thing works; God calls us, and we answer, or we don t. If we answer, we do the best we can. If we don t answer, then the world keeps on being troubled without the benefit of our doing whatever it is we were called to do. God calls us each and every one, and so, as the saying goes, we are the ones we have been waiting for. It doesn t matter who the president is or for how long, or which king did or did not do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, or how clean or unclean the lips of our people are, we are still called by God to work in this place and bring justice and mercy and love and peace and good news to this world. Page 3 of 4
I want to close by offering a concrete suggestion for a direction God might be calling you in, a direction God might be calling us in. I wasn t sure if I should do this, so I texted George and I asked him, and he wrote back, and he said that of course I should do it, because, he said, if he said no it would be denying millennia of biblical witness and the express teachings of Jesus, which is how I feel too. So here it is; if you re wondering in what way God is calling you to minister to the world and to work to leave this place more righteous, godly, just, and life-giving than you found it, I suggest to you the poor people s campaign. If you re looking for a way to do what God has called you to do, consider the poor people s campaign. You don t have to be poor to join, although Jesus did say that it helps. All you have to do is have an awareness that the world is broken and needs fixing, and that it is probably regular folks who are going to do it, not senators or presidents or governors or the pope or the Dalai Lama but regular folks like you and me. The poor people s campaign had its roots in the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., who never lived to see those ideas through. But in these last few years the idea has been revived, and now a broad coalition of people of faith and no faith, people across all kinds of difference, lots of different kinds of people are joined together to address things like systemic racism, poverty, a war economy that thrives on death and destruction, environmental degradation, and equal protection under the law. It is religious and it is political; it is, as one of its leaders the Rev. Dr. William Barber puts it, it is a national call for moral revival. It is, as George Anastos puts it, in accord with millennia of biblical witness, including every bit of the book of Isaiah, and it is in accord with the express teachings of Jesus. Right now the poor people s campaign is engaged in what it calls 40 days of moral action, including action at state capitals in multiple states on Tuesday, although not in Colorado. On their website you can find ways that you can get involved. Find a way to plug in, to support, to educate yourself, to demand action on the things you hear God calling you to do, to lend your voice to the millions of voices that are gathering to cry out together. Or don t maybe this not your call, maybe you re being called somewhere else. The poor people s campaign is just a suggestion after all. Find your own thing, find where God is calling you, because God is calling you. For we live among a people of unclean lips, that much seems clear now, and God is asking whom shall I send, and who will go for us. You be the one to jump out of your seat. Be the one to raise your hand. Be the one to finds yourself saying, here I am, send me, and let s get to work doing what God has called us to do. Amen. Page 4 of 4
SERMON Unclean Lips May 27, 2018 The Reverend Dr. Eric C. Smith
I d like to ask you to imagine something with me. Imagine that in the 2016 election, Donald Trump was taking over not for Barack Obama, but instead he was taking over for Lyndon B. Johnson, who had become president 52 years earlier. Imagine that LBJ had been president for the past 52 years, and that no one except LBJ had led the nation through all those decades of our national life, and that every person born since 1964 had only ever known a president Johnson. Imagine that it was Johnson who led the nation through Vietnam, but also the first Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine LBJ being president through Watergate, Iran Contra, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, and all of the history that has transpired since 1964. Imagine then how traumatic would it be when Johnson left office. Imagine how much stronger the emotions around the national election would have been in 2016 if it had been not 8 years of the prior president, but 52 years. Imagine if one party had had control of the presidency not for two four-year terms but for thirteen of them, and suddenly a different party controlled the presidency, and there were people eligible for retirement who could barely remember any other person in the Oval Office. Imagine all of that, and you have some sense of the trauma and uncertainty and upheaval surrounding the prophet Isaiah in this passage. King Uzziah had just died, the king had just died after a 52 year reign, and it seems that Isaiah didn t quite know what to do with himself. In the Hebrew Bible, there are two basic kinds of kings. There are good kings and there are bad kings, and the fate of the nation usually depended on the goodness or the badness of the king. The good kings ushered in periods of prosperity, and the bad ones brought decline and struggle and defeat. The bad kings were sometimes especially bad; the Bible says of those kings that they did what was evil in the sight of the lord, and the nation suffered the consequences of their bad rule. Likewise, of the good kings it was said that they did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and the people prospered. Of all the good kings in the Hebrew Bible, there are a few that stand out as especially good, kings whose reigns were said to have been especially righteous and prosperous. King Uzziah was one of those kings. Uzziah reigned as king of Judah, the southern kingdom, for 52 years, which was a period of extraordinary stability in a time when kings might last a year or two. And in the Bible Uzziah has a reputation for mostly being just and upright. And so it is a big deal that when the prophet Isaiah begins to talk about this vision that he had, he frames it in time, and he marks time with the death of this great and long-reigning king: in the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. In the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah writes, in that tumultuous and perilous time, I had a spiritual vision. It s often said that you should keep your religion and your politics separate, but Isaiah never got that memo. Neither did any of the other prophets of the Hebrew Bible, really. Religion was always political for the prophets, and politics was always religious. The temple and the king were part of a single structure by which the people could have access to God; God worked and spoke through the king, or at least God worked and spoke through the good kings, just like God worked and spoke through the temple and its sacrifices, and through the prophets and their oracles. The king dying after 52 years was a very big deal, but it wasn t just a big political deal. It was a big religious deal. The king s death brought on a crisis of faith. It was a dangerous moment for God s relationship with the people of Israel and the nation of Judah. It was a time when it might have felt to Isaiah and to his compatriots that their special relationship with God was threatened. This is not so different from what you can hear in our own time from all different corners of the American political arena. Lots of people, including a lot of us, are convinced that Barack Obama was the Page 1 of 4
most ungodly abomination ever to enter our national politics, and that he was a threat to everything good and true and right about our nation. And most of the rest of the people in the country, including many of us, are convinced that it is actually Donald Trump that is the abomination, the worst thing to ever happen to decency and truth. Before that it was George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush and Reagan and Carter and so on down the line. It seems like we don t just have presidents in this country, we have lightning rods, and for some of us one president is a savior and for others of us that same president is an existential threat. And religion, of course, religion is wrapped up right in the middle of it all. Evangelical Christians get a lot of the blame on this, but they re hardly the only Christians or only religious people who think about politics as a religious exercise and religion as an extension of politics. We are not so different from old Israelite society with its blending of religion and politics, we are just less honest about it. So in the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord. Remember, he was shaken, he was reeling, he was afraid, and he saw this vision. And it was a strange vision. The Lord which is the Jewish way of talking about God when they didn t want to use God s proper personal name the Lord, in this vision, was sitting in the throne room, in the temple where God lived, and God was on the throne, and all around God were seraphs. Now if you ve always wanted to know what a seraph is, you have come to the right place, because yours truly is the author of a 7000 word academic article on seraphs and their close cousins the cherubs, in a forthcoming encyclopedia of early Christianity. It promises to be really page-turning reading. But I ll sum it up for you here: seraphs are really weird angel type things, and seraphs exist solely to serve God. So the seraphs were all flying all around God and they were singing this song, Holy holy holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God s glory. It was a strange vision, and for Isaiah it must have been a deeply spiritual vision, a vision of God in God s temple surrounded by God s attendants and angels, a heavenly liturgy unfolding right there in front of him. And in the middle of all this majesty and strangeness, Isaiah spoke. And I think that what Isaiah had to say in that moment is something we could stand to hear in our moment. I think that Isaiah s words in the midst of that vision are words that we could bear to hear, and maybe even to speak, as we live out our own lives and our own politics and our own religion in our own day. Isaiah said, Woe is me. Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. Does that sound familiar? Just turn on the news these days and it might sound familiar. Just log into Facebook or Twitter these days and you ll know what Isaiah must have meant. I have a Twitter account, and whenever I open that app I feel like I live among a people of unclean lips. Certainly I live among a people of unclean keyboards. Woe is me, Isaiah says, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. In other words, my country and my people are adrift. We speak unrighteously. We pollute rather than purify. We speak hatred rather than kindness, we speak violence rather than peace, we profane the world with our mouths rather than make the world a better place. Isaiah, he knows the kind of people he lives among, and he knows the kind of world he is living in, there in the wake of this political and religious crisis, and he knows that his world not a godly one. And he acknowledges it, in the presence of God; he says this out loud. The seraph, then, the seraph took a live coal from the altar, and he touched Isaiah with it on the mouth, and with that the seraph cleared away whatever uncleanness and sin was on Isaiah s lips. And then Isaiah heard another voice, and this is the heart of the matter. Isaiah heard another voice. The voice asked a question. Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? The voice that Isaiah heard was God s voice, and the question was exactly the question that the moment required. God s question Page 2 of 4
was the one that should be asked at that moment when you realize what a fallen world you live in, when you understand the ways in which your society is broken and in need of healing. God s question was, so what? So what? The text had just spent a long time establishing that there was a crisis, that things were falling apart, that the culture and the society even the church of the day were rotten at the core, and the question from God was, so what? What is anybody going to do about it? What is the practical effect of noticing, as Isaiah had just done, what is the effect of noticing that things were off the rails? What difference was made because Isaiah had realized what kind of broken world he was living in? Whom shall I send, God asked, and who will go for us? I don t need to recite for you all the ways our world is broken, all the ways our politics are broken, all the ways our social fabric is torn. We could all make our own lists of the ways our world is broken, and regardless of our politics probably most of our lists would be pretty similar. But I have some bad news for all of you liberals out there: it didn t all start with Donald Trump. And I have some bad news for all of you conservatives out there too: it didn t start with Barack Obama either. In fact, even if we had just finished a 52-year reign of Lyndon B. Johnson, even if LBJ had been sitting in the Oval Office for all these years, and everything that happened since the 60s had happened on his watch, we still couldn t even blame it all on him. The brokenness in our world does not belong to any person, no matter how powerful. The brokenness in our world is systemic, it is endemic, it has something to do with us, it belongs to us, and all of our hating on this or that politician is just an elaborate ritual that keeps us from having to confront that central truth: that the injustices in our world are injustices that we cause and we allow to keep happening. The inequalities in the world are here because we sanction them, in one way or another. This is not to excuse politics and politicians; there are good kings and there are bad kings, and some of them do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, as the Hebrew Bible says. But Isaiah s vision points us to a bigger truth. In the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. In the midst of political trouble and turmoil, in the middle of unsteady days, in a time of uncertainty and fear, I saw the Lord sitting on the throne. And God asked: whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And here is the high point of the story. When God asks whom shall I send, and who will go for us, Isaiah almost jumps out of his seat. Here I am! The NRSV translation says here am I, but that sounds a little silly to me, so I m going to rephrase it. Here I am, Isaiah exclaims. Here I am! Send me! Let me be the one you send. I think I can be the one to make a difference. Let me do it. And that is the call story of Isaiah. That is how Isaiah got to be Isaiah, the great prophet of the Hebrew Bible. It didn t happen because he was the smartest one or the friendliest one or the one with the most resources or the holiest most pious one. It happened because when God asked for someone to go out and speak a good word to the world, Isaiah raised his hand and said, pick me. And God sent him out, and Isaiah became Isaiah. That s a daunting example for us today. That kind of clarity of purpose is rare, where God is literally in front of you asking for volunteers. And that kind of bravery is even rarer, when you re willing to be the one to raise your hand and say yes. But that is how this works. That s how this whole thing works; God calls us, and we answer, or we don t. If we answer, we do the best we can. If we don t answer, then the world keeps on being troubled without the benefit of our doing whatever it is we were called to do. God calls us each and every one, and so, as the saying goes, we are the ones we have been waiting for. It doesn t matter who the president is or for how long, or which king did or did not do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, or how clean or unclean the lips of our people are, we are still called by God to work in this place and bring justice and mercy and love and peace and good news to this world. Page 3 of 4
I want to close by offering a concrete suggestion for a direction God might be calling you in, a direction God might be calling us in. I wasn t sure if I should do this, so I texted George and I asked him, and he wrote back, and he said that of course I should do it, because, he said, if he said no it would be denying millennia of biblical witness and the express teachings of Jesus, which is how I feel too. So here it is; if you re wondering in what way God is calling you to minister to the world and to work to leave this place more righteous, godly, just, and life-giving than you found it, I suggest to you the poor people s campaign. If you re looking for a way to do what God has called you to do, consider the poor people s campaign. You don t have to be poor to join, although Jesus did say that it helps. All you have to do is have an awareness that the world is broken and needs fixing, and that it is probably regular folks who are going to do it, not senators or presidents or governors or the pope or the Dalai Lama but regular folks like you and me. The poor people s campaign had its roots in the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., who never lived to see those ideas through. But in these last few years the idea has been revived, and now a broad coalition of people of faith and no faith, people across all kinds of difference, lots of different kinds of people are joined together to address things like systemic racism, poverty, a war economy that thrives on death and destruction, environmental degradation, and equal protection under the law. It is religious and it is political; it is, as one of its leaders the Rev. Dr. William Barber puts it, it is a national call for moral revival. It is, as George Anastos puts it, in accord with millennia of biblical witness, including every bit of the book of Isaiah, and it is in accord with the express teachings of Jesus. Right now the poor people s campaign is engaged in what it calls 40 days of moral action, including action at state capitals in multiple states on Tuesday, although not in Colorado. On their website you can find ways that you can get involved. Find a way to plug in, to support, to educate yourself, to demand action on the things you hear God calling you to do, to lend your voice to the millions of voices that are gathering to cry out together. Or don t maybe this not your call, maybe you re being called somewhere else. The poor people s campaign is just a suggestion after all. Find your own thing, find where God is calling you, because God is calling you. For we live among a people of unclean lips, that much seems clear now, and God is asking whom shall I send, and who will go for us. You be the one to jump out of your seat. Be the one to raise your hand. Be the one to finds yourself saying, here I am, send me, and let s get to work doing what God has called us to do. Amen. Page 4 of 4
SERMON Unclean Lips May 27, 2018 The Reverend Dr. Eric C. Smith
I d like to ask you to imagine something with me. Imagine that in the 2016 election, Donald Trump was taking over not for Barack Obama, but instead he was taking over for Lyndon B. Johnson, who had become president 52 years earlier. Imagine that LBJ had been president for the past 52 years, and that no one except LBJ had led the nation through all those decades of our national life, and that every person born since 1964 had only ever known a president Johnson. Imagine that it was Johnson who led the nation through Vietnam, but also the first Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine LBJ being president through Watergate, Iran Contra, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, and all of the history that has transpired since 1964. Imagine then how traumatic would it be when Johnson left office. Imagine how much stronger the emotions around the national election would have been in 2016 if it had been not 8 years of the prior president, but 52 years. Imagine if one party had had control of the presidency not for two four-year terms but for thirteen of them, and suddenly a different party controlled the presidency, and there were people eligible for retirement who could barely remember any other person in the Oval Office. Imagine all of that, and you have some sense of the trauma and uncertainty and upheaval surrounding the prophet Isaiah in this passage. King Uzziah had just died, the king had just died after a 52 year reign, and it seems that Isaiah didn t quite know what to do with himself. In the Hebrew Bible, there are two basic kinds of kings. There are good kings and there are bad kings, and the fate of the nation usually depended on the goodness or the badness of the king. The good kings ushered in periods of prosperity, and the bad ones brought decline and struggle and defeat. The bad kings were sometimes especially bad; the Bible says of those kings that they did what was evil in the sight of the lord, and the nation suffered the consequences of their bad rule. Likewise, of the good kings it was said that they did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and the people prospered. Of all the good kings in the Hebrew Bible, there are a few that stand out as especially good, kings whose reigns were said to have been especially righteous and prosperous. King Uzziah was one of those kings. Uzziah reigned as king of Judah, the southern kingdom, for 52 years, which was a period of extraordinary stability in a time when kings might last a year or two. And in the Bible Uzziah has a reputation for mostly being just and upright. And so it is a big deal that when the prophet Isaiah begins to talk about this vision that he had, he frames it in time, and he marks time with the death of this great and long-reigning king: in the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. In the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah writes, in that tumultuous and perilous time, I had a spiritual vision. It s often said that you should keep your religion and your politics separate, but Isaiah never got that memo. Neither did any of the other prophets of the Hebrew Bible, really. Religion was always political for the prophets, and politics was always religious. The temple and the king were part of a single structure by which the people could have access to God; God worked and spoke through the king, or at least God worked and spoke through the good kings, just like God worked and spoke through the temple and its sacrifices, and through the prophets and their oracles. The king dying after 52 years was a very big deal, but it wasn t just a big political deal. It was a big religious deal. The king s death brought on a crisis of faith. It was a dangerous moment for God s relationship with the people of Israel and the nation of Judah. It was a time when it might have felt to Isaiah and to his compatriots that their special relationship with God was threatened. This is not so different from what you can hear in our own time from all different corners of the American political arena. Lots of people, including a lot of us, are convinced that Barack Obama was the Page 1 of 4
most ungodly abomination ever to enter our national politics, and that he was a threat to everything good and true and right about our nation. And most of the rest of the people in the country, including many of us, are convinced that it is actually Donald Trump that is the abomination, the worst thing to ever happen to decency and truth. Before that it was George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush and Reagan and Carter and so on down the line. It seems like we don t just have presidents in this country, we have lightning rods, and for some of us one president is a savior and for others of us that same president is an existential threat. And religion, of course, religion is wrapped up right in the middle of it all. Evangelical Christians get a lot of the blame on this, but they re hardly the only Christians or only religious people who think about politics as a religious exercise and religion as an extension of politics. We are not so different from old Israelite society with its blending of religion and politics, we are just less honest about it. So in the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord. Remember, he was shaken, he was reeling, he was afraid, and he saw this vision. And it was a strange vision. The Lord which is the Jewish way of talking about God when they didn t want to use God s proper personal name the Lord, in this vision, was sitting in the throne room, in the temple where God lived, and God was on the throne, and all around God were seraphs. Now if you ve always wanted to know what a seraph is, you have come to the right place, because yours truly is the author of a 7000 word academic article on seraphs and their close cousins the cherubs, in a forthcoming encyclopedia of early Christianity. It promises to be really page-turning reading. But I ll sum it up for you here: seraphs are really weird angel type things, and seraphs exist solely to serve God. So the seraphs were all flying all around God and they were singing this song, Holy holy holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of God s glory. It was a strange vision, and for Isaiah it must have been a deeply spiritual vision, a vision of God in God s temple surrounded by God s attendants and angels, a heavenly liturgy unfolding right there in front of him. And in the middle of all this majesty and strangeness, Isaiah spoke. And I think that what Isaiah had to say in that moment is something we could stand to hear in our moment. I think that Isaiah s words in the midst of that vision are words that we could bear to hear, and maybe even to speak, as we live out our own lives and our own politics and our own religion in our own day. Isaiah said, Woe is me. Woe is me, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. Does that sound familiar? Just turn on the news these days and it might sound familiar. Just log into Facebook or Twitter these days and you ll know what Isaiah must have meant. I have a Twitter account, and whenever I open that app I feel like I live among a people of unclean lips. Certainly I live among a people of unclean keyboards. Woe is me, Isaiah says, I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. In other words, my country and my people are adrift. We speak unrighteously. We pollute rather than purify. We speak hatred rather than kindness, we speak violence rather than peace, we profane the world with our mouths rather than make the world a better place. Isaiah, he knows the kind of people he lives among, and he knows the kind of world he is living in, there in the wake of this political and religious crisis, and he knows that his world not a godly one. And he acknowledges it, in the presence of God; he says this out loud. The seraph, then, the seraph took a live coal from the altar, and he touched Isaiah with it on the mouth, and with that the seraph cleared away whatever uncleanness and sin was on Isaiah s lips. And then Isaiah heard another voice, and this is the heart of the matter. Isaiah heard another voice. The voice asked a question. Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? The voice that Isaiah heard was God s voice, and the question was exactly the question that the moment required. God s question Page 2 of 4
was the one that should be asked at that moment when you realize what a fallen world you live in, when you understand the ways in which your society is broken and in need of healing. God s question was, so what? So what? The text had just spent a long time establishing that there was a crisis, that things were falling apart, that the culture and the society even the church of the day were rotten at the core, and the question from God was, so what? What is anybody going to do about it? What is the practical effect of noticing, as Isaiah had just done, what is the effect of noticing that things were off the rails? What difference was made because Isaiah had realized what kind of broken world he was living in? Whom shall I send, God asked, and who will go for us? I don t need to recite for you all the ways our world is broken, all the ways our politics are broken, all the ways our social fabric is torn. We could all make our own lists of the ways our world is broken, and regardless of our politics probably most of our lists would be pretty similar. But I have some bad news for all of you liberals out there: it didn t all start with Donald Trump. And I have some bad news for all of you conservatives out there too: it didn t start with Barack Obama either. In fact, even if we had just finished a 52-year reign of Lyndon B. Johnson, even if LBJ had been sitting in the Oval Office for all these years, and everything that happened since the 60s had happened on his watch, we still couldn t even blame it all on him. The brokenness in our world does not belong to any person, no matter how powerful. The brokenness in our world is systemic, it is endemic, it has something to do with us, it belongs to us, and all of our hating on this or that politician is just an elaborate ritual that keeps us from having to confront that central truth: that the injustices in our world are injustices that we cause and we allow to keep happening. The inequalities in the world are here because we sanction them, in one way or another. This is not to excuse politics and politicians; there are good kings and there are bad kings, and some of them do what is evil in the sight of the Lord, as the Hebrew Bible says. But Isaiah s vision points us to a bigger truth. In the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. In the midst of political trouble and turmoil, in the middle of unsteady days, in a time of uncertainty and fear, I saw the Lord sitting on the throne. And God asked: whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And here is the high point of the story. When God asks whom shall I send, and who will go for us, Isaiah almost jumps out of his seat. Here I am! The NRSV translation says here am I, but that sounds a little silly to me, so I m going to rephrase it. Here I am, Isaiah exclaims. Here I am! Send me! Let me be the one you send. I think I can be the one to make a difference. Let me do it. And that is the call story of Isaiah. That is how Isaiah got to be Isaiah, the great prophet of the Hebrew Bible. It didn t happen because he was the smartest one or the friendliest one or the one with the most resources or the holiest most pious one. It happened because when God asked for someone to go out and speak a good word to the world, Isaiah raised his hand and said, pick me. And God sent him out, and Isaiah became Isaiah. That s a daunting example for us today. That kind of clarity of purpose is rare, where God is literally in front of you asking for volunteers. And that kind of bravery is even rarer, when you re willing to be the one to raise your hand and say yes. But that is how this works. That s how this whole thing works; God calls us, and we answer, or we don t. If we answer, we do the best we can. If we don t answer, then the world keeps on being troubled without the benefit of our doing whatever it is we were called to do. God calls us each and every one, and so, as the saying goes, we are the ones we have been waiting for. It doesn t matter who the president is or for how long, or which king did or did not do what was evil in the sight of the Lord, or how clean or unclean the lips of our people are, we are still called by God to work in this place and bring justice and mercy and love and peace and good news to this world. Page 3 of 4
I want to close by offering a concrete suggestion for a direction God might be calling you in, a direction God might be calling us in. I wasn t sure if I should do this, so I texted George and I asked him, and he wrote back, and he said that of course I should do it, because, he said, if he said no it would be denying millennia of biblical witness and the express teachings of Jesus, which is how I feel too. So here it is; if you re wondering in what way God is calling you to minister to the world and to work to leave this place more righteous, godly, just, and life-giving than you found it, I suggest to you the poor people s campaign. If you re looking for a way to do what God has called you to do, consider the poor people s campaign. You don t have to be poor to join, although Jesus did say that it helps. All you have to do is have an awareness that the world is broken and needs fixing, and that it is probably regular folks who are going to do it, not senators or presidents or governors or the pope or the Dalai Lama but regular folks like you and me. The poor people s campaign had its roots in the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr., who never lived to see those ideas through. But in these last few years the idea has been revived, and now a broad coalition of people of faith and no faith, people across all kinds of difference, lots of different kinds of people are joined together to address things like systemic racism, poverty, a war economy that thrives on death and destruction, environmental degradation, and equal protection under the law. It is religious and it is political; it is, as one of its leaders the Rev. Dr. William Barber puts it, it is a national call for moral revival. It is, as George Anastos puts it, in accord with millennia of biblical witness, including every bit of the book of Isaiah, and it is in accord with the express teachings of Jesus. Right now the poor people s campaign is engaged in what it calls 40 days of moral action, including action at state capitals in multiple states on Tuesday, although not in Colorado. On their website you can find ways that you can get involved. Find a way to plug in, to support, to educate yourself, to demand action on the things you hear God calling you to do, to lend your voice to the millions of voices that are gathering to cry out together. Or don t maybe this not your call, maybe you re being called somewhere else. The poor people s campaign is just a suggestion after all. Find your own thing, find where God is calling you, because God is calling you. For we live among a people of unclean lips, that much seems clear now, and God is asking whom shall I send, and who will go for us. You be the one to jump out of your seat. Be the one to raise your hand. Be the one to finds yourself saying, here I am, send me, and let s get to work doing what God has called us to do. Amen. Page 4 of 4
SERMON Unclean Lips May 27, 2018 The Reverend Dr. Eric C. Smith
I d like to ask you to imagine something with me. Imagine that in the 2016 election, Donald Trump was taking over not for Barack Obama, but instead he was taking over for Lyndon B. Johnson, who had become president 52 years earlier. Imagine that LBJ had been president for the past 52 years, and that no one except LBJ had led the nation through all those decades of our national life, and that every person born since 1964 had only ever known a president Johnson. Imagine that it was Johnson who led the nation through Vietnam, but also the first Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine LBJ being president through Watergate, Iran Contra, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, and all of the history that has transpired since 1964. Imagine then how traumatic would it be when Johnson left office. Imagine how much stronger the emotions around the national election would have been in 2016 if it had been not 8 years of the prior president, but 52 years. Imagine if one party had had control of the presidency not for two four-year terms but for thirteen of them, and suddenly a different party controlled the presidency, and there were people eligible for retirement who could barely remember any other person in the Oval Office. Imagine all of that, and you have some sense of the trauma and uncertainty and upheaval surrounding the prophet Isaiah in this passage. King Uzziah had just died, the king had just died after a 52 year reign, and it seems that Isaiah didn t quite know what to do with himself. In the Hebrew Bible, there are two basic kinds of kings. There are good kings and there are bad kings, and the fate of the nation usually depended on the goodness or the badness of the king. The good kings ushered in periods of prosperity, and the bad ones brought decline and struggle and defeat. The bad kings were sometimes especially bad; the Bible says of those kings that they did what was evil in the sight of the lord, and the nation suffered the consequences of their bad rule. Likewise, of the good kings it was said that they did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and the people prospered. Of all the good kings in the Hebrew Bible, there are a few that stand out as especially good, kings whose reigns were said to have been especially righteous and prosperous. King Uzziah was one of those kings. Uzziah reigned as king of Judah, the southern kingdom, for 52 years, which was a period of extraordinary stability in a time when kings might last a year or two. And in the Bible Uzziah has a reputation for mostly being just and upright. And so it is a big deal that when the prophet Isaiah begins to talk about this vision that he had, he frames it in time, and he marks time with the death of this great and long-reigning king: in the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. In the year that king Uzziah died, Isaiah writes, in that tumultuous and perilous time, I had a spiritual vision. It s often said that you should keep your religion and your politics separate, but Isaiah never got that memo. Neither did any of the other prophets of the Hebrew Bible, really. Religion was always political for the prophets, and politics was always religious. The temple and the king were part of a single structure by which the people could have access to God; God worked and spoke through the king, or at least God worked and spoke through the good kings, just like God worked and spoke through the temple and its sacrifices, and through the prophets and their oracles. The king dying after 52 years was a very big deal, but it wasn t just a big political deal. It was a big religious deal. The king s death brought on a crisis of faith. It was a dangerous moment for God s relationship with the people of Israel and the nation of Judah. It was a time when it might have felt to Isaiah and to his compatriots that their special relationship with God was threatened. This is not so different from what you can hear in our own time from all different corners of the American political arena. Lots of people, including a lot of us, are convinced that Barack Obama was the Page 1 of 4